Facing Increased Extreme Weather Events, How Can Ghana Strengthen Its Resilience to Climate Change?
The increasing prevalence of weather-related natural disasters such as droughts and floods demands that local governments, already on the frontline of climate change, become better equipped and financed to respond.
In October and November 2023, devastating floods displaced just under 40,000 people in the south-eastern Volta region and the northern Savannah region. Torrential rains from September onwards triggered these floods which strongly affected the whole Volta River basin, forcing Ghanaian authorities to open the flood gates at large hydroelectric dams on the Volta River, triggering this catastrophe. The ensuing flood resulted in thousands of families losing their properties, crops, and livelihoods, besides damaging public infrastructure such as schools, clinics, and roads.
This illustrates some of the impacts of climate change in Ghana, which also experienced decreasing rainfall and an average annual temperature increase of 1.3 °C since the 1960s. This notably translates into a 13% increase in the number of days with temperatures above 35 °C. The increased climate variability resulted in more frequent instances of extreme weather events, including storms, floods, and droughts. Other impacts include coastal erosion, wildfires, and even desertification. Climate change strongly affects communities dependent on agriculture, forestry, and fishing sector, which employed 40% of the labour force in 2023. In addition, these trends disproportionally affect women due to traditional gender norms, lack of access to resources, and limited influence in decision-making, thereby limiting their resilience and adaptation capacities. With temperature projected to increase by another two degrees Celsius by the 2080s, climate change impacts will keep increasing in Ghana. This growing threat highlights the importance of strengthening community resilience in an inclusive and gender-sensitive way through local climate adaptation initiatives.
Local Governments as the First Responders to Climate Change
Climate change affects the whole world, but its impacts vary widely from one location to the next, even within a single country. For example, densely built and populated urban areas in coastal zones versus remote and sparsely populated village settlements in the savannah will be affected very differently by storms or droughts. The impact of those climatic events will also affect women and men differently given their unequal coping capacities, not to mention the elderly or people living with disabilities. Therefore, grand climate adaptation schemes planned in capital cities will often fail to respond adequately to community needs. Making local governments the first climate adaptation responders by providing them with both the technical and financial capacities to perform this role thus becomes crucial. Indeed, community members primarily engage with local governments given their proximity. This means local governments have a more in-depth understanding of community needs, especially in a context where they engage with civil society and regular elections ensure a degree of accountability. However, to situate local governments as first responders requires strong national policies and support from the central level toward subnational levels.
In much of the developing world, a combination of weak government management systems, poorly implemented decentralization, and insufficient financial resources constrain the ability of both national and local governments to respond effectively to climate change. This can be combined with a lack of accountability and responsiveness to community needs. Therefore, in vulnerable contexts such as West Africa and countries like Ghana, a large share of climate finance flows outside government systems. This includes international organizations such as the World Bank, the United Nations, the European Union, bilateral donors such as Canada, Germany, Japan, or the United States, and numerous global and local non-government organizations.
Two major challenges arise in this context:
- The level of climate funding allocated through these channels remains much below the requirements to respond to country needs, and local governments only receive a small fraction of these insufficient climate resources. For example, in the case of Ghana, financing remained below 50% of the required annual climate change needs of USD 1.5 billion for 2019–20. More strikingly, a study by Oxfam highlighted West African countries received on average only 7.1% of the financing needed to respond to climate change between 2013 and 2019. The lack of national and local financial resources in low and middle-income countries combined with multiple and complex donor requirements for accessing global climate finance explain this situation from a country-level perspective.
- With climate finance flowing outside national systems, through independent and often poorly coordinated channels, governments are restricted from supporting effective climate actions at both the national and local levels. Indeed, this multi-channel approach undermines the development of national systems at the capacity and scale required to respond to local climate needs. For example, both national and local governments in Ghana have only a partial view of the nature and the amount of climate funding flowing within their jurisdictions. This results from the numerous channels and organizations through which climate finance currently flows and the related reporting challenges. Ultimately, if many well-intended climate projects are implemented through these channels in Ghana and other countries, without more efforts to develop fit-for-purpose national systems, rapidly growing climate change needs will continue to remain unanswered in the coming decades.
As explained earlier, weak governance and public management systems explain in part the proliferation of climate actions outside national systems. Undeniably, properly managing climate finance requires strong and transparent systems for transferring funding, effectively planning and managing gender-sensitive local climate projects with community participation, and transparently reporting on expenditures and results. Without these prerequisites, climate finance funding will continue to flow through parallel channels and at an insufficient scale. This is where a 5-year project implemented in Ghana by Cowater International with CAD 10 million in funding from the Government of Canada enters the picture.
