Environment, development: Key issues for Ghana

Ghana is blessed as a nation with incredible natural and environmental capital and we all say repeatedly that our environment and our development are inextricably linked.

So the questions are: why are we squandering our national assets, what are we doing wrong, and how can we change our ways?

Nature has been extremely kind to Ghana. Other countries face hurricanes, major floods and tornados, as well as wildfires that destroy entire towns and heatwaves that kill the elderly in their hundreds.

So it is sad that most challenges that impact negatively on the environment, economy and development of Ghana are all made or facilitated by Ghanaians.

The environmental challenges that Ghana faces include increased climate change vulnerability; desertification of semi-arid areas; deforestation; rapid urbanisation in coastal areas; growth of slums; biodiversity loss; habitat loss from mining; pollution from agriculture and extractive industries, overharvesting and growth in illegal trade in minerals and other natural resources.

Many of these challenges have complex roots and drivers related to inadequate environmental education and awareness at all levels. Failure to deal with these challenges head-on and in the immediate term will result in erosion of all the economic gains that led Ghana to be classified as a lower-middle-income country.

Development trajectory

Every sovereign nation must make its own societal choices on the development trajectory that it wishes to pursue.

For a long time, it was thought that there must be a choice between respect and care of the environment or national development.  Recent advances in technology and greater knowledge of nature’s contribution to people have shown that it is possible to have a win-win situation where both environment and development thrive.

Addressing and arresting the decline in the environmental integrity of Ghana and not compromising our development trajectory requires a paradigm shift, from planning for the short-term performance to long-term resiliency.

The current COVID-19 pandemic provides us with the ‘comedies’ of what a full-fledged climate or environmental crisis could entail in terms of shocks to supply and demand, disruption of supply chains, as well as global transmission and amplification mechanisms.

Degradation

Environmental degradation is systemic, that is, its direct manifestation and cascading effects spread rapidly. It is also non-linear and a risk multiplier as socio-economic impacts grow disproportionally and even catastrophically past planetary boundaries, and there are feedback mechanisms that make one problem lead to another.

However, the important difference between a pandemic and an environmental crisis is that you cannot self-isolate from the environment.

COVID-19 presented Ghana with imminent, discrete and directly discernible threats; however, most of the dangers of our environmental degradation are, by contrast, gradual, cumulative and often distributed with impacts that are cumulative over time, for example, the annual three per cent loss of forest cover in Ghana or the spread of ‘galamsey’.

The world lost 12 million ha of forest cover each year from 2010 to 2015 versus 10 million ha of forests annually from 2015 to 2020. So based on just forest land cover, the global rate of deforestation is slowing – but not in Ghana.

Ghana’s economic growth and achievements have come at a significant cost to its forests. Having lost over 60 per cent of its forest cover from 1950 to 2000 (2.7 million hectares), and considering the current deforestation rate of approximately three per cent per year (320,803 ha/year) since 2000 and a marked increase between 2013 and 2015 of 794,214 ha/year, the future of Ghana’s forests and the people who depend on forests is an issue of major concern.

Effects

As forests disappear and encroachment of farms into protected areas increase, the risks of greater contact between humans and animals increase. In 2015, the World Health Organisation (WHO) compiled a list of emerging diseases which were “likely to cause severe outbreaks soon”.

Each disease on the WHO list is “zoonotic”, meaning it originates in non-human animals but either has the potential to jump from them to us or has already done so.

Zoonotic diseases include Salmonella, influenza, Lyme disease and tuberculosis,