The government, under the distinguished and outstanding leadership of President Akufo-Addo, will continue to adopt and implement policies necessary for the effective protection, preservation, management, and utilization of the lands and natural resources of the country. The Minister for Lands and Natural Resources, Hon. Samuel A. Jinapor, has assured Ghanaians that the protection of Ghana's lands and natural resources entrusted in the care of his ministry is intact.
He boasted, "We realize that the resources we have been trusted with are for the people of Ghana, and our role is a fiduciary one, requiring us to steward them carefully and wisely so that Ghanaians may profit from them."
At the Minister's Press Briefing, conducted on February 28, 2022, at the Ministry of Information in Accra, the Minister provided this unequivocal guarantee to the media.
Also in line with the protection agenda, Hon. Jinapor stated that the Forestry Commission has roped off all forest reserves and wildlife protected areas with the assistance of the Ghana Military Forces to free them of unlawful mining and logging.
He and others have mentioned several arrests that have been made. "The Quick Response Team of the Forestry Commission detained 212 people last year for a variety of forest and animal offenses." At several courts around the nation, these accused are on trial.
The Team also confiscated and/or deactivated several pieces of machinery and forest products, including fifty-four (54) trucks, seventeen (17) excavators, and forty-four thousand five hundred and twenty-two (44,522) different types of timber.
On other advancements in the forestry field, Hon. Jinapor said that this year's Green Ghana Day, the ministry's flagship aggressive afforestation and reafforestation initiative, will result in the planting of 10 million seedlings.
He claimed that this would allow the Ministry to provide the approximately thirty million trees that have already been planted in the previous two years the care they need to grow to maturity.
In addition to the Green Ghana Project, the Lands Minister noted that his ministry is collaborating with the Departments of Parks and Gardens, Urban Roads, and Green Streets to carry out the Green Street Project, which involves planting trees in the medians of streets and avenues of major roads in the country's various cities to improve the aesthetics of the areas while also assisting in the fight against climate change.
The Minister announced that Ghana has been appointed co-chair of the Forest and Climate Leaders' Partnership (FCLP), a new political forum that brings governments and other partners together to implement solutions that help reduce forest loss and land degradation while promoting sustainable development, in recognition of Ghana's forest climate change policies.
A national land conference was held in December of last year, according to Hon. Samuel A. Jinapor, who was highlighting developments in the land sector. The conference's goals included raising public awareness of Act 1036's potential benefits, fostering high-level support and ownership of interventions to address land governance, and empowering and building the capacities of stakeholders in the land sector. He mentioned that a multi-stakeholder framework with a secretariat at the Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources is being developed to put the conference's proposals into action.
He said, "The Commission is also working with the Ghana Police Service to ensure protection for all public lands and prevent them from being encroached upon, and has launched several operations to recover encroached public lands."
blogpay
Total Comments: 0