The Minister for Lands and Natural Resources, Samuel Abu Jinapor, has disclosed that climate change is a fundamental threat to the development of the country.
“The climate crisis remains one of the most fundamental threats to our development, our survival and the subsistence of planet earth,” he complained.
The minister was speaking at the Forty-Third (43rd) Management Day Celebration of the University of Ghana Business School in Accra yesterday.
Addressing the gathering on the theme: “Accounting for Climate Change and Environmental Sustainability: Our Collective Responsibility”, Mr Jinapor said with less than seven (7) years to the attainment of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), climate change has been identified as the most significant impediment to the realisation of these Goals, dragging millions of people into poverty.
Quoting experts, he said temperature rise above two degrees Celsius (2oC) can have catastrophic and irreversible consequences on people and the planet.
Meanwhile, at current rates, there are fears that average global temperature could be in excess of three degrees Celsius (3oC) by the end of the century, Mr Jinapor stated.
The impact of this looming disaster, the minister bemoaned, is already being felt across the globe, including extreme weather conditions that produce cyclones, hurricanes, sea-level rise, flooding, droughts and irregular rainfall patterns among others.
“Unfortunately for us, here in Africa, due to the agrarian nature of our economy and our low adaptation capacities, we are more susceptible to these impacts,” he said.
As a result of this, Abu Jinapor advised that the country’s response to climate change must be urgent, inclusive and comprehensive, in a way that strengthens the resilience of our ecosystems, and it must involve both individual and collective actions from the youth, Civil Society Organisation (CSOs), political and traditional leaders, local communities, public and private sectors actors, as well as the academia.
He continued that fighting anthropogenic climate change requires the need to establish a long-term path for environmental sustainability that caters for the needs of today’s generation and that of tomorrow’s, with healthy ecosystems of fauna and flora.
“Government continues to adopt policy measures geared towards environmental sustainability and socio-economic development, both at the micro and macro levels”, the minister asserted.
According to the minister, the 2012 Climate Change Policy articulates different sectoral policies and interventions across the forestry, transport, energy, waste, agriculture and other sectors needed to mitigate and adapt to climate change.
In addition to the policy, he noted that the updated Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), recently submitted to the UNFCCC, contains thirty-four (34) mitigation measures and thirteen (13) adaptation measures to address climate change towards a potential reduction of sixty-four million tonnes of Carbon Dioxide equivalent (64,000,000 tCO2e) of Greenhouse Gases by 2030.
“These mitigation and adaption measures are drawn from five (5) key sectors, and include a shift to renewable sources of energy at a larger scale, the promotion of electric vehicles, adoption of technologies that produce energy from waste, climate smart agriculture and reduction in deforestation and forest degradation,” he explained.
These Nationally Determined Contributions, Abu Jinapor told the gathering, are divided into conditional targets, which are to be achieved from Government funding with support from the international community and private sector, and unconditional targets, which are targets to be achieved from Government funding.
This, the minister added, clearly underscores the need for a concerted effort from different stakeholders to achieve climate solutions at scale.
On policies and programs the Forestry Sector had adopted to address Climate issues, the minister said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment Report (IPCC AR5) estimates that deforestation and forest degradation contribute about twelve to fifteen percent (12%-15%) of the global Greenhouse gas emissions.
But if it is well managed, forests, and other nature-based solutions will have the capacity to contribute about a third of global climate solution.
His outfit is also implementing the Forest Plantation Strategy, under which some six hundred and ninety thousand hectares (690,000 ha) of forest was cultivated between 2017 and 2022, through initiatives such as, forest plantation, enrichment planting and trees-on-farm.
All these national efforts, the minister is optimistic will feed into global concerted actions to halt climate change.
He also urged the private sector to provide the financial and technical support needed; local communities must be ready to uptake innovation that fosters positive climate action.
“Also, civil society must continually engage in outreach to engineer broad level understanding of climate trends; academia and research institutions must continually research and publish new information about climate vulnerability and impacts; and, of course, the media must engage in dissemination of accurate information to educate the wider populace on all these actions.
“And to ensure compliance, experts are required to assess corporate entities, Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) impacts in their supply chains. This provides a rare opportunity for academia, including the University of Ghana Business School, to train and equip business experts with the rudiments of these assessments and how to conduct them, benchmarked against international best practices”, he reinstated.
