The Forestry Commission of Ghana, Shai Hills division, has urged the youth and corporate Ghana to leverage the Green Ghana Day to make tree planting a daily activity to fight climate change.
According to the commission, the rate of land degradation and forest depletion in the country is very alarming, hence the national tree planting exercise that took place over the week is a very significant activity that will be of great benefit to the country but going forward it must be adopted as a daily activity to green the environment and avert any future disaster.
Director, Stakeholder and Ecotourism, Wildlife Division of Forestry Commission, Dr. Richard Gyimah, speaking at the Green Ghana Day activity held at the Shai Hills Resource Reserve, indicated that the country is getting warmer than expected and therefore an activity such as planting of trees to stir the time of climate change is very vital and must be embraced by all.
“For us at the Forestry Commission we are not seeing tree planting as an annual event, it is part of our everyday activity and so we will continue to plant trees and we encourage the youth that are here in their numbers today to support this exercise and corporate organisations to also make it a daily or regular activity to plant trees, nurture and grow them.
Tree planting alone is not enough measure that can help us to stem out of environmental degradation but we also have to stop cutting down trees indiscriminately, stop bush & charcoal burning, and other activities that destroy the land,” he said.
He added that measures to ensure the trees survive and grow well will be implemented such as creating fire belt, regular watering in addition to the hydrogel chemical added to the soil to store water for the plant.
The activity which was carried out by SDGs Advisory Unit of the Presidency in partnership with the Forestry Commission, Kufuor Foundation, Bank of Africa, Ghana Shippers Authority and National Cathedral, with support from 100 student volunteers, planted about 1,500 trees in that enclave out of the total 450,000 allocated to the Greater Accra Region, in the five million national target.
On his part, Head of SDGs Advisory Unit, Office of the President, Dr. Eugene Owusu indicated that just like water, trees are also a source of life for all that we get from them especially oxygen, as well as mitigate the effects of climate change which is an integral and important aspect of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) agenda.
“Essentially, planting trees deals directly with two of the SDGs, which are life on land and climate change, however it has an indirect bearing on all the others. So, we are here to plant trees to save the ecosystem, help mitigate the effects of climate change and also deal with dissemination on our land which is become a major problem for the country.
We encourage all Ghanaians to inculcate the habit of tree planting into our daily lives because we are not doing this just for ourselves but future generations unborn,” he said.
