The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is confident Ghana is prepared to tackle any oil spill along its coast.
According to the head of Petroleum at the EPA, Kojo Agbenor-Efunam, Ghana has an updated sensitivity mapping that aids to identify and monitor areas along the coast and it will be heavily affected if there is a spill.
“There is no single country in this world that can protect its entire coastline so you prioritize and know the areas that you can protect,” Agbenor-Efunam told Starr Business at the Global Initiative for Western and Central African regional conference in Accra.
He added: “In some areas if the oil spill comes it might not cause any harm to the environment and economic activities because you do not have recreational centres there, but in some areas for example like where you have a lot of hotels in ecological sensitive areas like lagoons, those areas are very critical and you have to protect them and you can only do that planning very well with a sensitivity map.”
He said the EPA last year toured the nation’s coastal line of 550 kilometers to identify changes that have occurred since the last operation in 2004. The new information gathered will be used to update the country’s sensitivity mapping data.
