International Workshop On The Environment Opens In Accra

Accra,(Greater Accra Region) 10, Oct. A two-day international workshop to train West African environment experts on the Global Environmental Facility (GEF) project for development started yesterday in Accra with a call on participants to integrate the concerns of indigenous groups, women and children in mechanisms to protect the environment. M. Abdoulie Janneh, UNDP resident representative in Ghana, noted that environmental problems the GEF seeks to address occur most in the rural areas where ''poverty drives our people to adopt unsustainable practices''. Such practices include slash and burn agriculture, bush burning, pollution of aquatic ecosystems and overtaxing of forest and marine resources. He said these ''directly impinge on biodiversity and water body conservation and climate change.... and at the same time increase emissions on greenhouse gases." The workshop, sponsored by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Bank, is being attended by about 40 participants drawn from Ghana, Nigeria, the Gambia, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. The main concerns of the workshop are issues affecting climate change, biodiversity and international water bodies and how to raise funding to avert the depletion of the environment in various parts of the West African sub-region.