Ghana committed to addressing land issues - Prof. Frimpong-Boateng
The Minister of Environment, Science, Technology and Innovation, Professor Kwabena Frimpong-Boateng, has stated Ghana’s commitment to address issues of land degradation and deforestation in line with efforts to achieve the Great Green Wall initiative underway in parts of West Africa.
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The Great Green Wall initiative is an umbrella programme supported by the Global Environmental Fund and the World Bank in 12 selected countries in West Africa and the Sahel, using a landscaping approach.
The project, which focuses on tree planting, is aimed at achieving food security, poverty reduction and efficient water use, reducing climate change risk exposure, soil health and sustainable biodiversity.
At the opening of the fourth conference of the Sahel and West Africa Programme in support of the Great Green Wall initiative in Accra, Prof. Frimpong-Boateng said land degradation in Ghana and Africa was increasingly being recognised as a key development issue.
That, he said, was because of the impact of land degradation on the productive capacity of land.
In Ghana, he said, rural households were the most affected by land degradation because of their heavy dependence on agriculture and other natural resources-dependent activities as their main source of livelihood.
Land degradation, he pointed out, compromised environmental services such as nutrient cycling, regulation of hydrological flows and amelioration of climate extremes and floods.
Projects
Prof. Frimpong-Boateng stated that Ghana, with support from its development partners, had developed a strategic investment framework to keep the project going.
The project, he said, was yielding results following the planting of trees covering 5,500 hectares on land in 118 communities across the country, benefiting 14,000 land users.
Additionally, he said, eight forest reserve management plans covering 42,844 hectares were in place.
Other initiatives, such as the fight against illegal mining, the one village, one dam project in northern Ghana and the planting for food and jobs initiative, would go a long way to ensure food security and protect natural resources, he added.
World Bank
In a welcome address, the World Bank Country Director for Ghana, Mr Henry G. R. Kerali, said economies and people living on Africa's dry lands, including the Sahel and surrounding countries, depended heavily on soil, water, vegetation and other natural resource assets.
Yet, he said, in recent years, those resources had been steadily deteriorating as a result of unsustainable management and expansion of human settlements which were generating increasing demand for food, firewood, land and water.
Citing Ghana as an example, he said poor land and water management practices had led to accelerated erosion, destruction of water bodies, land degradation and increasing desertification.
That, Mr Kerali said, had led to natural habitats and biodiversity getting degraded.
"This is resulting in declining natural resource productivity, hence lower household incomes, particularly in the Northern Savannah, the poorest region of the country," he said.
He added that Ghana had lost almost 50 per cent of its forest cover in the last 50 years.
Achievements
The Great Green Wall Coordinator, Mr Elvis Paul Tangem, said so far 14.9 million people had been reached through the project, as against the targeted 20 million people by 2020.
Even though the achievement was commendable, he said all parties needed to do more to overcome some challenges.
SAWAP
The Sahel and West Africa Programme (SAWAP) in support of the Great Green Wall initiative is being implemented in Ghana, Benin, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, The Sudan, Chad and Togo.
As part of the management of the project and institutional arrangements, project directors from the beneficiary countries, scientists, environmentalists, policy makers and media practitioners meet regularly to take stock of the state of implementation and developments and share the lessons learnt.
