Access to Early Warning for Climate Change-Related Hazards in Informal Settlements of Accra, Ghana

Abstract

Climate change-related hazards will aggravate and impact differently on urban societies. Although early warning systems will be important for reducing the hazard risks in cities, the nature of early warning systems that are available to residents of informal settlements remains less understood. This paper aimed to assess the early warning systems through which informal dwellers reduce their hazard risks in an African city. Using Accra as the case, data were collected from 582 households using a structured questionnaire along with 25 institutional key informant interviews and 14 focus discussions with state and settlement actors in this study. Findings of the paper show that a mix of formal and informal early warning systems are utilized by residents of informal settlements, but the majority of them perceived state disaster management institutions as not performing optimally in their resident settlements. The nature of land ownership in the informal settlements influenced their political exclusion and state institutions’ decisions not to locate weather monitoring equipment in their settlements. Respondents without the security of land tenure perceived state disaster management institutions as not performing optimally, which negatively affects their capacity to respond to climate change-related hazards. The paper thus recommends the incorporation of informal early warning systems into city-wide hazard early warning systems through participatory planning in Accra and similar contexts. Future scholars may extend this discourse by examining the effect of the use of informal early warning systems on the uptake of formal hazard early warning sources in informal settlements.