We should be concerned

Ghana like her neighbours in the West African sub-region as part of the world, has shown insufficient interest in matters related to global warming and climate change.

Farmers – peasant and modern large scale commercial ones – often complain about the challenges posed by the unreliability of the rainfall pattern and other issues pertaining to the weather.

Hardly do they think about what has accounted for the heightened vagaries of the weather. There have been extremes of rains or inadequacy of them.

While decades ago farmers were able to determine the period when the rains would come and adequately to take care of their farms these days such predictions have become rather difficult.

The Ghana Meteorological Service Agency (GMSA) can only tell farmers and the rest of us the prognoses which are invariably not heart-lifting. Indeed, it is not for them to tell us how to reverse the effects of global warming restricted as they are only to telling us what awaits us in a given period.

The felling of trees continues to be undertaken with such recklessness that it is clear to the onlooker that those engaged in the act do not appreciate the seriousness of the situation.

The Akosombo Dam has for many years now been unable to get enough water from its source in Burkina Faso and beyond the result of global warming and its associated issues.

It is for this reason that we find it unacceptable the little attention we have paid as a people to a subject which has a direct bearing on food production and, therefore, our survivability. For now, the subject remains locked up in the offices of academics and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) awaiting funding for technocrats to organize talk-shows on them.

We need to join the global campaign to educate ourselves about what doubtlessly remains a major challenge for the future of the world and to contribute what we can, no matter how little, towards reversing the negative global trend.

The only significant measure we have taken as a country so far to protect the environment is the banning of the importation of second-hand fridges because of the high level of CFC these emit and which take a worrying toll on the ozone layer.

In an intertwined global village, the speed with which glaciers are melting in the North Pole or arctic region has an indirect impact on dwellers of the Sahara Desert and beyond. We lose notice of this at our peril.

The many timbers which have been felled with no corresponding replacement are having unnoticeable effects on food production and even the population of wildlife.

We must act now through education of children from the primary schools to the adults long graduated from tertiary institutions and others outside those brackets.