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The final workshop of the Greenhouse Gas Determination in West Africa’s Agricultural Landscapes (GREENGADE) Project is currently underway at Forest Research Institute of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR-FORIG), at Fumesua, near Ejisu.
Participants from Ghana, Burkina Faso, Niger and Germany are attending the four-day workshop to discuss findings of various research works on greenhouse gas in agricultural landscapes in West Africa.
The GREEGADE project is one of six projects funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research under the framework of the West African Science Service Center on Climate Change and Adapted Land Use (WASCAL II).
It is being implemented by a consortium of partners, including CSIR-FORIG (Ghana), Laboratory Plant Biology and Ecology, University Joseph Ki-Zerbo (Burkina Faso), Radio-Isotopes Research Institute, Department of Nuclear Physics and Chemistry (Niger), and Institute for Environment and Agricultural Research (Burkina Faso).
German partners on the project are University of Postdam, Biodiversity Research/Systematic Botany and the University of Kassel, Center for Environmental Systems Research.
The goal of the project is to evaluate greenhouse gas emissions and carbon storage dynamics related to the agricultural sector at national and regional scales in West Africa, and also guide national and regional climate change adaptation policies and strategies.
It also seeks to develop strategies to accelerate the implementation of climate-smart agriculture approaches among smallholder farmers.
As part of the project, researchers are also aiming to quantify greenhouse gas emissions from different agricultural practices at local, regional, and national levels, and also measure carbon pool dynamics in agricultural lands and near-natural vegetation.
Professor Anja Linstaedter, Overall Consortium Investigator for the Project, said the project sought to find out more about greenhouse gas emissions and how to mitigate the increasing effects of climate change in West Africa.
She explained: “It is about learning more about how much carbon is stored in the soil, trees, grass and ecosystems.
“We also look at greenhouse gas emission such as carbon dioxide and methane which are the culprits for increasing the temperature.”
According to Prof Linstaedter, a lot of data had been collected since 2021 when the project started, but the greenhouse gas measurement only started in June last year because they had to construct specific gas exchange measurement chambers and organize laboratory devices to measure them.
She said they were, however, faster with carbon stocks measured in the soil and vegetation, saying that collecting data in three different countries required a lot of planning and intense discussions.
Dr. Reginald Guuroh, Principal Investigator for the Ghana Team, emphasized the importance of collaborating with partners across continents when conducting research of such nature.
“If you look at the West African Region, there is increasing population and with this comes a lot of activities that also cause emission and that is the background of the collaboration,” he noted.
He said important data that can contribute to national reporting in the greenhouse gases
Also, carbon sequestration had been collected across the participating countries which would have been difficult to achieve if they were working individually.
Dr. Guuroh also made the point that because members of the team were of different expertise, the collaboration had made it possible for them to share knowledge and experience both across countries and institutions.
Dr. Kwame Oduro Antwi, Director of CSIR-FORIG, said collaborations between FORIG and international research organizations had enabled them to work in partnership to develop joint research programmed for the development of national research systems.
He said such partnerships had also enabled CSIR-FORIG and its partners to provide technical support for research and development activities in Ghana and the West African sub-region.
“As we all know, climate change is a major environmental challenge of global concern that requires concerted efforts to solve.
The emission of greenhouse gases from anthropogenic activities is the main cause of climate change, thus efforts aimed at addressing climate change must also target reduction of greenhouse gases,” Dr. Antwi suggested.
Source: GNA
