Okyenhene: We can’t fight climate change with poverty

The Okyenhene, Osagyefuo Amoatia Ofori Panin, has said Africa cannot win the fight against climate change when it is still grappling with poverty.

He said although the dangers posed by climate change are critical, the level of poverty in Africa must be lower in order to achieve the measures the world has put in place to tackle the problem.

“Poverty and climate change cannot coexist; therefore, we need to win the war on climate change. As we are moving forward to rebuild our future in a more sustainable way, ‘Sankɔfa yɛnkye’, meaning: ‘Learning from our past is not forbidden.’ I will say it is a must,” said the Okyenhene.

Osagyefuo Amoatia Ofori Panin, the paramount chief of the Akyem Abuakwa Traditional Area, was speaking at the ongoing Royal Dialogue on Climate Action and the Sustainable Development Goals in Kyebi, in the Eastern Region.

Own the process

The objective of the dialogue is to provide a forum for reflection on climate action and the SGDs and to define collective action at the subnational level to speed up progress towards the SDGs and Ghana’s commitment under the Paris Agreement.

The Royal Dialogue is being organised as a precursor to the 26th United Nations Conference of Parties on Climate Change (COP26), to be held in Glasgow next month.

Osagyefuo Amoatia Ofori Panin said at the heart of the Sustainable Development Goals is the agenda to reduce poverty. In order for sustainable development to be effective, he argued, the indigenous poor themselves have to be in charge and to become owners of the process and the results.

He said that, in this way, the people will be accorded dignity of voice and self-determination. “Development is not something you do for people,” the Okyenhene explained. “Poor folks have to take charge of their destiny and to shape their own future.”

He cautioned that as governments prepare for the UN COP26 climate summit, they must know that the political price of more ambitious measures could be steep.

“The costs from inaction may be higher. Unfortunately, the synthesis of the Nationally Determined Contributions presented before the COP does, despite some progress, show that countries must urgently redouble their climate efforts if they are to prevent average global temperature increases beyond the Paris Agreement’s goal of well below 2˚C – ideally 1.5˚C – by the end of the century,” the chief said.

Biggest threat

For his part, President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, addressing the Royal Dialogue in a pre-recorded message, said climate change is the world’s biggest threat to realising the SDGs. This has become an issue of grave concern to all, especially as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has concluded that the planet has only until 2030 to stop climate change.

President Akufo-Addo, who is the co-chair of the Eminent Group of Advocates for the SDGS along with Erna Solberg, the former prime minister of Norway, said measures put in place to deal with climate change are contained in Ghana’s Co-ordinated Programme of Economic and Social Development Policies (CPESDP).

“We have introduced major policy interventions that have development and climate projection imperatives and, additionally, I have established an advisory group of prominent private sector chief executives, who are setting up a US$100 million SDGs Delivery Fund and a US$200 million Green Fund to complement the government’s efforts at tackling climate change and funding the implementation of the SDGs,” the president said.

John Attafuah

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