The Assistant Programmes officer at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the Eastern region, Mr Isaac Kwabena Danso has called on stakeholders in the education sector to teach children and the youth about climate change to help navigate and envision their future amid multiple social challenges.

According to him, climate change was altering all lives, including that of children, the environment, weather patterns and futures and hence, there was the need to educate them on the subject matter to develop their green skill, enable them to adapt to the harsh reality of a warming world, and understand how to combat climate change.

“We want to catch them young and inculcate in them a habit that would develop their sense of responsibility and passion for the world around them so that they can meaningfully contribute to climate changes,” he said.

Mr Danso was speaking at a day’s workshop organised by the EPA and other stakeholders with funding from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), for Senior High Students (SHS) on the theme “Fixing the Ozone Layer and Reducing Climate Change.”

The workshop was purposed to educate the students on the Ozone Layer Depletion and Climate Change issues to broaden their knowledge on the subject matter and help them to identify measures to enable them contribute their quota in helping to prevent the two.

He noted that climate change was partly as a result of human activities through which green gas emissions were released into the atmosphere, causing global warming and added that these activities impacted on weather conditions that caused climate change.

“Ghana has two main season which are the dry season in December and January where we experience the harmattan period and then the wet season which we experienced in May, June and July.” he noted and expressed worry over the change in weather patterns which caused flooding and drought in the country.

He said the situation hard negatively affected farmers and the country considering that Ghana was an agrarian community which depended a lot on agriculture.

He stated that there was the need to educate the youth to stop bad practices like dumbing rubbish in gutters, open defecation, among others, as those contributed to flooding which the country experienced as a result of climate change.

He added that since such practices contributed to worsening the country’s
situation causing loss of lives and properties, there was the need to inculcate good practices among the youth and develop innovative ways to teach them to prevent climate change.

The Acting Director of the EPA, Joseph Baffoe stated that the issue of ozone layer depletion was also a worry, and hence the need to educate the youth to enable them understand the difference between ozone layer depletion and climate change.

He said Ghana contributed to the depletion of the ozone by using certain chemical that depleted it, adding that the country was a signatory to the Montreal protocol which gave signatory countries the obligation to help solve the problem.

He said the UNDP had collaborated with signatory countries including Ghana to organize programmes to implement strategies to prevent the depletion and create awareness among the youth, adding that it was one of the reasons to target the youth and educate them enable them contribute their quota to prevent the depletion of the ozone.

From Ama Tekyiwaa Ampadu Agyeman, Koforidua