The Interim Guinea Current Commission (IGCC) would hold its Second Ministerial Meeting in Accra on Friday, July 2.
It is being attended by 16 countries in the GEF-funded Guinea Current Large Marine Ecosystem
project (GCLME project).
A statement said the landmark meeting would review the progress in implementing the GCLME
project since its inception in August 2004, and take decisions on policy and strategy.
Foremost among these is consideration and steps towards approval for the Interim Guinea Current Commission to become a permanent body - the Guinea Current Commission - in the framework of the Abidjan Convention and Johannesburg Plan of Implementation for the long-term sustainability of the project objectives.
The project aims to assist states, acting collectively, to protect the Guinea Current region's estimated 280 million people from environmental degradation from food insecurity, from depletion of fishery stocks and from land-based pollution.
It also aims to help States to restore their coastal and marine habitats.
In his message for World Oceans Day on June 8, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon
recognised the "key role" oceans play in the daily lives of people around the world, and urged
governments and citizens everywhere to acknowledge this fact.
"If we are to fully benefit from what oceans have to offer, we must address the damaging impacts of human activities," he said.
` Full commission status for the IGCC would institutionalise the Member States' efforts to attain their objective of building regional capabilities to protect and sustainably manage the marine environment.
It would undertake this by implementing the Strategic Action Programme (SAP) that was
developed to overcome trans-boundary environmental pressures as identified
in the Trans-boundary Diagnostic Analysis (TDA) for the Guinea Current applying the Large Marine
Ecosystem approach.
The problems with the decline of the biodiversity and natural resources of oceans and coastal waters are now well recognised and there have been increasing calls for new approaches to
management.
Ecosystem-based management is propagated by scientists and policymakers as a suitable new
approach.
Ecosystem-based management is an integrated approach to management that considers the entire
ecosystem, including humans. The goal of Ecosystem-based management is to maintain an ecosystem in a healthy, productive and resilient condition so that it can provide the services humans want and the living natural resources need.
A major core of the ecosystem-based management approach is the need to manage natural
resources within ecological and not just within political boundaries. The application of the
ecosystem-based management approach to transboundary water resources requires the creation of transboundary governance structures.
By establishing the Guinea Current Commission as a technical body the Ministers of the GCLME countries will institutionalise regional cooperation and create the governance structure for the management of a transboundary ecosystem shared by 16 riparian countries.
They will make a strong commitment towards the application of the principles of ecosystem-based
management for the GCLME and signal to the world that African countries are prepared and committed to cooperate in overcoming transboundary environmental problems.
The Ministers will also decide on providing strategic direction for the efficient management of the project and a planned second phase, including the implementation of the complete SAP. The StrategicAction Plan (SAP) is a negotiated document that explains policy, legal and institutional reforms, as well as investments needed to attend to the priority transboundary problems in the GCLME region.
The next phase is the completion and implementation of National Action Plans
(NAPs) which will ensure that the Large Marine Ecosystem approach to managing resources will
be translated into viable, costed and impactful actions at national-level along the Guinea
Coast which is at the receiving end of rapid rural-urban migrations of millions of Africans.
Some 100 delegates are expected to attend the ministerial gathering and the preceding technical segment. They will include up to 16 Ministers of Environment and as many national project directors of environment of the GCLME countries.
Others are United Nations cooperating agencies such as UNEP, UNDP, FAO, IMO and UNIDO, non-governmental and civil society organisations. Individuals, institutions,
the private sector and stakeholder communities have been invited as observers.
Ms Sherry Ayittey, Minister of Environment, Science and Technology would chair the meeting.
Ministers of Environment approved the GCLME project in 2003, which has been the continuation of a pilot science-based project, launched eight years earlier, on water pollution control and biodiversity conservation in the Gulf of Guinea.
The GCLME stretches from Guinea-Bissau to Angola and is under an unrelenting barrage of
pollution and resource over-exploitation.
The Interim Guinea Current Commission executing the GCLME project does so through a Regional Coordination Unit at Accra, headed by Dr Stephen Maxwell Donkor. He also serves as the Executive Secretary of the Commission. The GCLME project is executed by the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO) and implemented by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Funding for the
project is provided by the Global Environment Facility (GEF) while the New Partnership for
Africa's Development (NEPAD) constitutes an important stakeholder.
GCLME is an important global resource. Ranked among the most productive coastal and offshore waters in the world, the GCLME is home to vast fishery resources, precious minerals, oil and gas reserves. It also holds high potential for eco-tourism and is an important reservoir of globally significant marine biodiversity.
The GCLME's habitats and living resources are however threatened by human activity, including over-exploitation, pollution from land-and sea-based sources, and ecosystem
alterations resulting in the degradation of coastal habitats through erosion. The GCLME project was designed as an ecosystem-based effort to assist riparian countries to strengthen and
institutionalise transboundary coordination to combat these problems and to recover and sustain depleted fisheries, as well as conserve biodiversity.
When world leaders convened in Johannesburg for the World Summit on Sustainable Development
in Johannesburg in 2002, they agreed to pursue four Marine (and Coastal) targets; to achieve
substantial reductions in land-based pollution by 2006; to introduce an ecosystems approach to
marine resource assessment and management by 2010; to designate a network of Marine Protected
Areas (MPAs) by 2012 and to maintain and restore fish stocks to maximum sustainable yield levels by
2015.
The GCLME project is the response of the 16 Guinea Current countries - Angola, Benin, Cameroon, Congo DR, Republic of Congo, Cote d'Ivoire, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Ghana,
Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Sao Tome and Principe and Togo.