Hon. Kwabena Okyere Darko-Mensah Backs Carbon Credits, Calls for Community Revenue Sharing and Action on Degraded Lands

Member of Parliament for Takoradi, Hon. Kwabena Okyere Darko-Mensah, has backed carbon credits and urged government to ensure revenue from the scheme is shared with communities and invested in Ghana’s degraded lands.

Commenting on a statement by Minority Chief Whip, Hon. Frank Annor Dompreh, in Parliament, Hon. Okyere Darko-Mensah said: this topic of carbon credits is something that had come up the last parliaments last year they discussed it and now they are also discussing it again and he believe that it's very relevant because we all know that climate change present. "It's not a future event that we should be expecting. It's something that is happening now and if you look at all the rains that are falling in the numbers it clearly shows that as human beings we need to do something about it and carbon credit is one key area in solving that problem.”

He commended Hon. Dompreh “for such a brilliant paper and for his efforts at always bringing to the for the issue of sustainable development.”

"We know for a fact that a lot of the industrialized world are the major politance of this world and our ability to absorb the carbon that is generated is key in managing temperatures and the climate uh effects,” the Takoradi MP stated.

The Member believes that Ghana also has a unique opportunity to derive so much benefit from the carbon credit that we have already initiated in this country. "In fact Ghana seems to have been one of the first countries in Africa to set up an office and to trade carbon credit.”

“Unfortunately in our part of the world virtually all our mining reserves were built under forest reserves. Our mineral reserves are under forest reserves and over the period it's becoming more and more difficult to protect these forests,” he said.

“Mr speaker I've said it here before that it is time that the revenues that we are generating from these carbon credits are physically shed to communities that protect these forest reserves and in protecting them we can use these moneys to generate the carbon credits that we are talking about.”

*Value comparison and degraded lands*

He noted that, there are other areas that we also need to be looking at very seriously. He said, today when you take one ton of gold one ton of gold it will give us over one hundred and thirty million dollars. The same one ton of carbon credits will give us just thousand dollars. So as a country we need to ask ourselves what do we deal with it? How do we deal with it? How do we make sure that we can protect our forest to protect our lives than just letting it go?”