Participants at a Validation Workshop under the Ghana Environmental Management Project (GEMP) have appealed to the government to encourage illegal small scale miners to register. GEMP, with support from the Canadian government, begun in the Region last year and is being implemented by the Ministry of Environment, Science and Technology through the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). It is aimed at reversing land degradation in the three northern regions. The participants, who were drawn from the districts in the Region including traditional rulers, said since there was no way government could tackle the problem of illegal small scale mining there was the need to check their activities. They said the government could mount sensitization programmes to educate them on how to conduct their activities to minimise environmental degradation and to safeguard their lives. The participants expressed regret at the way illegal small scale mining was carried out in the Region and said this could promote more environmental degradation. Participants appealed to the Ministry of Food and Agriculture to assist communities with technical advice and support to nature pasture for grazing in order to reduce overgrazing. They also called on the Management of Wild Life and Conservation to strictly enforce their by-laws to help reduce negative environmental activities such as poaching and bush burning which is rampant in the area. GNA Environment NGO maps out trees in land bank Accra, Nov. 10, GNA - An environment NGO, Vision 2050 Carbon Project, has completed mapping out 2.04 million trees in its land bank in the Ashanti Region at the cost of GH¢ 100,000. This is the first of the seven regions with 130 million trees planted by 850 communities that were waiting to be mapped out at an estimated cost of GH¢13 million, a statement signed in Accra on Wednesday by Nana Bafour Nsenkyire Akosa II, Director of Operations of Vision 2050 Carbon Project. It said the enlisted farmers in the project would be able to draw the appropriate level of grants from the project to cover their trees when the mapping out exercise was completed. The statement said the farmers with formal title to the trees they now own would be assisted by the Project to access loans from selected banks. The Vision 2050 Project, which was established in 1988, with the main objective of recovering 50 per cent of the degraded forest of Ghana by the year 2050, has now acquired 560,000 hectares of land banks in the seven out of the 10 geographical regions. These land banks will enable the Project to plant 450 million trees. The Carbon Project that grew out of the original re-forestation and afforestation business is intended to also make a contribution from Ghana to the growing global menace from climatic change. Source: GNA