Mr Emmanuel Lignule, the Upper West Regional Director of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), has called on community leaders to enact bylaws against the harvesting of trees, especially economic trees to save the environment.
He said economic trees such as shea and Dawa Dawa were the hard-hit species being harvested in the region for commercial charcoal production, but that there was currently no law against felling such trees in the off reserve.
Mr Lignule, who made the call in an interview with the Ghana News Agency (GNA) in Wa on the occasion of the World Environment Day (WED), said the existing law only prohibited the cutting of cocoa trees and trees in forest reserves.
The United Nations set aside 5th June every year to be observed as WED to create awareness and to encourage the people to take action to protect the environment.
This year’s commemoration was on the theme: “Ecosystem Restoration”, concerning the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, which highlights the significance of restoring the ecosystem.
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“Demand for charcoal is one of the issues that drive the increasing cutting of shea trees.
We cannot stop tree cutting, what we can do is to control it, and the difficulty in controlling tree cutting is that there are areas where the law prohibits tree cutting.
“If you look at the legal regime, the law says that you cannot cut trees in the forest reserve, but in off-reserve areas, tree cutting is allowed, so that makes it difficult to prevent people from tree cutting,” he explained.
Stressing on the devastating impact of illicit logging of trees, Mr Lignule indicated that the EPA was engaging communities and traditional authorities on felling of economic trees and encouraging them to enact bye-laws to regulate tree harvesting at the community level.
He, however, observed that in some areas where there were laws against the felling of economic trees, those laws were not effective partly owing to the lack of strong leadership structures in those communities.
He said the EPA was, therefore, assisting communities to enact workable bye-laws as well as strengthening the local level leadership structure to enable them to effectively implement them.
The structures that support the enforcement of the rules, if they are strong enough, even without gazetting the rules could be enforced”, he said.
Mr Lignule indicated that they were educating the people on the importance of protecting the environment, and how they could harvest trees sustainably.
He said they were also sensitising the communities to desist from felling trees in environmentally sensitive areas such as water bodies, particularly dams, as that would cause the water bodies to easily dry up.
