Accra is underwater for the umpteenth time. Overnight rains that began on Sunday,  28th June, have submerged communities across the Greater Accra Region. Already, deaths have been confirmed. Across the city, emergency responders and community volunteers have been using boats to rescue citizens stranded by rising floodwaters.

Fire broke out at the Odawna Rubber Market while the city flooded around it. The Ministry of Interior issued a public safety advisory, and President Mahama undertook an aerial inspection of affected areas, citing climate change and “the issue of human behaviour.”

140 millimetres of rain fell on Accra in a single day, which is the highest the city has experienced in several years, and nearly triple last year’s peak. Accra was not built to absorb 140 mm of rain in a day, partly because no one ever intentionally involves geoscientists in identifying areas that could facilitate groundwater recharge to reduce surface runoff during extreme rainfall events. We often mention that people should not build in waterways or on Ramseyer sites, but are we intentional about it?

The consequences are what we see all around us. Destruction, loss of property and sadly death. At GhIG, we believe, we should no longer stay silent about a truth that our disaster response culture continues to sidestep. While Ghana's flooding crisis is multifaceted, geoscience sits at its core.

Engineering, planning, governance, and emergency response all matter, but they are most effective when grounded in an understanding of the land, the water, and the processes that connect them. Until we treat it as one, we will remain trapped in this brutal cycle of reaction without prevention.

We Have Been Here Before. Many Times.

Most of the communities that are underwater today are the same ones that flooded in March 2026, in 2024, in 2023, in 2021, in 2019, in 2018 and in 2015. Of course, new communities are continually being added to the disaster-prone areas,  but these names have become almost ritualistic: Weija, Kasoa, Kaneshie, Dansoman, Spintex, Tse Addo, Darkuman, Mallam Junction.

The cycle is always the same: the Ghana Meteorological Agency (GMet) warns us; the rains come; the water rises, we are shocked; we mourn; we make promises; we clean up, and we wait for next year. I dare say we have lost thousands of lives to floods, with hundreds of thousands displaced since we started recording data.

The economic losses are estimated to be in the billions of dollars. These statistics point to the compounding cost of failing to integrate geoscience into how we build, plan and govern this country. And yet we build on this Earth. So it is true, the rains are getting heavier, but we are also building in precisely the places we should not be building, and governing land use in precisely the ways that guarantee catastrophe.

What Geoscience Can Do That Drainage Engineering Cannot

There is a tendency in the public conversation to frame Ghana’s flooding problem as solely a drainage problem, with consequential suggested solutions such as building more drains, desilting gutters, and clearing waterways. Even though these interventions are necessary, they are downstream solutions to an upstream failure. And that failure is the absence of geoscience from the decisions that determine where people live, where buildings are sited, and where infrastructure is laid.

Geoscience is the discipline that reads the earth, that is, its structure, its composition, its surface processes, and how water moves through it and across it. Hydrogeologists can map the subsurface conditions that determine whether a given area will flood during heavy rainfall and how severely.

Engineering geologists can assess the stability of slopes and identify zones of high landslide risk. Soil scientists can characterise soil types and their capacity to absorb rainwater. Remote sensing specialists can use satellite imagery to map flood extents, monitor changing drainage patterns, and track encroachments on natural waterways. Geomorphologists can identify floodplains, drainage corridors, and natural retention zones, which are the same zones that, once built upon, become the disaster areas we know so well. These are all essential pieces of knowledge for building and deploying early warning systems.

None of this is new science. The Egyptians, the Chinese and those who came before us knew this. That is why there were designated living zones and no-go areas in our communities long before modern times. In modern times, scientific expertise exists in Ghana, with a whole professional body fully dedicated to geoscience and competent institutions, including the Ghana Geological Survey Authority, playing key roles.

What does not exist, in any meaningful or enforceable way, is the legal and institutional requirement for these tools to be applied before decisions are made about where and how to build.

A Warning Ghana Has Already Ignored Several Times

This year’s crisis is not only about urban flooding. On 20th May 2026, debris flow from the 600-metre Adaklu Mountain buried at least five houses and nine vehicles at Adaklu-Helekpe in the Volta Region. Dozens of residents were displaced. On the 22nd of June, 2026, the Western Regional Minister Joseph Nelson directed all individuals operating along landslide-prone sections of the Albert Bosomtwi-Sam Fishing Harbour in Sekondi to evacuate immediately to prevent future disasters due to a fire outbreak triggered by a rainfall-induced landslide. Furthermore, two weeks ago, a night of heavy rainfall triggered a mudslide on the Akoon–Bogoso Junction stretch of the Tarkwa highway, blocking a key transport route and halting movement.

