{"id":61137,"date":"2026-07-03T20:55:28","date_gmt":"2026-07-03T20:55:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/africa\/?p=61137"},"modified":"2026-07-03T20:55:32","modified_gmt":"2026-07-03T20:55:32","slug":"ghanas-deadly-floods-are-not-a-natural-disaster-theyre-a-wake-up-call","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/africa\/en\/blog\/61137\/ghanas-deadly-floods-are-not-a-natural-disaster-theyre-a-wake-up-call\/","title":{"rendered":"Ghana\u2019s deadly floods are not a natural disaster. They\u2019re a wake up call"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n

Picture this. Monday night, close to 1am and my mother sends me a string of videos. I was fast asleep at that time, so they were the first thing I woke up to. It hit me like an alarm\u2026a bad dream. My dear grandmother’s home was flooded. Inundated. Unrecognizable. <\/p>\n\n

The home that raised me. The one holding every memory of childhood visits to my homeland Ghana. The water was up so high it almost reached the branches of the palm trees in her garden. I watched those nine videos over and over again, before I could process what I was looking at. Memories rushing back: her favourite spot on the couch where she would sit and giggle, the kitchen I ran to when I was hungry and the corner where I hugged my grandma for the last time before she left us in 2012. What would she have done if she lived there now? I couldn\u2019t give that thought half a second.  <\/p>\n\n

I checked our local news and read the headline \u201c12 Dead, 150 Rescued: GNFS gives breakdown of June 29 flood tragedy<\/a>\u201d. I went back to the videos on my phone, pinged by more messages from family and friends checking if my family was okay. These floods did not discriminate. They reached rich and poor alike. They didn’t check bank balances before their waters rose. Somebody’s grandmother, somebody’s shop, somebody’s savings, somebody\u2019s memories, sitting under the same brown water as everyone else’s.<\/p>\n\n

That is what it feels like when a headline stops being a headline.<\/p>\n\n

Accra sits between the Akuapem mountain range and the Atlantic Ocean. For centuries, the rain that fell found its way to sea through streams and channels like the Odaw river, the Densu delta, the Korle lagoon, the Onyasa river and the Kpeshie Creek which carried these rains. The natural system, as nature intended it – and it worked. <\/p>\n\n

The severe weather on Monday, June 29, wasn’t just a heavy storm. According to President Mahama, the area was hit with roughly 140mm of rain in one day. That total didn’t just break the previous year’s single-day record; it more than doubled it, signaling a dramatic shift in local weather patterns.<\/p>\n\n

The numbers behind the heartbreak<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

As of this week, Ghana’s Interior Ministry has confirmed 12 people dead and 7 still missing. Over 38,800 people have been affected, and more than 7,760 households displaced, across 25 communities and 18 districts of Greater Accra. Read those numbers again. Ghana Grid Company Limited (GRIDCo) and Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) also had to cut power to parts of the capital because floodwater had compromised electrical substations, calling it a necessary precaution against risk to both equipment and people. Will this become our new normal?<\/p>\n\n

One story from the coverage has stayed with me all week: a man who got his family to safety, then went back into his flooded home for their belongings, and did not come out<\/a>. I keep thinking about what could have been in that house that felt worth the risk. I think about how many of us would have done the exact same.<\/p>\n\n

This is not the first time that Accra has flooded seriously. Eleven years ago, on June 3, 2015, floodwater mixed with leaking fuel and ignited at a filling station killing more than 150 people in one night. That disaster was supposed to be the lesson that changed everything. It wasn’t. And unless something shifts now, this one won’t be either. <\/p>\n\n

Three doors, one flood: government, citizens, and the West’s waste<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

President Mahama, after an aerial inspection of the flood-hit areas, pointed to two things: an engineering problem and a behavioural one. Rapid urbanisation has pushed buildings directly into the path of the natural waterways, so the water simply has nowhere to go. And separately the habit of dumping waste into drains has choked what capacity those channels still have. Both are true. Neither excuses the other.<\/p>\n\n

I want to add a third piece, because it’s the one we’ve spent years documenting at Greenpeace Africa and it’s only now reaching the headlines: because people are finally making that connection: waste. Not just any waste – imported waste. Ghana has become one of the world’s largest dumping grounds for the West’s discarded fast fashion, and the country\u2019s existing landfill sites have been overspilling for years, pushing new informal dumpsites to spread across communities that never asked for them. Last year, alongside Greenpeace UK’s Unearthed team, we uncovered what we called “fast fashion graveyards<\/a>“, identifying new fast fashion dumps sprouting across Ghana\u2019s protected wetlands. Yes, protected wetlands. <\/p>\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n

