Ghana’s biodiversity and ecosystems are being lost at an alarming rate with an aggregate pressure being from agricultural expansion, mining, timber extraction, construction and infrastructural development among other socio-economic factors and changes.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says the country has lost vast forest areas to wanton exploration by humans to satisfy their immediate economic needs without recourse to the regeneration capacity of the forest.

This reduces the closed forest cover of 145,000 square kilometres from the beginning of the 20th Century to 15,000 square kilometres.

Mr Ebenezer Sarpong, the Deputy Technical Director at the EPA, said an economic assessment of the cost of environmental degradation some two decades ago suggested that the country was losing over 54 billion dollars annually.

Thus there was every reason to believe that the figures have more than doubled, given the spate of unprecedented devastation currently being witnessed as a result of the manner in which artisanal mining or ‘galamsey’ is being carried out.

He said this called for urgent action and a change from the traditional methods of addressing those challenges using old biodiversity approaches and adopting current global methods such as Biodiversity Offset Business Scheme (BOBS).

Mr Sarpong was addressing stakeholders at a validation meeting in Accra on Thursday on the new BOBS, Framework and Guidelines that was being developed by the EPA in partnership with key stakeholders including the John Agyekum Kufuor Foundation, the NYCOB Enterprise Consortium, the Business Sector Advocacy Challenge (BUSAC) Fund, Forestry Commission and the National Biodiversity Committee.

He said the development of the BOBS by the EPA, in collaboration with key stakeholders, was to create a framework that would provide guidance for instituting a private sector-led offsetting programme in Ghana.

He said when implemented, the Scheme would help in mainstreaming biodiversity conservation actions into broader economic development activities and decision-making processes, ensure responsible management, sustainable utilisation, and also the equitable benefit sharing of biodiversity resources.

It would also encourage businesses to take responsibility for their impacts and generate additional private sector investments in biodiversity conservation, which was consistent with the agreement by Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity in 2008.

This would enhance private-sector participation in biodiversity conservation and use appropriate tools such as biodiversity offset to account for impacts and further enhance the integrity of biodiversity wishing member States.

Mr Sarpong said the Scheme would further enable businesses to internalise the full cost of their impacts and ensure sustainability of their operations, employ market-based approaches which would be led by the private sector on an online portal.

The BOBS, he said, would empower biodiversity-based enterprises with the appropriate regulatory environment to attract more private investment into nature conservation and generate livelihoods for the populace along the value chain.

He said the EPA would work closely with its private sector partners to pilot the scheme in 2017 and implored all the stakeholders gathered to critic the documents to help fine-tune them for implementation.

Dr Yaw Osei-Owusu, the Chairman of the Advocacy for Biodiversity Offsetting Group (ABOG), said the scheme was seen as a new landscape of opportunity for business and biodiversity interface.

He said these engagements were meant to open up Ghana’s nature-based economic sector and attract more private sector investments in the Sustainable Utilisation, Management and Protection of the country’s Natural Capital Assets.

He said the ABOG, which was commissioned by the EPA a year ago as the first step towards the realisation of the initiative, would support the incoming administration to operationalise the BOBS and restore the target of 30,000 hectors of degraded area per year within the Offset Scheme.

Originally published by Christabel Addo, GNA