#Letsgoplanting is this year’s hashtag for the national tree planting exercise. The theme for the exercise is “Mobilising For A Greener Future” which highlights the importance of trees for our future world and indeed for the present.
On June 10, 2022, we shall as a country embark on a more ambitious project of planting 20 million trees, the maiden one having taken place last year with 5 million seedlings committed to the ground.
Ghana and the rest of the world are on a major course of not only changing attitudes towards the environment but actually physically embarking on concerted projects of planting trees, the main response of addressing the deteriorating state of our environment.
We are, only twenty five days away from another opportunity to collectively address the state of our depleted forest cover, the repercussions of which are dire. With the President and for that matter the Presidency involved in this crusade, the seriousness of the subject could not have been better underscored. Presidents, all over the world, are committing themselves to the reversal of the deteriorating state of the environment.
We have all taken note of the fast depleting state of the Amazon in South America, the largest global rainforest and for that matter, the world’s major source of oxygen, twenty percent.
Unfortunately, reckless and irresponsible logging for cattle ranching in this part of the world is costing us unquantifiable negativity on our environment.
Although the devastation is more pronounced within the political jurisdiction of some countries, the rest of the world cannot fold its arms and refuse to call for action because, after all, nature respects no geopolitical borders.
A few months after the initial Greening Ghana project, we had cause to ask about the health of the seedlings. The Lands and Natural Resource Minister responded in the affirmative about the health of the seedlings.
We had no reason to doubt his word. After all, the monitoring and evaluation of the seedlings, fall within the purview of his ministry.
There are a lot of things we can do to enhance our tree planting projects to which much time and resources are being committed.
The pomp and pageantry are only needed to push the publicity of the project and no more. The most critical thing to do, for us, is the enhancement of the monitoring of the seedlings.
This task, should, as we stated in an earlier commentary, be placed on the bosom of the Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDAs).
The performance of the MMDCEs should be tied with the health of the tree seedlings and indeed how successful they are in greening the ambience within their jurisdictions.
This is a serious project and should be considered as such by all standards.
It is not enough to plant the seedlings and go to sleep.