Story by: Ishmael Barfi
Member countries have been called upon to develop concepts and programmes to attract the private sector to invest, hence breaching the gap of climate change financing.
The call was made by the Director for Development, Policy and Planning at the National Development Planning Commission (NDPC), Dr. Felix Addo Yobo at the dissemination workshop for revised Nationally Determined Contributions organised by the Climate Knowledge and Development Network (CKDN) in collaboration with the Institute for Environment and Sanitation Studies-University of Ghana.
According to him, development of concepts and programmes to attract the private sector is the surest ways of accessing enough funds and making climate change financing challenges a thing of the past.
“We can’t rely on the green funding, concessions, loans or grants to pursue climate change agenda. We need a mind shift in this regard and look at the bigger picture of financing.
Adding “he biggest pot of funding sits with the private capital venture and not in the green funding and that is where we need to look”, Dr. Addo Yobo stated.
“How can we get access to that pot of money that are sitting there idle looking for investment opportunities and so if we see the financing as not a challenge but rather as financing opportunities and then prepare prgrammes to attract private sector investors it will become a win-win situation.”
“It takes a lot of skills capacity to put together a very strong and good proposal to meet the requirements of the green funding and other funding out there”, he stated.
He, however, emphasized that when investors get attracted to the concepts “they will put their money into the NDC and we will meet our NDC commitment and the private sector will also make money out of it”.
He later expressed delight on what he described as subtle shift from emphasis on early warnings and disaster preventions to early warning and disaster risk management adding that the shift gives it a broader scope which focuses on whole cycle of disaster as opposed to the earlier objective that focused mainly on prevention.
On his part, Dr. Ted Yemoh Annang of University of Ghana, stressed the need for climate communication to be targeted at the local communities by involving them in the dissemination of climate information rather than leaving the communications only to the media.
He said this would enable the local people to better appreciate the subject matter and be deeply involved in the fight against climate change.
The Country Lead of Climate Knowledge and Development Network, Prof. Chris Gordon expressed worry over the funding challenges and stressed the need for availability of enough funds for Ghana to be able to meet its NDCs.
And urged stakeholders to continue investing and ensuring the NDCs are adhered to in accordance with the numerous agreement regarding to Climate change.
Source: www.thenewindependentonline.com
