The Minister of Lands and Natural Resources, Samuel Abu Jinapor, is rallying all and sundry to join the second edition of the ‘Green Ghana Day’ which takes off tomorrow across the country to plant two million trees.
Mr Jinapor, MP, Damango told Parliament in Accra yesterday that with the fast depreciating forest cover of the country and worsening climate changes, it was important all persons joined hands with his outfit to try to recover the lost vegetation.
“Mr Speaker, let me use this opportunity to call on Honourable Members, corporate Ghana, traditional leaders, entrepreneurs, teachers, nurses, doctors, lawyers, judges, students, religious leaders, traders, civil servants, public servants, members of the diplomatic corps, and indeed, every person living in Ghana, as well as those visiting Ghana on Green Ghana Day, to join hands with us to plant, at least, 20 million trees,” he appealed on the floor of Parliament.
To get everybody involved, he said government had allocated to each of the 16 regions planting targets and seedlings had been made available free of charge at the district offices of the Forestry Commission, Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies, as well as other public places.
According to Mr Jinapor, based on lessons from the maiden edition, a two-pronged strategy had been adopted to achieve the target as part of measures to reforest the reserves.
The first strategy, he said, was to plant 10 million seedlings in degraded forest reserves in compartments and 10 million seedlings outside forest reserves, around farms, degraded watershed areas, boundaries, office compounds, and sites within communities, including, parks, roadsides, homes, churches, mosques and schools.
“We encourage corporate Ghana and other organisations to adopt forest compartments for planting, and we will brand these compartments in the names of these organisations, and same can be reported, either as part of their Corporate Social Responsibility or as offset for their carbon footprints,” he said.
The current generation, the minister said had a collective responsibility, as a people, to leave future generations and their communities with richer, better and more valuable forests and wildlife endowment than it inherited.
With Ghana’s temperature having risen more than one degree celsius in the last three decades as estimated by the Meteorological Agency the effect of this on daily lives were tidal waves, frequent droughts, perennial floods, temperature rise and erratic rainfall patterns, he stated.
The forest sector, he said offered fast, reliable and empirical evidence-based actions to mitigate the effects of Climate Change and that concerted efforts were needed to safeguard the forests.
Painting a gloomy picture about Ghana’s forest situation, he said the country had lost over 8 million hectares of its cover forest since 1900.
Globally, he said the world loses 150 million acres of rainforest every single minute, translating into two hundred thousand acres and 79 million acres a day and a year respectively.
Mr Jinapor said the climate crisis was reaching a tipping point because according to the experts, greenhouse gas emissions are at their highest levels in two million years, and continue to rise.
As a result of forest depletion and other anti-environment activities, the earth is now 1.1 degrees celsius warmer than it was in the late 1800s, with the last decade being the warmest period, he observed.
“The good news, Mr Speaker, is that we have solution which is within our reach; forests” he noted and called on all and sundry to rally behind government and other partners and stakeholders to make the Green Ghana Day a resounding success.
BY JULIUS YAO PETETSI
