Government urged to prioritise indigenous solutions in climate mitigation

The Director at Ghana Climate Change Innovation Centre, Dramani Bukari, wants government to prioritise the development of indigenous solutions to ensure accessibility and increase the impacts of innovations in Ghana.

He said this in an interview with media at the just-ended Environmental and Sustainability Summit 2023 event organised by the Business and Financial Times, dubbed Climate change and its impacts on the food system in Ghana.

He explained that if the country is going to depend on import innovations, then the possibility of issues arising regarding those innovations could be high; and will also affect productivity as well as the cost of production.

“If all of these are going to be imported into the country and over time parts become a problem, the knowledge-transfer could become a problem – and prices could also become a problem, which means that scalability to smallholder farmers could become a challenge as well as wider access.

“So for me, it is important to develop indigenous solutions; and once we develop indigenous solutions, we will scale those up for accessibility by a wider community to increase the impacts of those innovations,” he said.

Furthermore, Mr. Bukari stated that government needs to generate revenue funds locally to support climate adaptation and mitigation activities – that is if government is serious about addressing the effects of climate change in Ghana.

“We need to realise that climate funds inflow will not come from development partners alone regardless of our contributions to the perils of climate change; government needs to generate revenues of funds locally to support climate adaptation and mitigation activities.

“Our reliance on grants for instance is not going to work, because over time grants have only been distributed to around 5 percent of climate finance globally. Between 2011 and 2019, Ghana’s climate change inflows were over US$1bn which brought it to an average of US$162 million annually; which was 90 percent below what we needed to be spending,” he further explained.

Moreover, he added that for Climate change to be managed, government needs to be proactive, coherent and intentional about everything that concerns climate change – given that the concerns about climate change are local in Ghana.

“We need to be intentional about climate action, about the policy and about ensuring proper coordination between institutions.

“The reason we have to do that is, like it or not, the consequences of climate change are local here and no one directly faces the impacts but Ghanaians; that’s why it is our responsibility to address the challenges and address them head-on.”

In a panellist discussion, Mr. Bukari spoke about some new innovations currently in Ghana to tackle climate change and also significantly improve Ghana’s food security, emphasising machines designed to scare away pests following the assessment that farmers lose about 30 percent of potential yields.

“There is one start-up that came through called the AI spec role; already we are talking about the fact that climate change will lead to reduced yields particularly in the case of cereals; there are also birds and other forms of pests which come to the farm and destroys yields.

“So what they have done is to come up with an AI-powered drone in human form, so it’s a drone with a human head powered with some level of sound that is able to hover around several acres of land at the same time and is able to drive away these flocks of pests to stop them from eating away crops,” he added.