Ghana Landscape Restoration and Small-Scale Mining Project

active

The project is supporting a community-led integrated landscape approach to improve management of forest and savannah ecosystems in the target areas and enhance resilience of ecosystems and populations dependent on them. The interrelationship among agriculture, biodiversity (including wildlife) conservation, mining, and forestry calls for a holistic integrated landscape approach to provide ecosystem services. Smallholder farmers’ access to finance also needs to be improved and critical supply chain bottlenecks removed in the value chains by focusing on improved storage and post-storage processing. Therefore, a win-win vision for the environment and regional economy is exploiting green drivers of growth compatible with improved watershed management, supported by appropriate commercial and social infrastructure. Tree crops are identified as a key economic driver. The potential for additional agricultural diversification and nature-based tourism needs to be supported for better resource management at the landscape level. Farm-based aquaculture is an important economic and food security activity, scaled up under the project additional financing. Uncontrolled illegal small-scale mining, including extraction of gold, sand winnowing, and stone quarrying, has resulted in serious deforestation and land degradation – requiring a meaningful effort to formalize and train small-scale miners in environmentally-smart mining as part of the landscape-wide management approach. This requires strong multi-sector coordination at both the national and decentralized levels. The Project is supporting cross-sectoral collaboration from a number of Government agencies, such as MEST, EPA, MOFA, MLNR, Ghana COCOBOD, Minerals Commission, Water Resources Commission, Fisheries Commission, and Forestry Commission to proactively engage in finding integrated solutions to landscape management.The GoG has requested broader engagement and support from the World Bank in addressing the small-scale mining sectoral issues in the targeted landscapes. The project is supporting a sequence of sector reform initiatives, including (a) regulatory reform and formalization of the ASM sector, (b) strengthening the government’s capacity for support and monitoring of small-scale mining operations. Subsequently, the project aims to support (c) piloting rehabilitation on a limited number of mined out sites (according to lessons learned from the just-closed Forest Investment Program project), (d) promoting responsible entrepreneurship for ASM development, and (e) supporting sustainable livelihood alternatives within galamsey communities. However, addressing the full scope of the artisanal and small-scale mining issues will require mobilization of additional resources on a much grander scale, both from Ghana’s own budget and from external partners and sources, beyond the scope of this project.The project design has a two-fold focus to: (i) enhance landscape management planning at decentralized levels that cuts across administrative boundaries, multiple sectors and multiple land uses in the target sub-basins within the savannah and cocoa forest areas. The actions envisaged through such planning will be mainstreamed into and implemented through GoG Mid-term development plans (at district-level) to ensure synergies with government-led development planning, and (ii) scale-up land use specific interventions for land restoration, and food and cash crops production linked to livelihoods, both in the Northern Savannah Zone and the cocoa forest landscape.