۱٫ Introduction

۲٫ Climate resilience and urban development

۳٫ Climate resilience in African cities: the Ghanaian experience

۴٫ The role of urban planning in building climate resilient African cities

۵٫ Production of climate sensitive spatial plans

۶٫ Towards climate resilience-based urban Africa

۷٫ Conclusion

References

Abstract

Past and ongoing research shows that African cities remain one of the vulnerable zones of climate change, yet the least prepared. With an expected increase in climate change impacts coupled with rapid urbanization in African cities, this paper inquires: what if more attention is devoted to urban planning in the efforts towards addressing climate change issues and building resilient urban futures in Africa? Using available and relevant literature and Ghana as a case study, it argues that it is about time African cities begin to address climate change through urban planning. This paper anayzes the unexplored potentials of urban planning in addressing issues of climate change in the continent, and makes recommendations for the engagement of urban planning in developing resilient African cities.

Introduction

In 2019, the Washington Post ranked African nations as the most susceptible to changing climate, and the most ill-prepared in the world (Washington Post, 2019). While Fig. 1 shows that climate change impacts are widespread across urban and regional Africa with the World Economic Forum in 2018 describing Africa as being in the eye of the climate change storm, the continent’s rapidly growing conurbations remain the worst defenseless worldwide (Dahir, 2018). Since the 1990s, African cities have experienced unimaginable impacts of climate change (Cobbinah and Addaney, 2019), and today 79 out of the 86 African cities that are among the rapidly expanding conurbations in the world are challenged with extreme risk due to climate change (Hewston, 2018). Given the sea level rise, warming temperatures, erratic precipitation regimes causing catastrophic flooding and prolonged droughts and threatening rapidly-expanding populations and investment opportunities, building resilience is the continent’s primary surebet of survival (see Broto, 2014). Yet, national governments’ commitments to implementing urban resilience strategies have not been encouraging (see Cobbinah and Addaney, 2019) despite being signatories to all transnational climate treaties (e.g., the 2016 Paris climate accord, 1995 Kyoto Protocol). To enable this global response particularly in Africa, the UN Secretary-General António Guterres in 2019 convened a climate meeting attended by world leaders, the private organizations and civil society representatives to intensify and quicken action on climate change. This summit emphasized six key areas of consideration among which cities and resilience were paramount (United Nations, 2019).