By Anthony Adongo Apubeo
Bolgatanga, June 20, GNA – Dr Asher Nkegbe, the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) National Focal Point, has called for collective efforts and strategic approaches to reverse the current rate of environmental degradation to mitigate climate change and its adverse impact.
He said environmental degradation continued to pose significant threats to global, national and local targets, deepening the already environmental crisis and underscoring the need for all stakeholders at all levels to get involved to ensure sustainable practices to reverse the trend.
“Today, the future of our land is on the line,” Dr Nkegbe, who is also the Upper East Regional Director of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), said.
“Globally, we are degrading about 100 million hectares of healthy and productive lands. Our soils, which take up to hundreds of years to form are being depleted in a matter of minutes.
“Every second, the equivalent of four football fields of healthy lands is degraded. It is more important than ever to engage current and future generations to halt and reverse these alarming trends since we depend on land for our survival.”
Speaking in an interview with the Ghana News Agency in line with the World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought, Dr Nkegbe said promoting good environmental management practices would not only help restore degraded lands but would help curb drought, desertification and floods while increasing agriculture productivity and employment opportunities.
This year’s World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought is being marked on the theme: “United for the Land: Our Heritage, Our Future”, which calls for global efforts to raise awareness about desertification and drought, to ensure sustainable land management practices as well as preventive and recovery methods from drought.
This year’s celebration also coincides with the 30th anniversary of the United Nations to Combat Desertification, which is the sole global agreement dedicated to sustainable land management, ratified by 196 countries and the European Union.
Dr Nkegbe emphasised that Ghana and the Upper East Region in particular continued to grapple with environmental destruction and identified overgrazing, annual bushfires, unsustainable mining and indiscriminate tree felling among others as root causes of such destruction.
These activities, he said, were perpetuated by actors in the environment value chain and those stakeholders had the power to reverse the trend.
He therefore called for collective efforts from all stakeholders, including the citizenry, farmers, political leaders, scientists, private sector and media among others to innovate and roll out stringent policies and interventions that would help create awareness and build resilience in communities to reinforce the fact that land is a cross-cutting issue relating to all the three conventions (climate change, biodiversity conservation and desertification control linkage).
He added that the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), especially goals one, two five, 13 and 15 depended on the sustainability of the land and encouraged practices such as agroforestry, woodlot, earth bonding, composting, stone bonding, natural regeneration, protection of water bodies, tree planting among others, especially along the Savannah Ecological zone which had been heavily depleted.
“For this, Ghana needs to scale up the sustainable land and water management practices we have been implementing since 2008 under the Ghana Environmental Project, the Sustainable Land and Water Management Project, the ongoing Ghana Landscape Restoration and Small-Scale Mining Project, to deliver a moon shot moment for the land as Ghana contributes to the restoration of the worldwide target of 1.5 billion hectares of degraded lands by 2030,” he added.
GNA