Government urged to leverage impact assessments for sustainable development
The government has been advised to always conduct impact assessments on policies and leverage the accompanying data to achieve sustainable development and socioeconomic growth.
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A former President of the International Association for Impact Assessment (IAIA), Nana Yaw Amoyaw-Osei, who gave the advice, described it as a tool used to evaluate the potential effects of a proposed project, policy or action on the environment, society and economy to help identify and analyse the positive and negative consequences before making decisions.
He stressed that it would enable decision-makers to ensure that potential adverse impacts of any proposed policy are mitigated and that the benefits far outweigh the risks.
“Looking at it now, the knowledge of impact assessment is not that widespread so we don’t use it. It seems the politicians and the policymakers themselves are not fully aware of this knowledge. However, if they knew, they would have used it,” he said.
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Mr Amoyaw-Osei was speaking at a ceremony organised by IAIA-Ghana to honour him for his contributions to the association at both the international and local levels.
IAIA is the leading global network of professionals in best practices in the use of Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) for informed decision-making on policies, plans programmes and projects.
Its values include promoting integrated and participatory approaches to IA, contributing to sound decision-making processes for equitable and sustainable development, respect for human rights and exercising a duty of care to future generations.
The impact assessment expert received a plaque with a citation that recognised his hard work and dedication to the environment and his decades of efforts and work at Ghana’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
To buttress his point, Mr Amoyaw-Osei, who is also a former president of the Ghana Chapter of the association, referred to the controlled spillage of the Akosombo and Kpong dams last year by the Volta River Authority (VRA), which led to the destruction of property and the massive displacement of people who lived in the communities along the lower Volta Basin.
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He intimated that an initial environmental impact assessment coupled with data on the country’s rainfall patterns would have helped authorities determine the extent to which releasing the water would have affected local communities.
“So during town planning, building construction would be disallowed in such areas, maybe only farms and other things that might even require a lot more water would be situated there. It would determine the use of such lands. But all we seem to be doing is firefighting,” he stressed.
“The President said he wanted to make Accra the cleanest city in the world. We should have taken it and worked it out using this tool. But no one really cared. We were looking up to the president to achieve it when we have a tool we can use to reach that goal,” Mr Amoyaw-Osei added.
He called for the establishment of a National Environmental Council led by non-partisan persons with deep knowledge of the environment about its protection, preservation and improvement for future generations.
He equally called on the government to incorporate impact assessments as a requirement into the country’s national environmental policy so that government agencies, MMDAs, ministries and departments and all other stakeholders would use them for research and development.