For the past few days, the weather in Accra and other parts of the country has been unusual; the global climate change is real. October is not a month known for the meteorological features residents of the country have observed in the past few days.
The same story goes for the rest of the world as unusual weather patterns continue to defy annual meteorological standards.
Therefore, it is for us another evidence of changes occurring in the global climate pattern. Of course, something should have informed these changes and they are man-made the consequences of which are becoming dire across the globe.
Agricultural production in places where rain-driven farming is the order would obviously be impacted, as especially peasant farmers are unable to determine to sow seeds.
The natural order of things has been immensely tampered with in motley of ways. Recently, the Amazon in Brazil was on fire and the world was on edge about the occurrence.
Until this fire, most of us did not know twenty per cent of the world’s oxygen originates from the tropical rainforest of the Amazon.
Ghana, Cote d’Ivoire, Nigeria, Liberia and Sierra Leone and other countries strewn across the African continent are bestowed with tropical rainforests. These also account for the production of oxygen the world depends upon after sucking carbon dioxide.
Our ability to ensure the consistency of the supply of oxygen is being compromised. While the developed countries are gradually coming to terms with this reality and are gearing themselves towards reversing the trend, we are yet to do so perhaps because we do not even believe our relationship with the environment has a hand in the climatic metamorphosis.
It is important, therefore, that today a climate change summit is taking place in Accra with participants coming from different parts of the world. Our Local Government Ministry is a focal state agency which has been engaged in the issue of climate change management.
This is an important opportunity for Ghanaians to be apprised with the reality of climate change and why they too should gird their loins for the necessary sacrifices and attitudinal changes needed to reverse the phenomenon.
As they engage themselves today on how to address the challenges posed by the changing climate of the world, it is our expectation that the participants, some of them experts, will bring their experiences to bear on how to effect changes in how we manage nature.
Trees continue to be felled recklessly and unsustainably as though the green cover of the country and the world at large do not matter.
We have been told that the repulsion of heat from the sun back to the atmosphere after it hits the earth because of insufficient green cover to absorb causes, among other things, the indeterminable changes in climate, destructive rainfall patterns and unusual rise in temperature in places not known to have such patterns.
Governments should take the outcome of such engagements seriously as others are doing in other parts of the world otherwise our stewardship of the earth we have inherited will someday be put on the spot by future generations.