Reverend Nana Kwabena Dwomoh Sarpong, a seasoned environmentalist, has called for a strategic plan to promote tree-planting and protection in the country’s fast growing cities and urban centres as a measure of mitigating the impact of climate change.
The plan, he suggested, could be dove-tailed into the government’s Green Ghana programme and focused on residential, commercial and industrial enclaves, close to the airports and lorry stations to help trap dangerous gas emissions and curb the worsening incidence of air pollution.
Rev. Dwomoh Sarpong, founder and president of Friends of Rivers and Water Bodies (FRWB), an environmental non-governmental organisation, bemoaned the unbridled destruction of trees in some prime areas of Accra, notably the Airport Residential area, Cantonments, East and West Legon, describing the practice as “incomprehensible because the trees help to mitigate the adverse impact of aviation emissions”.
“It’s really difficult to understand why developers in some prime areas of the city would choose to destroy every tree on their plots to pave way for the construction of mostly high-rise buildings without any regard to the country’s building code and expect no adverse results in the end,” he stated in a telephone interview with the Ghanaian Times at the weekend.
“Our major problem as a nation” the environmentalist noted,“is sheer negligence of duty especially on the part of government agencies and officials. The Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDAs), for instance, can’t or simply won’t for inexplicable reasons enforce their own building regulations”.
“Why do we spend precious time and resources in making laws meant to ensure the orderly development of our cities and towns only to fail to enforce them?”, he asked and added “We seem to be living in a lawless society but this laissez faire spectacle is injurious and will sooner or later land us in a chaotic situation of unimaginable proportions”.
Rev. Dwomoh Sarpong endorsed the Green Ghana programme but pegged its success on the ability of the government, in particular, and Ghanaians, as a whole, to wage a relentless war on forest destruction and environmental degradation.
“Our forests and major rivers are persistently being destroyed on the altar of illegal mining with no end in sight. And that is the nagging problem as we virtually sit on a time-bomb,” he said.
Noting that the menace of illegal mining was already impacting negatively on agricultural production and water supply in some parts of the country, the environmentalist stressed the need for everything possible to be done to stem the tide.
“If there is truism in the adage that ‘water is life and when the last tree dies, the last man also dies’, then we need to sit up and take the bull by the horns for we are all either part of the problem or part of the solution,” Rev. Nana Dwomoh Sarpong insisted.
FROM TIMES REPORTER, KUMASI
