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The acting Executive Director of the Ghana Wildlife Society (GWS), Prof. Erasmus Owusu, has called for more efforts to protect biodiversity, including the Mole ecological landscape.
Given the rapid depletion of biodiversity through human activities, he said there was the need to put in place pragmatic measures to protect species that were going extinct.
Prof. Owusu made the call at a two-day stakeholders’ forum in Tamale, the Northern regional capital.
It was organised by the GWS, with support from the EU.
In attendance were representatives of parks and protected areas such as the Mole National Park, the Bui National Park, the Gbele Resource Centre, the Eastern and Western Wildlife corridors and the Mole-Bui wildlife corridor.
Among issues discussed were conservation within the Mole ecological landscape and lessons learnt from the implementation of the Savannah Integrated Biodiversity Conservation Initiative (SIBCI) project which ended last year.
The three-year project was aimed at promoting a more sustainable, participatory and integrated management of the Mole National Park and its peripheral landscapes.
Prof. Owusu, who is also a Council Member of the GWS, said parks and protected corridors in the country had come under serious attacks in the last few years by illegal loggers and miners, a situation which had endangered biodiversity.
On the SIBCI project, he said, the initiative contributed significantly to building the resilience and empowerment of communities along the peripheral of protected corridors which hitherto depended on the parks for their source of livelihoods.
“Based on the experience we had from the project, there is the need to institutionalise this forum for further deliberations and commit to the process of conservation of protected areas in the country” Prof. Owusu added.
For his part, the Director of Stakeholder and Eco-tourism at the Wildlife Division of the Forestry Commission, Dr Richard Gyimah, underscored the significant impact the implementation of the SIBCI project had made.
He said it had helped in the effective management of the Mole National Park, adding that “through the project the park was provided with logistics, resources and other forms of support which has gone a long way to transform the place”.
