By Laudia Sawer
Tema, July 20, GNA – Ms Mary Ama Kudom-Agyeman, the Executive Director for the Media Platform on Environment and Climate Change (MPEC), has encouraged journalists to take keen interest in and focus their writing on environmental issues.
She admitted that even though environmental issues reportage had gone up in recent times, “we still have large, uncovered fields, journalists must enter into the under reported fields and bring out issues. The environment needs our collective protection.”
Ms Kudom-Agyeman said it was not enough to attend and report on organized environmental programmes; rather, journalists must specialize in the field of the environment as human activities negatively impact it.
She said issues such as climate change, science, sea level rise, mining, and agriculture must be looked into deeply to bring out the hidden challenges and effects in the public domain.
Speaking at the Ghana News Agency-Tema Industrial News Hub Boardroom dialogue platform, he said there were gender dynamics and gaps in the linkages between diseases and their causes in the environment, among other things that environmental journalists could focus on.
She further said MPEC had realized that a lot of research abounds on environmental issues, but the public is not aware of them due to a lack of publication. She said journalists could be the bridge to bring the issues out.
The MPEC Executive Director said the media could bring change to society through their write-ups, which would impact society, emphasising that “environmental journalism is a calling and therefore must be done to impact society.”
Professor Roger Koranteng, the Head, Public Sector Governance, Commonwealth Secretariat at the United Kingdom, contributing to environmental issues, reiterated the need to focus on it as, according to him, it transcends all aspects of life.
Professor Koranteng said Ghana’s destiny as a country depended on how the people treated the environment, adding that food, clothing, shelter, and others came from the environment.
He encouraged journalists to focus on the various aspects of the environment to become authorities on them while impacting the country positively.
