The Water Research Institute of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR-WRI) is to embark on a climate resilience management of the Pra and Densu River basins.
The project dubbed, Building Climate Resilience into Basin Water Management (CREAM), is to ensure sustainable management of the two river basins.
CREAM is aimed at creating a knowledge base and capacity for integrating climate change, shared socio-economic pathways and land use into the river basin management.
This is expected to enhance climate resilience, livelihood, water, food, energy, security and environmental conservation of the two river basins.
The project is expected to run for a period of five years and end in February 2024 with funding support from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark.
WRI with regards to this project is leading a consortium of nine partners, Food Research Institute under CSIR, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana Hydrological Services Department, Ghana Meteorological Agency and SIRCOOL Bottled Water Company.
Others are, Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, Aarhus University and Central Queensland University to implement the project.
Speaking in an interview with the media after the project inception meeting, Dr Emmanuel Obuobie, a Senior Research Scientist at WRI and Coordinator for the CREAM project, said the mismanagement, coupled with expected change in climate in future development was going to be more terrible if a better way was not find to manage the resources of the two river basins.
He explained that the project was set out to provide evidence for the impact of climate change and socio-economic development on the river basins and then to recommend solutions for dealing with that.
He said as it stood now, there were all kinds of unsustainable activities like deforestation, illegal mining activities, fishing with unapproved fishing methods, pollution, dumping of refuse and all of this have negative effects on the resources of the rivers.
“If we continue in this trajectory, then the picture in the future is very gloomy and that is the reason why we want to use this project to shape the management and reverse some of the negative trends,” he emphasized.
Dr Obuobie said as part of the project, capacity of stakeholders would be built to be able to understand how the current practices were impacting negatively on the resources through various analysis.
He said they intended to revitalize the stakeholder platform for managing the resource and support them with tools and analysis that will be able to make an informed and better decision to improve on the resource in the basins.
The participants, as part of the project inception meeting, were introduced to the CREAM project, its objectives, methodological approach, expected outputs, outcomes and impacts.
Feedback was also obtained from the participants to shape the approach and implementation of the project.
The meeting was also intended to build interactions and establish relationship between stakeholders and the project team as well as identify how the expected project outputs can support relevant decision makers, planners and managers to deliver on their mandate in relation to the two basins.
