A TEAM of experts has been dispatched to various communities in the Northern Region to monitor and evaluate the implementation of the Ghana Environmental Management Project (GEMP).
The team will visit selected communities that are piloting the project to ascertain how well the various activities pencilled under the project have been executed.
The activities include the formation and operation of Environmental Management Committees (EMCs) both at the district and community levels.
The GEMP is a five-year project being implemented by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) with funding from the government of Canada through the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA).
It focuses specifically on strengthening the capacity of public institutions and rural communities to enable them to take action to reverse land degradation and desertification in the three regions of the north.
At a meeting of the Northern Regional Environmental Management Committee, the Northern Regional Director of the EPA, Mr Iddrisu Abu, said significant progress had been made since the implementation of GEMP in 2009.
“We have so far facilitated the establishment of 20 EMCs in all the districts, whilst over 100 of such committees have been established at the community levels,” he stated.
“In addition, we have formed 20 new environmental clubs in various basic and second cycle schools in the regions whilst 10 of such clubs, which were defunct, have also been reactivated,” Mr Abu added.
All these activities, Mr Abu said, were expected to strengthen the beneficiary communities to be able to address issues of the environment in a co-ordinated and sustained manner.
He said very soon, those communities would be assisted to establish their own nurseries and subsequently, create large plantations.
Members of the committee singled out bush burning as a major threat to current efforts being made towards reforesting parts of northern Ghana.
According to them, the establishment of woodlots has become crucial following the spate of land degradation and imminent threat of desertification in the northern Savannah.
They, however, stated that the indiscriminate burning of bushes had resulted in the razing down of major plantations that had been established over the years.
The committee members, therefore, recommended that any new effort made towards establishing woodlots and nurseries must first consider ways of controlling bush fires or risk achieving little results.
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