Oil Boom Gains From It Our Choice — Leticia Obeng

The President of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, Dr Leticia Obeng, has said economic prosperity from the discovery of oil is a choice Ghanaians would have to make.

She said managing the oil revenue for the country's good should, therefore, become the decision and responsibility of all Ghanaians.

Dr Obeng said this when she delivered an address at the 49th Founder's Week Lecture of the academy in Accra yesterday. It was on the theme: “Challenges of Natural Resources”.

She said the deterioration of resources in rural areas had contributed to the mass migration to urban centres where unexpected population pressure had resulted in extensive unplanned peri-urban settlements.

Dr Obeng said according to the Stockholm Conference on Environment in the early 70s, a clear realisation emerged that the earth's population was not only using up its share of the earth's resources but was also degrading them.

She said a number of issues had critically affected actions by the UN to solve the problem, adding that “the most serious has been the increase in human population and the overwhelming demand that it has put on natural resources”.

In the period after the Stockholm Conference on Environment, Dr Obeng said the UN launched the environmental strategy known as Development Without Destruction to promote an emphatic approach to meet the challenges of the

environment.

The strategy, she said, emphasised the need for using the resources of the earth for development to improve the quality of life, without degrading the environment.

Dr Obeng, therefore, called for the promotion and safe management of the resources of the human environment and to protect and conserve them for future generations.

The Chairman for the occasion and Immediate Past President of the academy, Nana S. K. B. Asante, called on all stakeholders to put in place prudent measures to protect the environment.

Story By MacLiberty Misrowoda