In September 2024, CASCADE held its first City Learning Lab in Accra, a day of mapping, role-play, and shared reflection on the climate-health challenges shaping life in Ghana’s capital.

The CASCADE project, Cascading Climate and Health Risks in African Cities, works across five cities (Accra, Harare, Kampala, Johannesburg, and Cape Town). Launched in 2023, it brings together researchers, policymakers, and communities to better understand climate-health risks in African cities and co-produce locally grounded, practical responses.

Hosted by the University of Ghana at the Mensvic Hotel, the Lab brought together a diverse mix of participants from across Accra, including local government officials, disaster and agriculture agencies, academic researchers, NGOs, and CASCADE Fellows and researchers.

Setting the Scene

Professor Chris Gordon, CASCADE Co-Principal Investigator and lead partner in Accra, based at the University of Ghana, opened the Lab with a reminder that climate change in Accra is a present reality. It is visible in flood-prone neighbourhoods, in rising food prices, and in the heat that shapes daily life for residents working outdoors or living in concrete homes without reliable cooling.

Officials from disaster management and agriculture traced how rising temperatures, sea-level rise, and intensifying rainfall are compounding flooding, coastal erosion, and disease, and how erratic rainfall, pests, and heat stress are reshaping food security and nutrition.

Stepping into the Story

A highlight of the day was a role-play simulation in which participants took on the roles of healthcare providers, government officials, community leaders, NGOs, and residents responding to a severe flood in the city. The exercise made the cascading nature of climate risk tangible, one event triggering surges in waterborne disease, infrastructure failure, supply-chain disruption, and breakdowns in coordination between the very institutions meant to respond.

The group then moved into a vulnerability mapping exercise, marking flood-prone neighbourhoods, water-insecure areas, and informal settlements on large maps of the city. Each group built a case study around a single person or family. A young mother in Ablekuma West is facing flooding, poor waste management, and coastal erosion all at once. A fisherman in Korle-Klottey supports a large household amid rising sea levels and storm damage. A street hawker selling sachet water in midday traffic. A head porter raising four children in Nima Market. A visually impaired teenager in a flood-prone informal settlement. A farmer in Ashaiman is watching erratic rainfall reduce his yields.

Across these stories, a pattern emerged. Climate risks rarely arrive alone. They compound existing vulnerabilities and fall hardest on women and children in informal settlements, informal workers without shelter or healthcare, persons with disabilities navigating flooded streets, and farmers without access to climate information. The exercise also surfaced gaps in how Accra’s systems respond, from inadequate drainage and early warning to limited health coverage for those most exposed.

A Call for Collaboration

Officials from the Ashaiman Municipal Assembly shared a candid frustration. They had tried public education, enforcement, and infrastructure improvements to address waste management, and yet the problem kept returning. Why does this problem keep happening? They invited researchers in the room to work alongside municipalities on the problems they were already facing, noting that CASCADE’s strongest contribution will come from sustained, two-way relationships with the cities it works in.

Priorities Going Forward

By the end of the day, participants had named a set of priority areas, including water scarcity and pollution, urban flooding, food security, climate-resilient infrastructure for informal settlements, stronger early warning systems, and community-led solutions.

These priorities now help guide CASCADE’s research in Accra and shape the focus of future engagements.

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CASCADE is one of 14 consortia under the DELTAS Africa II initiative (2023–2026), implemented by the Science for Africa Foundation with support from Wellcome and the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office.

Author: Alacia Armstrong, Communications Lead, CASCADE.