Strengthening Investments in Gender Responsive Climate Adaptation in Ghana (SIGRA)
The SIGRA project seeks to improve the resilience of Ghanaian citizens to climate change with a focus on women and vulnerable groups. The project advances climate action and inclusive governance by working with key national and local stakeholders, including government, civil society, and communities. SIGRA first works with the Ministry of Finance, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Ministry of Local Government, Decentralization and Regional Development, and other key Ministries, Departments, and Agencies at national and regional levels. It focuses on strengthening their abilities to implement gender-responsive climate adaptation policies and support local governments. Second, the project provides grant funding through national systems and works with three local governments in the Northern region and two more in the Volta region on the planning, implementation, and reporting of local adaptation projects. Third, we work with key women-led civil society organizations (CSOs). This aims to strengthen accountability along with the participation, voice, and influence of women-led CSOs and vulnerable groups in government decision-making.
As part of SIGRA’s start-up phase, we conducted a political economy analysis focused on public financial management and climate adaptation. The goal was to identify the main factors explaining the low levels of locally available climate funding in Ghana. Key findings from this research have been summarized in SIGRA’s Learning Brief #1: The State of Climate Finance in Ghana. It notably highlights that with a high public debt constraining the country’s investment capacities, it becomes essential to strengthen public management systems and accountability while enabling increased access to global climate finance at the local level.
We found that the government of Ghana has put in place solid climate change policies, a strong decentralization framework, and developed well-established public financial management systems from central to local levels. However, a lack of technical capacity, some financial management weaknesses, and insufficient climate finance (as highlighted above) seriously constrain the country’s ability to implement key policies. This also prevents an effective response to the climate needs of communities, women, and vulnerable groups. The low level of climate expenditure between central and local governments illustrates this strongly. From 2015 to 2020, climate-related spending for all central-level government departments stood on average at USD 94.4 M per year, compared to USD 32.9 M for all 261 local governments in Ghana. Those figures do exclude the expenditures of international organizations and donors channeled outside government systems. Nonetheless, if we compare this to Ghana’s estimated annual climate finance needs of USD 1.5 billion for 2020, this reveals a huge financing gap for climate change needs.
In terms of capacity gaps, we found that budget preparation guidelines for central-level ministries and local governments do include the integration of climate change activities and gender responsiveness into program planning. However, central and local governments do not always carry this out in practice. In another case, central-level departments all manage their budgets and expenses within the Government Integrated Financial Management System (GIFMIS), but some local governments at times operate outside the system. Also, despite the development of a climate finance tracking system by the Ministry of Finance, its coverage remains incomplete at the central level, and very limited at the local level. Finally, the National Development Planning Commission’s annual performance reports contain limited information on results from the government’s gender or climate change-related activities at both central and local levels. These factors all constrain the Government’s ability to implement policy, mobilize more climate finance, and support effective climate change adaptation response.
A Proof of Concept for Scaling Climate Finance and Responding to Climate Needs in Ghana?
The SIGRA project will work with government stakeholders on all the gaps identified to strengthen their ability to access and manage climate finance. This will critically include providing direct grants to the five target local governments through national PFM systems to fund gender-responsive local climate adaptation projects. The grants build on an approach piloted and implemented by UNDCF’s LOCAL project. Identifying needs, designing projects, and reporting on results with local women-led CSOs will also increase transparency and accountability. The SIGRA project aims to demonstrate with this approach that Ghana can strengthen and leverage its systems to gain broader access to climate finance.
Critically, the resilience of women and communities confronted with increasingly variable and disruptive weather patterns needs to be strengthened. This requires increasing the support and resource flow to local governments so that they can respond to their climate adaptation needs. Beyond the grants provided by SIGRA, and combined with system strengthening for tracking, managing, and reporting on climate finance, we will also support the ability of both national and local governments to prepare proposals for accessing international climate funds. Additional locally managed climate resources would then foster community preparedness and lessen the impacts of extreme weather events in targeted areas. Through the related learning, this can then help pave the way toward better access to climate finance for all 261 local governments across Ghana. In practice, this would increase the resilience of communities, women, and vulnerable groups to the impacts of climate change, including better preparedness for catastrophic events such as the floods that affected the Volta River Basin in 2023. Making this vision a reality requires central and local governments, civil society, women, and communities across Ghana to take climate action now, with the catalyzing support of SIGRA.
