Kofi Adu Domfeh: Radio’s commanding power in climate change mitigation and adaptation

A severe storm strikes, bringing with it torrential rains, deafening thunder, and blinding lightning. The downpour is wreaking havoc on the community, with roofs being ripped off houses, streets transforming into rivers, and worst of all, people losing their lives in the raging floodwaters.

 

Yet another day, the sunrise brings a fleeting sense of serenity, offering a brief respite from the sweltering heat. However, this tranquility is short-lived, as the sun's intense rays soon begin to scorch the skin, penetrating deep beneath the surface.

 

This is the climate reality.

 

In Ghana today, the rains are coming at unexpected periods, the sun hits harder than it should have; the least of the rains causes flooding and livelihoods are impacted in diverse ways.

 

This situation cannot be different from other parts of the world.

 

People are experiencing changing times for real, and indeed everybody seems to be talking about the severity of the change in weather patterns.

 

Yet the climate change agenda is not a top priority in the media – reports are often limited to government policy papers and other scientific stuff.

 

But the media, especially radio, can play a central role in the global drive to mitigate climate change as well as support adaptation mechanisms.

 

Radio and Climate Change

 

Radio is a powerful broadcast medium in impacting farming practices of the local people, through the production of climate-related programs.

 

By broadcasting in the local language, for instance, a radio station is helping the communities to be weather-aware, while managing problems with sea erosion, soil management, crop diversification and best adaptation mechanisms.

 

Access to radio can reduce the farmer-extension service ratio and enhance agricultural practices.

 

It is therefore heartwarming that 2025 World Radio Day is dedicated to “Radio and Climate Change” to support radio stations in their journalistic coverage of this issue.

 

Proper communication of climate events is becoming increasingly important in the wake of the continuous increase of negative climatic effects that plague the planet, such as the confirmation that 2024 has been the warmest year on record.

 

Broadcasters are expected to prioritize the quality and diversity of information sources, as they play a critical role in addressing climate-related issues. “This includes dismantling climate skeptics' arguments, investigating greenwashing, understanding ecological economics, and reporting on climate activism and barriers to solutions”.

 

Radio aids in climate adaptation

 

Climate mitigation has taken centre stage at the national and global levels. According to the Paris Agreement, greenhouse gas emissions need to ease in order to limit global warming to 1.5°C.

 

But at the community level, what is required most is adaptation. The ordinary person on the street relies on radio to access public information on the changing seasons.

 

Increasing access to information and use of knowledge on climate change adaptation is important to improve the livelihoods of people in local communities. The rural farmer is hardest hit when information on the changing climate is not adequately disseminated.

 

A number of institutions are currently engaged in climate change-related activities across Africa. However, communicating issues on the unexpected changing weather to reach the mass of vulnerable communities remain challenging.

 

All over the world, in socio-political, economic and environmental circles, talk of climate change is top of agenda and there are several initiatives geared towards mitigating the impact of climate change.

 

But attitude towards the environment – forests, water bodies, waste management and land degradation through resource exploitation – remains largely pathetic.

 

The media is expected to lead the dissemination of information on what to do and what not to do in environmental protection.

 

Climate change and environment reporting can be made interesting to the audience if journalists and media houses can change their approach and explore diverse areas of coverage including land use and water management, forest conservation, sustainable development and wealth creation.

 

Radio, as a powerful tool, will continue to play a critical role in weather information mediation, climate change communication, and environmental protection and promotion.

 

Kofi Adu Domfeh is a journalist and Climate Reality Leader; adomfeh@gmail.com

 

Surviving climate change through media mediation

In Ghana today, the rains are coming at unexpected periods, the sun hits hard than it should not have; the least of rains cause flooding and livelihoods are impacted in diverse ways.

This situation cannot be different from other parts of the world.

People are experiencing changing climatic times for real and indeed everybody seems to be talking about the severity of the change in weather patterns.

Yet the climate change agenda is not a top priority in the media – reports are often limited to government policy papers and other scientific stuff.

Kofi Adu Domfeh looks at how the media can play a central role in the global drive to mitigate climate change as well as support adaptation mechanisms.

