Mrs Sherry Ayittey, Minister of the Environment, Science and Technology, at the weekend underscored underscored the need to have a sustainable oil sector without compromising the nation’s environment. According to her, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was collaborating effectively with the Ministry of Energy to ensure that best practices were applied by operators in the sector to ensure sustainable development. Mrs Ayittey made the call when she spoke on the ‘State of the Environment in Ghana and the Role of Women in Nation Building’, at a durbar to climax activities commemorating the 10th Anniversary Celebration of Obonu FM in Tema on the theme: “Our Culture, Our Development.” She said government had rolled out a number of capacity-building programmes to enable Ghanaians to participate in the expatriate-dominated oil and gas sector by making scholarships available to students to study oil and gas-related subjects. Mrs Ayittey said that the Ministry of Energy and its related agencies were developing a land use planning scheme for the Western Region to ensure efficient and sustainable use of land. “Other sector Ministries such as the Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources, are working assiduously to streamline land acquisition processes and to ensure transparency and sustainable land administration,” she noted. Mrs Ayittey said that the nation would be making progress towards environmental sustainability, if collectively; Ghanaians took steps to address issues that impacted negatively on the environment. Mrs Ayittey said to effectively implement environmental policies, there should be improved coherence between sectoral government policies, improved law enforcement, enhanced capacity, especially at the decentralized levels, to implement policies. The Minister revealed that out of the 8.3 million hectares of high forest in the country in the early 1900s, only 1.6 million hectares remained, adding that forest cover declined at an average rate of 1.7 per cent between 1990 and 2005, which amounts to about 70,000 hectares annually. She said the underlying causes were the expansion of land for plantations (especially cocoa, rubber, coffee, and palm oil), as well as logging, most of which were illegal, besides firewood exploitation and forest fires. Mrs Ayittey said the situation had brought about the fragmentation of Ghana’s forest landscape, loss of wildlife corridors, and forest connectivity: degradation of biodiversity and the ecosystem. She gave the assurance that her Ministry, in collaborating with the Ministry of Lands and Forestry would replant lost forest cover and also guard the existing ones to avert this worrying trend. She said regulations and mining Laws were currently under review to ensure better environmental stewardship as well as improve the human rights situation in the mining communities. On the role of women in nation building, the Minister stressed the need to strengthen relevant policies for women’s economic empowerment to help address inequalities affecting women and girls at all levels as regards access to education, age, poverty, geographical location, language, ethnicity and disability among others. She also e,phasised the need to ensure that women and girls also had full and equal access to quality formal, informal, and non-formal education and vocational training at all levels. The Minister called for increase in the enrolment and retention rates of girls in schools by ensuring that sufficient budgetary allocation was made to education authorities to effectively execute this mandate. Mr Kwabena Sarpong Anane, Acting Director-General of the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation (GBC), commended the staff of Obonu, a branch of the GBC, for exhibiting a high sense of commitment and devotion to duty thus placing the station at an enviable position on the radio stations’ league table in the Greater Accra Region. Mr Anane, however, charged them to be innovative in their presentations in order to stay in competition with sister FM stations. He paid a glowing tribute to the founding fathers of Obonu FM for their foresight, sacrifice, devotion and dedication to duty and urged the current staff to sustain the achievement and desist from imitating unprofessional practices by some media houses. Source: GNA