Isaac Boateng | Akateeminen Kirjakauppa

This handbook provides background information of Ghana's coast and develops a practical guide for a holistic and integrated process-based coastal management for Ghana. This handbook presents key concepts and methods for the following: coastal risk and vulnerability assessment, erosion monitoring, shoreline change analysis, capacity building and institutional framework for sustainable coastal area management. These strategies are shared as best practice for West Africa and to the rest of the world. This is because the challenges of the coastal and marine environment are not peculiar to Ghana alone; they are transboundary in nature. For instance all the countries from Guinea Bissau to Angola, bordering the natural limits of the Guinea Current Large Marine Ecosystem (GCLME) have identifiable common problems from a coastal and marine processes perspective. The coastal and marine environment of Ghana contributes significantly to the economic development of the country. The coastal zone alone is host to about 27% of the Ghanaian population. However, coastal erosion and floods threaten life, properties and economic development of the entire nation.
The impact of climate change and associated sea level rise is expected to intensify the risk of flooding and coastal erosion. There is the need to develop and implement an integrated plan to manage the coastal area sustainably. Past and existing coastal management strategies have largely focussed on provision of hard protection at specific locations where risk levels to life and economic assets are high. There has been little commitment to the concepts of integration of management interventions with wider natural processes and longer-term sustainability. In most cases, such ad hoc management interventions classically tend to stabilise the shoreline at the protected section and aggravate the situation elsewhere along the shoreline ("knock-on effects"). Holistic understanding of the interrelationship between coastal processes and coastal defence offered in this handbook is therefore fundamental for the successful integrated management of a shoreline.