A photo taken prior to the tree planting exercise at the Tema West Municipal Assembly
The Tema West Municipal Assembly has outdoor mobile technology to monitor and adequately take stock of the planting of over 10,000 trees across the 11 electoral areas in the municipality.
The tree tracking app, "Tree Tracker, “has been developed to track planted trees while supporting people and the assembly to monitor and protect those particular trees.”
Using the mobile Treetracker app, growers are able to care for trees and take periodic geotagged photos of them as they grow and are readily captured and uploaded to a verification platform.
Also, after new tree photos are screened, it is verified that it represents a living tree as it is tagged with additional attributes such as species; and tree growers anywhere in the world can take photos of trees they care for and upload them to the app to be verified.
Mrs Adwoa Amoako, Municipal Chief Executive, Tema West Municipal Assembly, joined scores of people in the Municipality including; officials of the Assembly and school children to plant trees at selected locations in the Municipality.
She said improving the environment and addressing climate change was key and even phenomenal doing it through technology and the tree-planting exercise was timely as it related to the core mandate of the assembly in the management of human settlements and improvement of the environment.
Mrs Amoako explained that the assembly existed to ensure that the lives of the local people were improved by offering them the basic amenities in the deepening of the decentralization process while protecting the natural habitat they lived in.
The MCE, who tracked some seedlings she planted using the mobile app, said in achieving the preservation of the environment, education and empowerment of the community on sustainable forestry on the long-term health of the economy and its natural resources, was pertinent.
She said as part of measures to take care of the trees, the Assembly had resolved to engage some persons, particularly around the Sakumo Ramsar Site area, and give some allowances to care for the trees.
She described the President’s Green Ghana initiative as a laudable project that would restore soil health across the country by protecting it from rain and wind with an even stabilized climate, and said “it is a good step to restore our ecosystem, and this exercise should continue.”
Mrs Amoako was unhappy at the rate of encroachment by private developers on portions of the Sakumo Ramsar Site-a a conserved 1,400 hectares wetland site, and said, the assembly in collaboration with the Forestry Commission was taking a strategic roadmap on the non-accessibility or development within the buffer zone of the Ramsar Site.
Mr Malik Mino Ereira, an Environmentalist, said so far over 8,500 seedlings out of the 10,000 were planted, and adequate measures were put to ensure their sustainability using the mobile technology and called on the public to download the app, compatible with android phones, to monitor and track the growth of their trees.