By Delphina Addo- Dankyi/Khadijah Musah
Accra, Nov. 23, GNA – The Young Professional and Youth Coalition (YPYC) has charged the youth to increase climate activism in furtherance of achieving the objects of the “Conference of the Parties” – COP 28.
In a statement issued to the Ghana News Agency in Accra ahead of a one-day high level virtual youth conference, scheduled for November 27, President and Founder, YPYC, Mr Andy Osei Okrah, said diverse initiatives had been triggered locally to feed into the global challenge to strengthen youth participation in climate change programmes and urged young people to take advantage of them.
“The YPYC will join the comity of nations in a concerted campaign to roll back the pervasive effects of climate change on humanity and livelihoods.”
Mr Osei Okrah said behavioral change held the key to positioning the youth as owners with a greater stake in the fortunes of the environment in the distant future to join global initiatives in restoring the ecology to its former self.
He said student leaders, tertiary students, young professionals, youth and climate change advocates and ambassadors, who made up the target group, should constitute themselves into brand ambassadors of climate change content for the good of humanity.
He said the conference would navigate the delicate balance of achieving a healthy, regulated climate and the ever-increasing human reliance on same for research, industrial growth and technological advances.
“We need collective mobilisation to bring issues of the environment to the front burner to let same feature prominently on the table of officialdom in tandem with political success and economic prosperity, which predominantly, has been the priority of the political class,” Mr Osei Okrah added.
He noted that: “Stopping global warming is an inherently global goal since greenhouse gasses emitted anywhere, affect people everywhere, and the survival or otherwise of one, is inextricably indexed to the other.”
The YPYC Founder called for fair and inclusive decision-making process in a bid to thread down the wave of increased heat and drought in parts of the world.
“The single biggest health threat facing humanity, including air quality, disease, extreme weather events, forced displacement, increased hunger and poor nutrition can be reversed with the active inclusion of the youth.”
Speakers for the conference include Miss Roselyn Fosuah Adjei, Director of Climate Change, Forestry Commission, Professor Daniel Ofori, Director, Forest Research institute of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, and Miss Dora Cudjoe, lead stakeholder engagement, CIF,USA.
GNA