Pathways for future climate action planning in urban Ghana

Abstract

In the face of rapid urbanization and urban climate vulnerabilities in the Global South, developing effective and suitable climate action plans have become imperative. Recent literature has critically examined climate action planning approaches in the Global South. In Ghana, the existing top-down approach to urban climate action planning is criticized as ineffective, unsustainable, and reactionary, emphasizing the need to continuously explore alternative effective context-based approaches. This study adopts a backcasting and participatory approach to explore prospective pathways for Ghana's urban climate action planning. We contextualize the pathways in two-fold; climate action pathways and social network pathways. The approach identified seven climate actions and distinct networks for collaboration, resource sharing, and knowledge/information flow relevant to Ghana's future urban climate action planning. The actions include three pro-adaptation actions, one pro-mitigation action, and three actions to achieve synergies from simultaneously implementing both adaptation and mitigation. It further reveals that aligning to a particular climate action can be influenced by an individual's age group (or generational cohort) or level of experience in climate planning. Lessons are drawn from the pathways to propose a conceptual framework to guide Ghana's future urban climate action planning. To achieve climate resilience in the cities of Africa and other Global South countries, our study provides evidence of a multi-stakeholder approach in prioritizing actions and enhancing social networks and interrelationships for climate action planning.