By Gilbert Azeem Tiroog
Bolgatanga, Nov 7, GNA – The research team from the Faculty of Natural Resources and Environment of the University for Development Studies (UDS), has held a day’s workshop to deliberate on its research findings on the adaptive management of Community Resource Management Areas (CREMAs).
CREMA is a concept developed by the Wildlife Division of the Forestry Commission of Ghana to promote collaborative and participatory wildlife management in the country which principally involved communities agreeing on the management regime of a common area.
The workshop, held in Bolgatanga formed part of the Ghana Shea Landscape Emission Reduction Project (GSLERP) with funding support from the government of Ghana through the Forestry Commission.
It is being partnered by the Global Shea Alliance (GSA), Forestry Commission (FC) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
The GSLERP is aimed at enhancing forest carbon stork across the northern savannah landscape by restoring degraded forests and Shea parklands, while promoting investment in the Shea value chain and women`s empowerment.
The workshop was held on the theme: “Adaptive Management of Community Resource Management Areas”
Stakeholders, including Organization for Indigenous Initiatives and Sustainability Ghana (ORGIIS) and other NGOs Participated to highlight various plans drawn from their respective works geared towards enhancing forest governance, transparency and restoring Shea parklands and degraded lands.
The workshop aimed at enabling the stakeholders to discuss the findings of the problem or potential identification phase for adaptive management.
It was also intended to enable the stakeholders give inputs to the findings, identify potential management alternatives or models, agree on a potential model, share and discuss lessons learned and co-design a monitoring mechanism for the implementation of the model.
Among other things, findings of the research indicated that the effective functioning of most CREMA Executive Committees (CECs) and the Community Resource Management Committees (CRMC), was characterised by weak governance.
Professor Bernard N. Baatuuwie, Vice-Dean, Faculty of Natural Resources and Environment and the team leader indicated that the research was focused on finding out what was exactly happening with the CREMAS.
“These are areas that really have resources like forest vegetation, minerals and even wildlife which have huge potential for livelihood and others but unfortunately these resources are facing some kind of challenges like land degradation due to human activities such as agriculture, mining and harvesting some of the plants like rosewood trees,” he stated.
Professor Baatuuwie noted that the CREMAS had governing councils, thus people who were supposed to take care or watch over those resources, but the resources continually had challenges.
“So to address this, the government of Ghana through the Forestry Commission is doing various activities including planting of trees and building capacities to restore these CREMAS but UDS, for that matter the Faculty of Natural Resources and Environment as a Knowledge hub is to find out what information is available and what new information can be generated to manage these resources sustainably”, he added
To achieve this, Professor Baatuuwie said researchers were deployed to interact and find out from stakeholders, including community members, NGOs, Government institutions working within the landscape to figure out the challenges and see how they could together design a management system to address the challenge and improve the potentials.
GNA