Accra, Aug 11, GNA-To contribute to biodiversity conservation and
management in the country, stakeholders have met to validate the “Ghana
Connect” project that is expected to sustain efforts at safeguarding
biodiversity.
The Ghana connect project involved the gathering and repackaging of
existing biodiversity data and information from a range of sources at both
national and international levels in order to catapult them into the heart of
government decision making processes.
The aim of the workshop was therefore, to introduce stakeholders of
biodiversity enterprise to Biodiversity Information Products (BIPs) that
emerged from the Connect project.
The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and the National
Biosafety Authority (NBA) in partnership with other stakeholder institutions
rolled out the Ghana Connect project some two and a half years ago, with
the goal of connecting decision-makers with biodiversity information to
ensure more effective decision-making for biodiversity conservation.
“We need these connections strengthened to sustain our contributions to
biodiversity conservation and management,” Dr. George Owusu Essegbey,
Co-project Coordinator, said at the workshop held on Wednesday in Accra.
He said that the challenge facing the earth was huge, in that “at natural rate,
we expect to lose eight biodiversity species every 100 years. But the
National Autonomous University of Mexico conducted a study that revealed
that in the past century, we’ve lost 500 species.
“And this is mostly due to human activity — our agricultural practices,
urbanization and expansion of human settlements, industrialization and
deforestation, among others”.
He said the only way to counter the risk was to guide decision-making in
national affairs to protect the biological resources and revitalize them.
Professor Alfred Oteng-Yeboah, Chairman, Ghana National Biodiversity
Steering Committee, said what were gathered under the Ghana Connect
project were basically data on all or some aspects of the variability of living
organisms (biodiversity), which were essential to inform proper decision
making and further development of policies.
“Decision-making is an all-encompassing activity, which must take into
consideration every form of knowledge about national development, which
must in all situations reflect a balance on the socioeconomic and
environmental underpinnings for sustainable development.
“This embraces the concept of mainstreaming to link all the various sectors
of the country’s development agenda.”
He said there was the need to accumulate more data sets by encouraging
institutions and individuals who have the capacity to collect, analyze,
synthesize, transform and share the data, so that the information could be
assembled to contribute to development actions that would embody all the
tenets of sustainable development goals, in particular goals 12, 13, 14 and
15.
Dr Kwaku Afriyie, Minister of Environment, Science, Technology and
Innovation, commended the efforts at validating data developed purposely
for decision makers.
He said such products were very important and would surely be of great
benefit to not only decision makers but “all of us whose actions and in
actions in one way or the other affects our environment broadly.”
GNA