Benito Owusu-Bio, the Deputy Minister for Lands and Mineral Resources, has indicated that the government will release a number of speedboats to patrol and protect Ghana’s major rivers.
The deputy minister explained that it was a joint decision with the ministry’s leadership to launch a project to acquire “shallow used” speedboats to monitor the river banks of motorable rivers like the Prah and Offin.
“The boats will be present for monitoring and deterrence. The boats have already arrived and will be ready to launch within a week or two. It will be difficult to stop certain illegal activities on our river banks if we do not do this,” he said at the maiden Environmental Sustainability Summit organised by the Business & Financial Times’ (B&FT)
Under the theme ‘The Socio-Economic Impact of Pollution on Natural Life
Mr Owusu-Bio believes that illegal mining is the most serious threat to our water bodies and their banks. Hence the purposes of the project will help to reduce the dangers to a negligible level.
He went on to assure Ghanaians of the government’s willingness to curtail and deter such actions that endanger our water bodies.
He added, “We cannot stop mining in Ghana. The best thing to do is to regulate their activities and ensure that they are carried out legally. The presence of these patrol speedboats is intended for this purpose. The correct goal is to provide alternatives for them and ensure that they do the right thing.”
The Summit is designed as an annual event and will engage government institutions and universities with focus on sustainability, and CSOs and stakeholders in the oil and gas industry.
Why environmental sustainability is key
Recent data and figures on Ghana’s environmental sustainability performances continue to look bleak despite the efforts of government.
Ghana, according to the Global Forest Watch, has lost a total of 1.41 million hectares of tree cover from 2001 to 2021 – equivalent to a 20 percent decrease in forest cover over the last twenty years, with 740 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions.
The report also indicated that the country’s deforestation rate is high and concentrated in the areas of high poverty, with land use changing from forests to agriculture lands and causing close to 92 percent of forest degradation.
Equally, data from the Ministry of Finance indicate that since 1900 Ghana has lost over 8 million hectares of forest cover, with almost one million hectares lost in the last few years.
Since 1960, average annual mean temperature according to the Finance Ministry has increased by one degree Celsius; average number of hot days increased about 13 percent, while the number of hot nights per year increased by 20 percent.
In 2017 alone, the effects of environmental degradation in Ghana, according to the MoF, was estimated at US$6.3billion.
Globally, an estimated loss of over 10 million hectares of tropical forests was recorded in 2020 alone.
