FOREWORD BY PROFESSOR ALFRED A. OTENG-YEBOAH

It is heartwarming that at the onset of the year long celebration of 2010 as the International Year of Biodiversity, A Rocha Ghana will come up with this e-newsletter. The arrival of the e-newsletter comes at the time that the publics’ engagement is necessary to ensure that biodiversity is conserved and at the same time sustainably used. The instrument for this engagement is to ensure that the public benefits adequately from the available aspects of communication, education and awareness of biological diversity and ecosystem services for human well-being. The publics’ perception of biodiversity is not encouraging as people fail to connect human survival with biodiversity. We fail to appreciate that biodiversity is life itself and that the numerous ecosystem services such as water availability from its catchment, conducive climates for various plant and animal growth in agriculture, good soils for crop harvests, come from biodiversity. We also fail to appreciate that the goods that we collect from forests, savannas and water habitats in the form of fruits, spices, wood, fish etc. are actually the sources of our food, fuel, fodder and fibre which come from biodiversity. So one can see that biodiversity and its associated ecosystem services are for human well-being, and that we should treat these with care because they constitute life, and provide an insurance for life.

To ensure that such knowledge becomes available to all people, the international year celebration will attempt to focus on strategies to identify levels and content of communication, education and awareness raising that should be made known. The publication of this e-newsletter is one of the many ways expected to be used to do this. A Rocha Ghana has thus scored a high point in exposing the Ghanaian public to this high-tech presentation which will go a long way to underscore the Ghanaian desire to be counted with the best in the world.

I am therefore happy that A Rocha Ghana has outdoored this communication channel at this time. While congratulating A Rocha Ghana for this, I salute the gallant young men and women who have started or will be involved in bringing news that will help to inform their peers and others. The messages contained in this series and the subsequent ones will be directed to the youth who presently form the majority of the Ghanaian population and for whom every effort must be made to involve them in a heritage that is Ghanaian because they represent the future. There is a desire to ensure a smooth appreciation of the Ghanaian biological wealth across all generations, and thus promote inter-generational equity in knowledge. The young should be able to relate well with the biodiversity heritage of Ghana in the same way that the past older generation did and the present older generation are continuing to do.