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African governments urged to
take urgent action on climate change
Cape Coast, June 18, Ghanadot/GNA - Dr Barnabas Amisigo, a
Research Scientist at Water Research Institute of Centre For
Scientific And Industrial Research (CSIR) on Wednesday,
called on African governments to develop the political will
to adopt new policies to meet the challenges of climate
change on the continent.
He observed that due to lack of proper coordination between
researchers and policy makers in Africa, reports from
researchers were not being recognized or utilised but relied
mostly on information on issues based on the developed world
at the expense of developing countries.
Dr Amisigo made the call when presenting a paper on “Climate
Change” at a two day conference on “Climate, Environment and
Human health” at Cape Coast.
It was under the theme “The Challenges of Climatic and
Environmental Changes and their Implication for Human
health”.
The conference attended by journalists, students,
researchers and NGOs, is being organized by Centre for
Environmental Impact Analysis (CEIA) in collaboration with
the United Nations University-Institute for Natural
Resources in Africa (UNU-INRA).
It is to assess the potential health effects of climate
variability and environmental changes, with the goal of
identifying vulnerable population and sub-groups and
interventions that could be implemented to reduce the
current and future burden of disease.
Topics discussed included climate change and the
environment, climate change and health impacts, the
challenges of climate changes in Ghana , effects of climate
change on environment and human health and strategies to
deal with the impact of climate on the environment and human
health.
Dr Amisigo expressed concern about the inadequate
information on climate change particularly, global warming,
to policy makers in Africa that did not augur well for the
socio-economic development of the continent and stressed the
need to link researchers with policy makers.
He stressed the need for researchers in Africa, particularly
Ghana, to have a lobbying group that could coordinate their
activities with policy makers and advocated the
establishment of such a group in the country.
Dr Amisigo called for the involvement of “many and varied
stakeholders” in an effective and sustained education on
mainstream climate change issues into national development
programmes.
He pointed out that global warming was actually happening
and advised African leaders to come out with pragmatic
policies and programmes to adequately meet the challenges
which had a devastating effect on human health.
Dr Amisigo noted that Africa was one of the most vulnerable
continents to climate change variability, which was already
affecting parts of the continent in the form of floods,
storms, and in some cases droughts.
Mr Samuel Obiri, Executive Director of CEIA said the issue
of climate change was a reality and all hands must be on
deck to address the situation.
He called on scientists and researchers to write more about
the effects of climate change in Africa and formulate
policies that would help educate the public on the causes
and effects of climate change.
GNA
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