Accra, June 16, GNA- Civil Society Organisations (CSO's) have expressed concern about the spate of oil spillage in the country even when commercial production of the commodity had not commenced.
They therefore called on the government to halt the menace to safeguard the country's ecosystems and livelihood support systems. "We deplore this gradual but systematic characteristics of ecosystem and livelihood misfortune heralding the country's young oil sector. "If this goes unchecked it has a huge potential for negative ecosystem and environmental imbalance and its attendant ramifications for local socio-economic and livelihood support systems."
This was contained in a statement issued by Noble Wadzah, a representative of Oilwatch-Ghana in Accra on Wednesday. Oilwatch-Ghana represents a plethora of environmentally-biased CSO's in the country.
The statement said during the preparatory stages for securing the mandate for commercial offshore drilling, Kosmos Energy and Tullow Oil indicated that their production activities would not pose significant environmental damage, particularly in the marine environment. It said Kosmos Oil description of the first incident of oil spillage as "technical" did not mean that the occurrence had no effect on the environment.
"For oil bearing communities, oil spills present an even more frightening experience particularly for us in Ghana where the extent to which legal frameworks to control, sanction and address compensations issues are not fully in place yet."
The CSO's called on government to, as a matter of urgency, institute full scale investigation into the recent oil spills in order to determine the underlying causes to avert such occurrences in future. The statement also demanded a full-scale assessment of the situation to ascertain the impact of the spills on critical ecosystems and livelihoods on both offshore and onshore environment, calling on government to make such findings public.
It harped the need for Ghana to re-examine dependence on fossil fuel and investing in alternative energy sources such as renewable energy sources. "Thought of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill tragedy remains too fresh on our minds and not only is another spill anywhere unacceptable but unfair to human existence." 16 June 10
