The Monitoring and Evaluation Officer for Rainforest Alliance, Matilda Agyapong has anchored the need for actors in the forestry sector to upscale the capacity and skills of its stakeholders in reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation.
According to her, although several bodies have strived in their own ways to protect the environment, there is the need to implement more action plans to ensure the successes and goals are sustained.
Mrs. Matilda Agyapong made these remarks during a stakeholder meeting to introduce a fresh project to increase the capacity of landscape management actors on data collection to improve their performance in forest preservation and climate mitigation.
With funding support from World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the new project dubbed “Jurisdictional Data Analysis Project” aims at gathering information and data on the progress of landscape management within the transition landscape from key stakeholders to address data gaps as well as ensuring the sustainability of existing environmental protection projects, implemented by the Ecocare Ghana and the Rainforest Alliance.
Mrs. Matilda Agyapong during the launch of the project at Akomadan in the Ashanti region intimated that, it has always been the goal of Rainforest Alliance, and its Partner Ecocare Ghana to champion the course of tree planting and climate mitigation through their flagship project, Landscapes and Environment Agility across the Nation (LEAN project, which is however bound to end soon.
According to her, the Data Analysis Project will serve as a structural framework to ensure the objectives of the LEAN project materialize even after its implementers’ exit.
“We are using the integrated Landscape management approach” to drive and reduce forest degradation and deforestation within the transition landscape, and to be able to do this, we need to build evidence of results that we have implemented or actions that we have implemented within the landscape. So we are using a tool which we call the ‘Landscape’ to help in assessing the sustainability of the LEAN Project.”
The Monitoring and Evaluation Officer added that the landscape framework tool has already attracted some funding support from the World Wildlife Fund to help in the collection of data to help the landscape management board realise their goals.
“The Data would be collected on four main pillars including the ecosystem pillar, the human wellbeing pillar, the governance pillar and the production pillar” she explained.
The launch of the Jurisdictional Data Analysis Project was patronized by heads of departments in Forest protection and leadership of the Landscape management boards within the transition landscapes.
The LEAN project is a four-year project funded by the European Union’s flagship GCCA+ initiative that aims to conserve biodiversity, build climate resilience, and reduce emissions from land-use changes in the savannah, high forest, and transition zones of Ghana, while helping local farmers to improve their livelihoods.
The project seeks to address three structural barriers that have historically hindered efforts by governments, civil society organizations, and the private sector to halt land degradation and deforestation through the uptake of landscape approaches.
