Barely a month ago, some parts of Accra and its surroundings were submerged by floods for almost two days.
Torrential rainfalls came at a time when Ghanaians were not expecting rains of that magnitude.
People living in flood prone areas are used to the perennial flooding, which occurs during the raining season that starts in April and reaches its peak in June-July every year.
Yet, this year, after the usual floods at the expected period, which resulted in the lost of property and goods worth millions of cedis, the rains hit again suddenly in October.
Official figures indicate that the rainfall that flooded parts of Accra and Tema lasted seven hours as it began on Tuesday night October 25, 2011 at about 20:00 hours and ended at 2:100 hours, and resumed at midnight until 06:00 on Wednesday.
Media reports indicated that 14 deaths were recorded, while, apart from the property lost, thousands of people were displaced and had to take refuge with friends in school blocks and places of worship.
“This is the worst floods we have seen,” said Mary Ago, a cloth seller who lost her shop and all its contents.
With tears in her eyes, Madam Ago narrated how her business capital, which included a loan from a bank, was washed away by the floods.
“Because of the coming Christmas, I ordered for extra goods worth GH¢8,000 and I took delivery of it on Monday, the day before the rains,” she relates. “I packed them in my shop and even made some sales on Tuesday, after which I left in the evening for home as usual.”
Though it rained heavily in the night, little did the single mother of two know that her business would be affected, even though she heard on the radio that some places in Accra had been flooded.
The road from her house in Ablekuma to her shop had been rendered impassible as a result of the heavy rains; the residents in that area had virtually been cut off from the city so she had no option than to stay at home.
However, in the early hours of the next day, as she prepared to use an alternative route, which she had been told was a bit better but longer, she was called by some friends and told her shop, a wooden structure at Awoshie, a suburb of Accra, has been washed away by the floods.
“I cried and rushed to the place a quick as I could,” said Madam Ago, adding that her shop was in the vicinity for the past seven years. “I have never seen anything like this before. The rainfall on Tuesday was too much. I have never seen anything like that before.”
The world is experiencing extreme weather conditions and many natural disasters ranging from floods, storms, tsunamis. Meanwhile, there is a scarcity of water as rivers dry up, rainfall patterns change, and deserts spread.
In Ghana most communities near the coast are experiencing rising sea levels and this is resulting in the loss of land.
People in the forest and savannah zone of the country have not been spared. They have been hit by desertification, draughts, influx of pests and disease among others as a result of rising temperature.
Experts have attributed the trend to climate change, which is caused by human activity that directly or indirectly alters the composition of the global atmosphere.
Activities such as bad farming practices, industrialization, land, air and water pollution, burning of fossil fuel, indiscriminate falling of trees in the forest which serve as a carbon sink as well as other practices have the tendency to gradually heat up the world.
Yaw Oppong-Baodi, chief programme officer of the Energy Resources and Climate Change Unit of the Environmental Protection Agency, stated that climate change issues are real and taking alarming tolls on both human beings and other forms of life.
Climate change, he said, has a great significance for the sustainable development plans of Ghana as it affects the livelihood of the people.
“It should be seen as a developmental issue for the country,” he said.
Since the trend is caused by the release of greenhouse emissions into the atmosphere the world’s leaders have agreed to reduce the emissions. The goal is to get the world keep the global temperature below a 2°C rise.
In line with this, global leaders came up with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change with the objective of stabilizing of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. Ghana signed the Convention in 1992 and ratified it in 1995.
“At least two degrees centigrade rise in global temperature would potentially decrease water availability, crop yield in Africa by 20-30 per cent and 5-10 per cent respectively and between 20 and 30 million people would be exposed to malaria,” said Joseph Essando Yedu, a scientist at the Energy Commission.
Though developed countries have been identified as the worst polluters, developing countries have been the hardest hit.
Developing countries are battling with too much or too little rains, which raise concern over food security, water shortage, rising temperatures, rising sea levels and land loss, desertification, and diseases, just to mention a few.
“This is putting the survival of the poor at risk, each passing day,” said Sherry Ayitey, Minister of Environment, Science and Technology.
She believes there is the need for the developed countries who have admitted that they should be blamed for climate change to support the vulnerable in developing countries who are suffering as a result of their actions to help minimize the effects.
To reduce vulnerability and impact of climate change people in the developing world have to adapt to new developments and consider alternative livelihoods while they protect the environment. But because they do not have the technology and the financial strength they have to depend on developed countries, which have pledged financial commitments but have not made good their words.
Every year, there is a conference on climate change attended by world leaders, activists; academia and ministers of Environment and the seventeenth session, this year’s would be in Durban, South Africa from November 27 to December 9.
It is expected that this year’s Conference of Parties (COP 17) would come out with concrete commitments and actions to mitigate the effect of climate change.
Ghana would join other African countries to go to the conference with one voice.
Professor Chris Gordon, Director of the Institute of Environment of the University of Ghana, said: “Ghana is good at signing protocols, conventions and rectifying models and so on, but that is not enough.”
He called for concerted action by all the various agencies and government institutions, as well as civil society groups to coordinate programmes and projects relating to climate change mitigation.
“Government needs to be serious about capacity building for climate change. Access to finance go hand-in-hand with capacity building. We can not access the various financing opportunities available for vulnerable countries if we do not have the capacity.”
Yet Daniel Tutu Benefo, senior program officer at the Environmental Protection Agency, thinks: “We must think of homegrown solutions.”
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