Africa needs bottom-up approach in Climate Change mitigation measures

Ghana’s Minister for Local Government and Rural Development, Hajia Alima Mahama has urged African countries to adopt the bottom-up approach in policy formulation to mitigate Climate Change.

Speaking in an interview during the second Africa Climate Chance Summit, the minister said the inclusion of indigenous knowledge and practices would be part of the bottom-up approach to support national efforts at mitigating the menace of climate change in the country.

For example, in northern Ghana, she said no indigenous person in the village would cut down shea-nut trees because they knew its economic value.

For that reason, Mahama urged that “when it comes to nationally determined contributions towards Climate Change action, the continent should start by looking at the issues at the local level.”

“Rather than developing them at the national capitals and then local authorities later struggle to understand and implement, let us start the nationally determined contributions from the bottom, just as our planning processes come with a bottom-up approach,” Mahama said.

In this regard, she said Ghana would incorporate indigenous environmental management practices into its national policy on Climate Change to ensure an all-inclusive approach to the country’s adaptation and mitigation measures.

“We need to have conversations with our rural communities, to let them understand that if people from outside come to explore their environment for resources, the rural communities owe their generation and those unborn the responsibility to hold those outsiders accountable in their resource extraction from the environment,” she added.

Source: Xinhuanet