At Sakumono, between Accra and Tema, a protected wetland is still strewn with rubble. Structures built illegally inside the Ramsar site were demolished, but the debris was never cleared. When it rains, the rubble blocks the water the wetland is meant to soak up.

Wetlands like Sakumono are Accra’s natural sponges, and the city has lost almost 60% of them to development. Yet the core of this one can still be saved. Researchers want it protected, replanted and run by the surrounding communities as an eco-park, a model the rest of the city could follow.

Loss and possibility, side by side, ran through a virtual science–policy dialogue on flooding and nature-based solutions, held on 8 October 2026. Researchers, planners and climate governance practitioners asked whether working with nature offers a realistic answer for a dense, fast-growing city.

A sealed city

The question was urgent. On 29 June, heavy rain brought Accra to a standstill. Nearly 39,000 people across Greater Accra were affected, and the region’s death toll later rose to 17. For Dr Philip-Neri Jayson-Quashigah of the University of Ghana, who opened the dialogue, the rain was only part of the story. “Urban flooding is built and governed,” he said.

In 1991, about an eighth of Accra was built up. By 2025, that was projected to reach 70%. Paved ground sheds water instead of absorbing it, and even homes add to the problem. Planning standards allow about 40 to 50% of a plot to be built on, with the rest left for green landscaping. But in neighbourhoods such as East Legon, yards meant to stay open are paved wall to wall. Unpaved ground lets rain soak in instead of running into the street, and rainwater harvesting and rain gardens can catch more of it before it flows downhill. 

What open ground remains does more work than it seems. A wetland or empty lot is often treated as land waiting to be built on, when it is there to act as a sponge. “Nature is part of the city’s infrastructure,” said climate governance lawyer Juliet Osei-Wusu. 

Nobody argued for tearing out the drains, only for backing them with nature.  Dr Jayson-Quashigah’s modelling demonstrates how vegetation reduces the volume of water reaching the low-lying, built-up areas downstream. Upstream, trees and permeable surfaces slow runoff and let water seep into the ground, midstream, retention ponds hold water back (which could support fish farming as a livelihood), and downstream, wetlands and lagoons hold what is left before it drains gradually to the sea.

The plan was already written

None of this is new to Accra. The city’s 1991 Strategic Plan protected a green belt from Weija to Aburi to slow runoff. “All those areas are now filled up with development,” said Dr Benedict Arkhurst, a senior planner at Ghana’s Land Use and Spatial Planning Authority. A national green infrastructure network, proposed in 2015, has stalled too.

The answers are in the plans, he said. What is missing is enforcement, and city officials say political pressure makes sanctions hard to apply. Even Sakumono, protected under international law, was built on. A year earlier, at CASCADE’s second City Learning Lab in Accra, participants had asked for the same thing: land-use rules that are enforced, and traditional authorities brought into land decisions.

Land is the other obstacle. When a major flood project identified sites for retention ponds, payments to landowners were delayed. By the time the money came, most of the land had been sold.

Room for water

Where landowners are brought in early, deals can hold. Dr Arkhurst described one from his time as a district planner: the assembly drew up plans the landowners could not afford, and in return they handed sensitive land over as green space. Building green space into planning is becoming the rule rather than the exception, too. Revised zoning guidelines now require 20 to 30% green space in new local plans. In Kigali, an encroached wetland has become an eco-park that visitors pay to enter and that doubles as flood storage.

Communities must be involved in planning from the start because residents know the landscape. “They can tell you this particular place was a stream and now they’ve put a building here, this was the place that water used to pass,” said Ms Osei-Wusu. That knowledge is vital for projects like tree planting, where trees are meant to slow runoff. However, trees only do that job if someone looks after them. “If we are planting 5,000 trees, we cannot just plant the trees and leave them,” said Ms Osei-Wusu. Employing local residents to care for the trees ensures their survival while creating community jobs.

That is the future researchers want for Sakumono: protect its core, clear the rubble and hand it to the surrounding communities to run. That last step matters. “Normally we do community consultation, we don’t do community involvement,” said Ms Osei-Wusu. Planners are starting to listen. Approved plans will now go up on community billboards, so residents know which land is meant to stay green.

Closing the dialogue, CASCADE Co-PI Prof Chris Gordon called for accountability. Rules count for little, he argued, if those who build in the wrong places, however well connected, face no consequences. “You cannot cheat nature,” he said. Build in a wetland, and sooner or later nature takes the land back.

The test will be whether the plans reach places like Sakumono, where the rubble from the last round of demolitions still lies in the water’s path.

This piece draws on the recording of When Accra Floods: Can Nature Help Restore the City?, a virtual science–policy dialogue held on 8 October 2026. It was organised by CASCADE Ghana with the Institute for Environment and Sanitation Studies (IESS) at the University of Ghana, led by Co-Principal Investigator Prof Chris Gordon, and moderated by Doreen Larkailey Lartey.

Read more

• Greater Accra floods: 38,802 people affected, 7,761 households displaced, Ghana News Agency
• June 29 floods killed 39, affected nearly 92,000 people, MyJoyOnline
• Heat, floods and urban resilience: insights from CASCADE’s second City Learning Lab in Accra, CASCADE

By Hugo De Lemos & Alacia Armstrong