Wastepickers are seen at a roughly four-year-old textile dump site in Glefe, inside the Densu Delta protected wetlands, outside Accra, Ghana. \u00a9 Michael Takyi Lartey \/ Unearthed \/Greenpeace <\/p>\n\n

You know the situation is bad when protected wetlands become designated dumping grounds.<\/p>\n\n

This is not one failure. It’s several, arriving together: poor drainage, blocked waterways, building on floodplains, weak enforcement, a lack of public education and a government posture that reacts once the water is already inside people’s living rooms rather than before.<\/p>\n\n

No one gets to sit this out<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

This cannot be another cycle of sympathy statements followed by silence until the next rainy season. I am calling on the government to treat environmental and infrastructural investment as the emergency it is – not a line item to revisit next budget cycle. That means real investment in drainage systems built for the rainfall Accra now receives, not the rainfall it received twenty years ago. It means enforcing the removal of structures blocking waterways, however politically uncomfortable that is. And it means working with the local experts, environmental scientists, journalists and community organisers who have been sounding this alarm for years, instead of rediscovering the problem after every flood.<\/p>\n\n

But as Ghanaians, we also have to look critically at ourselves, because this is also about us. Every piece of plastic or fabric that ends up in a drain instead of a bin is a small decision that adds up to exactly what we watched happen this week. <\/p>\n\n

Ghana’s government must also embrace sustainable solutions to cut landfill waste. Supporting refill and reuse systems and promoting slow fashion are key in ensuring clean local environments and reducing the waste burden on major hubs like Accra’s Kpone landfill. We have to change how we see and treat our environment, because nature screams when we don\u2019t listen. <\/p>\n\n

The future is watching us decide<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

Here is the part that should frighten us more than the water did: this was not a freak event. It is the shape of things to come. Climate scientists have told us, plainly, that rainfall like this will come again – heavier, faster, more often – and each time it does, it will find the same blocked drains, the same wetlands turned into waste sites, the same buildings sitting in the path of streams that were flowing to the sea long before any of us were born.<\/p>\n\n

So ask yourself honestly: is Ghana ready for that to be the new normal? Is the continent? Because right now, the answer is written in every flooded street, every displaced family, every name added to a death toll that keeps repeating itself every few years. We are not looking at a single bad storm. We are looking at a preview, playing on a loop, of a future we are currently choosing not to prevent.<\/p>\n\n

That future is not fixed yet. It is being built right now: in every drain we clear or leave choked, in every illegal structure we stop, tear down or quietly allow, in every dumpsite we shut or let grow, in every budget that either funds real infrastructure or funds another press conference after the next disaster.  <\/p>\n\n

To the Government of Ghana, this is your test as much as it is ours. The difference between a country that plans and a country that mourns is what you do in the dry months, not what you say in the wet ones.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

I don’t want to write this piece again next year. I don’t want another flood video from my mother. I don’t want another family standing where mine stood this week, wondering if this time will finally be the one that changes something.<\/p>\n\n

So I’ll leave you with the only question that actually matters now: if we already know this is coming again, what exactly are we waiting for? The time to act is now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Picture this. Monday night, close to 1am and my mother sends me a string of videos. I was fast asleep at that time, so they were the first thing I woke up to. It hit me like an alarm\u2026a bad dream. My dear grandmother’s home was flooded. Inundated. Unrecognizable.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":61142,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"p4_og_title":"","p4_og_description":"","p4_og_image":"","p4_og_image_id":"","p4_seo_canonical_url":"","p4_campaign_name":"not set","p4_local_project":"","p4_basket_name":"not set","p4_department":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[46],"p4-page-type":[126],"class_list":["post-61137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-protecttheenvironment","tag-greenpeaceafrica","p4-page-type-blog"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/africa\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/africa\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/africa\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/africa\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/africa\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61137"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/africa\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61137\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61144,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/africa\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61137\/revisions\/61144"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/africa\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/61142"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/africa\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/africa\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/africa\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61137"},{"taxonomy":"p4-page-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/africa\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/p4-page-type?post=61137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}