ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE STUDENTS ON FIELD TRIP TO THE WESTERN REGION OF GHANA

 

The Institute for Environment and Sanitation Studies, University of Ghana has organised a one week field trip to the Western Region for its first year Environmental Science Programme Students. The team left Accra for the six-day fact finding trip on Sunday, 3rd February, 2013. The trip offered the students an opportunity to study the environmental impact of the operations of some industrial concerns in Ghana and how such impacts are managed. The team made up of twenty students (admitted in 2012/2013 academic year) and led by three lecturers: Dr. Ted Yemoh Annang, Dr. Elaine Tweneboah-Lawson and Mr. Jesse Sey Ayivor, visited both Goldfields Ghana (Tarkwa) Mines and Zeal Environmental Technology, oil and gas waste management company in the Sekondi –Takoradi metropolis. The visit also took the team to Coastal Resources Management Initiative, a natural resource management project christened “Hen Mpoano”. The final leg of the field studies was a visit to the Ankasa Forest and Conservation Resource site, a forest reserve located about three kilometres from the Ghana-Ivory Coast border at Elubo. The visit to the forest further provided the students with a chance to appreciate details of “the role of fringe communities in protected area management in Ghana". This exercise involved an interaction with the communities on the fringes of the forest, including focus group discussion, as well as questionnaire administration, on their role in the management of the forest and its resources. It was the view of participants that such field trips should be organised more frequently, and also taken to other parts of the country and possibly within the West African sub region to enable the students broaden their horizon on the mitigation of the impact of various forms of land use on the environment, as well as the involvement of local communities in the management of natural resources. By Dr. T.Y. Annang