Prof.Chris Gordon,Director of the Institute for Environment & Sanitation Studies,University of Ghana
• Prof. Chris Gordon has said stray animals are a threat to national tree planting exercise
• The tree project called Green Ghana Project is expected to plant 5 million trees on June 11, 2021
• The Lands Minister has said five million trees is a big investment into the country’s forestry sector
The Director of the Institute for Environment and Sanitation Studies at the University of Ghana, Professor Chris Gordon has named stray animals as a challenge to ‘Green Ghana Project’.
The project is a national initiative to plant five million trees across the country.
Speaking to Citi News, Prof. Gordon said stray animals pose the biggest threat to young seedlings.
“There is a point I would like to raise on this issue of concern, and the point is that we are planting these trees and somebody made a comment about cutting trees and things like that, but really the biggest danger to these trees is the animals which are free and wandering around.
We have sheep, goats, cattle even in Accra, and the next thing you realise they will decimate all these young seedlings, so I think we have to look at this as a totality. Just as we have an ordinance that looks at how many trees you need to plant, we also must have an ordinance looking at how animals in these urban areas can be kept away from the roads and these trees”.
He also said planting 50 million trees rather than the 5 million would have been a great idea.
“I think this is a fantastic initiative that I would say should be 50 million not five million trees. When you look at the amount that we lose annually, we need 50 million plantings every year to make up for the losses. At Legon, we had our own tree planting project which I was part of some years back. There were 50 of us, and we planted about 1,500 trees in one morning.”
Prof.Gordon further raised concerns on the real estate companies to consider tree planting in their plans.
Meanwhile the Minister for Lands and Natural Resources, Samuel Abdulai Jinapor, has also stated that planting five million trees is a big investment into the country’s forestry sector.