By Rosemary Wayo
Nyankpala, Sept 4, GNA – The West Africa Centre for Water, Irrigation and Sustainable Agriculture (WACWISA) of the University for Development Studies (UDS) has begun a four-day short course on landscape restoration.
The course known as Collaboration for Landscape Restoration is to provide participants with practical skills in stakeholder mapping, conflict resolution and understanding gender dynamics within restoration projects.
It focuses on collaborative approaches to restoration to enhance stakeholder engagement and perspectives, governance, economics, and technicalities of restoration with emphasis on collaboration and stakeholder involvement.
Participants are graduate students of UDS as well as representatives of some organisations, whose focus areas include environmental issues.
It is funded by the Centre for International Forestry Research (CIFOR-ICRAF) and facilitated by the Department of Environment and Sustainable Sciences and WACWISA.
Professor Felix Abagale, Director of WACWISA-UDS, speaking at the opening of the course at Nyankpala, near Tamale, said it was a significant step towards advancing ecosystem restoration, citing the critical role of collective action in addressing environmental challenges.
He said restoration efforts should be aligned with multiple Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) such as eradicating poverty to fostering partnerships for sustainable development.
He said the course, which included theoretical and practical components, was designed to equip participants with valuable skills for addressing land degradation and enhancing ecosystem resilience.
He highlighted the successes of previous short courses of WACWISA, noting that since 2019, more than 500 individuals from 15 countries had been trained along with 150 graduate students from 26 African countries.
Professor Abagale emphasised the essence of being keen about landscape restoration and encouraged participants to contribute actively to global efforts at addressing the phenomenon.
He underscored the practical benefits of the course and urged participants to apply the knowledge to be gained to help tackle local environmental issues such as illegal mining and land degradation.
Dr Esther Ekua Amoako, Lead for the Pan-African Restoration Education Programme, UDS, said the course was a multi-disciplinary approach to addressing environmental challenges.
She said it resulted from the Global Landscape Forum, held in Accra in 2019, where gaps in landscape restoration practices were presented.
She noted that while tree planting was often seen as synonymous with restoring the landscape, it was a component of a broader and more complex process.
She called for capacity building among practitioners including those from forestry and environmental NGOs to address the gaps effectively.
Dr Samuel Jerry Cobbina, Dean of the Faculty of Natural Resources and Environment, UDS, said the faculty shared in the vision of CIFOR-ICRAF and WACWISA to foster meaningful collaboration that would drive restoration of the country’s landscape.
He said the challenges of land degradation and loss of biodiversity among others, could not be tackled by individuals, adding it required a collaborative effort of combined knowledge and skills to make an impact.
GNA