All of these have happened before. For instance, in 2017, rocks on the Adaklu Mountain broke apart and sent debris cascading into the same community, compelling residents to flee. A proper geoscientific assessment of slope conditions at that time, embedded in the district’s spatial planning, should have resulted in enforced building setbacks and early warning protocols. Instead, nine years later, we are back at Adaklu with more destroyed homes, more displaced families, and more calls for investigation. For us at the GhIG, this is a disturbing pattern where an investigation is commissioned after the disaster with nice recommendations, and then we wait for the next disaster to rediscover these old reports.

The Governance Gap That Is Costing Lives

After the devastating floods on the 9th of June, 2026, President Mahama directed the National Disaster Management Organisation (NADMO), Ghana Geological Survey Authority (GGSA) and other relevant agencies to prepare a comprehensive flood assessment report. This was a welcome directive, and another has been issued after the recent floods. But it points directly to the structural problem: geoscientists are summoned after the disaster strikes, not embedded in the systems designed to prevent it. Currently, Ghana has no legal requirement for geological hazard (geohazard) assessments to inform land-use planning decisions. District Assemblies approve developments on floodplains and unstable slopes without mandatory geoscience review. NADMO’s technical architecture does not include a geoscientist on its governing board. The national spatial planning framework does not require a geological hazard map as a precondition for zoning approvals. And more importantly, the legislation that would empower professional geoscientists at the centre of these processes, the Geoscience Act, has yet to be passed.

What the Ghana Institute of Geoscientists Is Calling For

The Ghana Institute of Geoscientists represents the professional body of earth scientists in this country. Our members work in petroleum exploration, mineral exploration, environmental assessment, groundwater management, engineering geology, and academia. We have the expertise to contribute to Ghana’s flood resilience architecture. Specifically, GhIG is calling on the government to act on five fronts. First, include credentialed geoscientists in the national flood assessment taskforce that President Mahama has directed NADMO to lead.

The geological dimensions of Ghana’s flooding require geological input. Second, commission a National Geological Hazard and Flood Risk Atlas as a living, legally binding spatial document, mapped at a scale useful for district-level planning, and updated regularly using remote sensing and field data. This should include providing instrumentation and equipment for acquiring the requisite data needed to make such assessments. GhIG stands ready to co-create a National Geological Hazard Atlas with GGSA. Third, establish a mandatory geoscience review requirement for all development permits in flood-prone areas and geologically hazardous zones.

No building should be approved in a high-risk geological zone without a professional geoscientist’s sign-off. Fourth, NADMO's governing board would be significantly strengthened by the addition of a credentialed geoscientist, ensuring that its disaster management decisions are grounded in solid geoscience, so that this expertise is part of the institutional architecture of disaster prevention, not an afterthought. Fifth, facilitate the passing of the Geoscience Act, being championed by GhIG. And this is not as a gesture to a professional body, but as the legislative foundation for everything else on this list.

What Happens If We Do Not

GMet has issued a further warning: more heavy rains on the way. The flooding across Accra will almost certainly continue. More communities will be affected. Emergency services are already stretched. And somewhere in a flood-prone district of this country, a structure is sitting on geologically unstable ground that no one has assessed, waiting for the next heavy rain.

Over the past decades, we have lost the lives of precious Ghanaians to floods; we have lost billions of dollars; we have written reports, formed committees, and made speeches from the same flooded streets, year after year. What we have not done is place the right science at the centre of the decisions that matter.

Ghana cannot engineer its way out of a problem it has not yet mapped. Geoscience is not a luxury for a developing country. It is the discipline that tells us where it is safe to live, where it is dangerous to build, and what the earth beneath our feet will do when the rains come. After the events of the past week, we at the GhIG hope that it becomes impossible to ignore.

Dr. Cyril Dziedzorm Boateng is the General Secretary of the Ghana Institute of Geoscientists (GhIG), a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Physics, KNUST and a Geophysicist

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