Listen to audio report…

https://soundcloud.com/kofi-adu-domfeh-1/surviving-climate-change-through-media-mediation

Forum engages media on biotechnology for food productivity

The Open Forum on Agricultural Biotechnology in Africa (OFAB) wants the Ghanaian media to frame the modern biotechnology debate in a manner that will improve public perception toward the technology.

Over 60 percent of people in Africa depend on agriculture for their livelihood, yet only four percent of cropped land has access to irrigation, whilst close to 33 percent of cropped land is subject to drought, making food production extremely difficult.

Other factors affecting agriculture in Africa include poor policies, low investments in agriculture, virulent attach on crops by pests, diseases and low application of fertilizers due to extreme poverty.

According to Daniel Otunge, Africa Coordinator of OFAB, a program of the African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF), the media has huge responsibility in setting the right development agenda for policy makers, especially in promotion of better agricultural policies and adoption of new technologies to help mitigate the challenges.

“For better or for worse, the world is mass media mediated,” he said, adding that the media is vital in the biotech debate to provide information for the public to make decisions regarding benefits and potential risks.

The enactment of the National Biosafety Act in 2011 gives full legal backing to the use of LMOs in Ghana but with biosafety approval.

The National Biosafety Committee last year approved three applications for confined field trials of Living Modified Organisms (LMOs) in the country, including cowpea, rice and cotton biotech crops.

Mr. Otunge has called on the media to provide the platform for credible biotech dialogue in Ghana to facilitate improved and timely decision making on the technology.

“To ensure that Africa is in a position to harness the benefits of biotech, the media ought to make the debate to be about which policies need to be formulated; which strategies need to be adopted; which capacities are lacking and needs to be built and what biotech investments should be made and where”, he stated.

By working closely with scientists and policy makers, the media should define an African agenda for biotechnology or else the continent will forever be dependent on food aid from countries that have adopted innovative agricultural technologies to improve food production, the OFAB coordinator noted.

OFAB Focal Person in Ghana, Dr. Margaret Otta Atikpo, believes the use modern biotechnology would help bring about agricultural productivity in Ghana.

“In biotechnology, we are removing the good traits in the genes of organisms and putting it into another [organism] to get a better product, so the farmer can produce a lot of crops in a short while you have the cattle breeder getting a lot of cattle produced from one source”, she explained.

AATF is a not-for-profit organization that facilitates public-private partnerships to access and deliver appropriate agricultural technologies for use by resource-poor farmers in sub-Saharan Africa.

The Foundation was set up specifically to deal with the intellectual property rights with regards to biotech crops and has successfully brokered several technologies including Striga control in maize; Insect-resistant cowpea; improvement of banana for resistance against banana bacterial wilt; Biological Control of Aflatoxin; Drought-tolerance in maize and Improved Rice.

 

OFAB has the mission to enhance knowledge-sharing and awareness on agricultural biotechnology to help create a better biotech regulatory frameworks to facilitate adoption of the technology.

The Forum currently has six chapters in Ghana, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania.

Story by Kofi Adu Domfeh

My coverage of Ghana’s Election 2012

As a journalist specializing in business and economic reporting, mainstream hardcore politicking has not been of much interest; mainly because the seemingly blind partisanship often derails the common national drive for socio-economic good.

Yet the son of man cannot divorce the politics of government policies from the quest for economic emancipation and advancement; and most importantly, business cannot thrive in an atmosphere devoid of peace, which as a quadrennial ritual, replaces the national anthem in the run-up to the polls.

So, it becomes a matter of compulsion for me to have interest in politics, especially in an election year.

I therefore had my heart and head set on the goal of playing my part to promote Ghana’s democratic credential in the heat up to the December 2012 Presidential and Parliamentary Elections. Above all, the agenda is to enjoy life with my family and friends!

A high sense of responsibility must be upheld in reporting Ghana’s elections, as the country today commands global respect as a beacon of hope in Africa politics. The obligation to instill free, fair and transparent polls rest squarely on the shoulders of all other interest groups – including the Electoral Commission, political parties and candidates, electorates, security agencies, civil society and others.

Luckily for me, I had the experience of the 2004 and 2008 elections as a guide as I lend a hand for the team in Ashanti region to deliver to patrons – discerning consumers of information from the stables of the Multimedia Group’s Election Headquarters.

