A three-day sub-regional training on Green House Inventory Methodologies using the Agriculture and Land Use Tools (CAALU) Software opened, on Tuesday, at the Corenthia Atlantic Hotel, in Banjul.

The workshop organised by the Department of Water Resources, in collaboration with UNDP, aims to train participants on improved inventory management with special emphasis on data control and analysis in the national inventory system, key source analysis, quality assurance and control in GHE inventory, hand-on-training on LULUC, and agriculture.

Declaring the workshop open, the Secretary of State for Forestry and the Environment Momodou A Cham said The Gambia was the first African country in 1991 to develop a case study using the new guidelines which was presented at the IPCC session in Geneva, together with a case study from Canada, when the first set of guidelines were developed by the OECD and IPCC. 

The efforts by Canada and The Gambia, he went on, led to the development and implementation of the US$4 million UNEP Greenhouse Gas Inventories Project for a few countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia in 1993.

SoS Cham said that the case study served as a good entry point.

Almameh Sonko, who deputised for the UNDP resident representative to The Gambia, disclosed that climate change in Africa is having a profound and irreversible impact on the continent’s economic, social and environmental system.

This, he said, is increasingly apparent from the frequency and intensity in the occurrence of national imbalance and climate related disasters on the continent such as drought, floods, erratic rainfall and ecosystem services, which are key to human survival and economic development.