The National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE) office in the Ningo-Prampram District has ended its annual Citizenship Week celebration with a call on residents to respect the environment.

The Citizenship Week celebration for this year which was on the theme: “The Environment and You,” saw civic educators from the NCCE visiting and interacting with pupils from 60 private and public schools in the District.

Miss Gifty Agyeiwaa Badu, Ningo-Prampram District Director of NCCE ending the Week at Nygbenya Basic A and B Schools, said disrespect for the environment was evident in habitual littering of the streets with empty water sachets, and other plastics.

Miss Badu, added that indiscriminate disposal of both solid and liquid waste, open defecation on the beaches and other areas in the community, illegal mining, and bush burning among others degraded the environment.

She urged Ghanaians to cultivate the habit of caring for their immediate surroundings by desisting from littering and dumping faecal matter and garbage into drains.

She added that such material blocked drains leading to flooding in communities and subsequently displacing people, causing damage to properties and even deaths in some cases.

The Ningo-Prampram NCCE Director also urged the youth to serve as ambassadors of good environmental practices to their friends and relatives to ensure their surroundings were clean to prevent the contracting of communicable diseases.

She urged them to obey national and local laws on environmental sanitation, protect and safeguard the environment, participate in clean-up exercises as well as discourage their parents from engaging in illegal mining and bush burning.

The pupils asked environmental questions bothering their mind such as what should their parents who sold charcoal for a living do since the Civic Educators cautioned the against tree cutting.

They also observed that even though people were expected to dispose of their garbage properly, there were no litter bins and those available were not emptied on time leading to an overflow.

The children however resolved to do their best to observe good environmental practices at home and away.