Ghana needs immediate measures to tackle climate change

Story: Moses Dotsey Aklorbortu & Ama A. Baafi, Akosomb

Ghana needs to put in place immediate measures to deal with the economic implications of climate change, which is already having debilitating effects on the various sectors of the economy.

Dr Delali B. Dovie of the Regional Institute of Population Studies at the University of Ghana, who gave the warning said: “The looming crisis will affect sectors such as energy, infrastructure, agriculture, industry, health and the country has to rethink its development process and employ scientific findings to contain any effects”.

Speaking to the Daily Graphic in Akosombo at the on-going Climate Change training for journalists across the country, Dr Dovie said even though it might not reflect directly in the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) it would have serious effects on the sectors contributing to it. The training programme is being sponsored by Africa Adaptation Programme and the International Centre for Journalists. He said one of the sectors that could seriously be affected was the country’s agriculture sector which depends heavily on rain and is also as major source of employment. That aside “If we don’t have rain

agriculture will be affected, the Akosombo Hydro plant will shut down and it will affect the country’s energy and it will trickle down to production and people will be out of business,” he said. Dr Dovie said if the country’s agriculture sector would soon be recording poor yields and some crops would not be able to do well, under the new weather, then income of the poor farmer would diminish. He said as a matter of urgency, the country should start putting monetary values on losses the country was likely to incur as a result of climate change on various sectors.

Dr Dovie said it was about time that linkages were explored financially, such that if agriculture, industry, energy and other sectors were affected there would be plans to deal with it. “It is therefore very important that serious steps were taking to plan ahead of time to avert the challenges pose by climate change,” he said. In the area of infrastructure, he explained that when there was a change in the weather and the floods destroy the roads, water tables falling deep down more financial resources had to be put in to fix it. “We have to rethink our development process, our planning, action plans as well as our budgetary concerns to ensure that financial implications mostly negative that might emerge from the impact of climate change does not manifest itself in the near future as far as Ghana was concern,” he said. He said there are various funds available to mitigate the impact of climate change, but many were embedded in the development agenda of all nations, therefore to access them there was the need to justify that there was a need for extra fund to pursue it. Dr Dovie said currently, most of the development partners were of the view that since climate change adaptation is related to development, it should be the responsibility of governments and not the partners.

“That is where we have insisted science has a role to play to diversify our strategies or our approaches in arriving at some of these justifications to enable us as a country to benefit,” he said.