Indeed uneasy it is to lead in the media business – the stakes are always high and surely there certainly cannot be any room for complacency.

 

The newsroom as usual is my playfield but during this period I’m mostly passive in the action – mainly engaged in editorials and information dissemination through the reports of my astute colleagues.

The activation of campaigning brought in its wake challenges in news gate-keeping as the various political parties and ambitious candidates jostled for airspace and headlines.

The unpleasant thing about this my journalism job is to play neutral – what we call objectivity – even when deep within, your conscience and common sense communicate to you that a politician is toying with the heart or vote of an electorate.

But surely, a reporter can only report what is seen or heard and strive to protect the public good.

For me, the public good in electioneering is to put the electorate first! They’ll queue in person, with stones, in sickness, in disability and in old age, just to cast their vote; either to make a change or maintain a good.

In my humble opinion, these democratic people seeking to exhibit their power through the ballot should never be counted as numbers but as human beings exercising their franchise.

Hence, no politician should be given room to take the electorate for granted. And this was my orientation as part of a team deployed to cover the elections in all constituencies.

Covering the polls

On Election Day December 7, I was positioned in the Offinso South Constituency to monitor the electoral proceedings, whilst liaising with other first-time election monitors to get the best out of their reports.

In my familiar terrain, I did not experience much of a challenge in combing the territory to have a feel of the exercise – I recorded relatively high voter turn-out, enthusiasm to participate in the process and tolerable comportment.

Going by the heightened tension in Kumasi few days to the polls, I was excited at the maturity in engagements at the polling stations and I was confident of a peaceful exercise.

I recorded few glitches in the application of biometric verification system in the voting process; obviously experimenting with such a technology would not have been without hiccups.

My observation generally gave an assurance of a smooth process, but least did I expect that I’ll be spending my night at the collation centre – an experience that prompted me to pray against a run-off in the race to the presidency.

I had not factored in the fact that polling stations in the hinterlands may be handicapped in transporting the ballot boxes to the collation centre on time… and so the vigil ensued till the battle ended midday following day.

My profession delights in new, unusual and exciting things and on this basis, I can confidently say there was no news in Offinso South Constituency – the final results was the obvious expected; cannot be counted among the shocking incidents that had been recorded elsewhere. Simple a boring exercise!

The intrigues

My long night at the collation centre was not without its own intrigues.

People stayed glued to their radio sets to keep abreast with happenings across the country – and the political color of some so-called observers of the polls got betrayed through their unconscious emotional attachment to the radio broadcast.

The social media platforms were most interesting, especially as the uncertified figures were churned out by folks on facebook. At this moment I cherished the beauty of having friends from various political divides because it was the only means to strike the balance and understand the dynamics of the figures.

It was also interesting to see how technology aided the vote collation.

The Electoral Commission may have gone electronic in registering and verifying voters but not in vote count.

In a constituency of some 117 polling stations, the returning officer would have extended our day a little longer by computing results with a table calculator. But thanks to the intervention of a representative of one of the political parties who saved us the ordeal by putting his MS-Excel to good use and offering accurate statistics and computation of the constituency results.

I returned to Kumasi exhausted but there would be no rest for me, especially with the general keen interest in who wins the Presidential polls.

Matters got worse after my Election Headquarters, based on collated results, projected a likely win for one of the presidential candidates.

Some called me to verify the collated figures, others to raise doubts about mathematics and many others to rain insults on my profession and media organization – all taken in good stride, acknowledging very well the hazard of practicing journalism in a highly polarized environment!

I heaved a huge sigh of relief when the Electoral Commissioner finally declared the results; not because of who had won or lost, but for the vindication of the team at the Election Headquarters for projecting right.

The human and material resource invested in electioneering and the risk of professionalism would not go down the drain and that was the Joy of my Luv for the Multimedia Group.

I surely understand the pain of losing an election and the joy of emerging victorious but I can’t understand why anyone would think the hundreds of professionals working within a particular media organization would all be aligned to one particular political party.

Whatever the case maybe, I take pride in the team I work with and feel fulfilled that I played a part, no matter how negligible, in promoting Ghana’s democracy.

I just love my job and my country.

May Ghana continue to set the pace of political maturity in Africa!

Views of Kofi Adu Domfeh

adomfeh@yahoo.com