In northern Ghana, communities are facing food insecurity and declining livelihoods due to erratic weather, degraded soils and loss of forests. Among those working on ways to unpick this complicated knot of challenges in the Northern Savannah Zone is an NGO called the Regional Advisory Information and Network Systems, or RAINS. The NSZ stretches 97,000 square kilometers (37,500 square miles) across northern Ghana, where people have long grown maize, millet, yam, groundnuts and soybeans in a landscape dominated by shea nut, baobab and acacia trees. Home to more than 5 million people today, the ecological balance of this semiarid ecosystem is in danger: forest cover here declined by 77% between 2001 and 2015, according to the United Nations Development Programme. “Evidence abounds in Ghana that temperatures in all the ecological zones including the Northern Region are rising, whereas rainfall levels and patterns have been generally reducing and increasingly becoming erratic,” Hardi Tijani, executive director of RAINS, told Mongabay via email. “Soil degradation and erosion caused by alternating floods and droughts are leading to creeping desertification.” He said these changes have affected residents’ harvests, prompting many to turn to felling trees for timber and charcoal to earn additional income, further aggravating damage to the landscape. Charcoal production near Chiana, Kassena Nankana District – Ghana. Image by Axel Fassio/CIFOR via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0). To counter the threats and break this cycle, RAINS is explaining and supporting regenerative agricultural practices to farmers across the region, including intercropping, the planting of cover crops,…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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