Beyond Drains: Why Ghana's Flood Crisis Is Also a Biodiversity Finance Challenge

By, Pamela Quaye, Environmental Policy Analyst, UNDP Ghana

July 23, 2026

White adult swan with a cygnet swimming in a pond among tall green reeds. — UNDP

On June 29, 2026, much of Accra disappeared beneath floodwater. Roads became rivers, homes turned into emergency shelters, businesses shut their doors, and emergency responders raced against time to rescue hundreds of stranded residents. By early July, the National Disaster Management Organisation (NADMO) reported that the nationwide death toll had risen to 34, including 12 fatalities in Accra alone. The floods affected seven regions and displaced more than 91,000 people across the country. While Greater Accra bore the brunt of the June 29 disaster, the Central Region had already suffered a separate flood event earlier in the month that claimed the highest number of lives.

The storm delivered approximately 140 millimetres of rain within a few hours, the heaviest single downpour the city has experienced in years and more than double the 56 millimetres recorded during a comparable event in 2025. In response, President John Dramani Mahama released GHS 300 million (approximately US$27 million) for emergency relief while the armed forces, police, NADMO and other emergency services were mobilised to support rescue and recovery efforts. The Ghana Meteorological Agency has also warned that more rainfall is expected as the rainy season continues.

This is not a one-off event. Accra floods almost every rainy season now, and officials and experts point to recurring pressures including inadequate and obstructed, development near and on natural waterways and wetlands, and continued expansion into flood-prone areas. What's different this year is the scale and the growing recognition that "the heaviest rain in years" is becoming a description that repeats annually as the climate shifts.

Pedestrians wade through floodwaters on a submerged urban street, cars stranded. — Floodwaters on a submerged urban street

Geoscapes Project: Ghana

Flooding is also a biodiversity finance challenge

Urban flooding is usually treated as an engineering problem, bigger drains, wider culverts, more concrete. Ghana does need drainage investment. But engineering alone can't fix a problem whose root cause includes the steady loss of natural infrastructure.

Wetlands, mangroves, floodplains and healthy watersheds are nature’s original flood defence system: they absorb rainfall, slow runoff, and store excess water before it reaches communities. When these ecosystems are degraded or paved over, natural drainage is disrupted, and floodwater has nowhere to go but into homes, facilities and roads.

The flooding experienced in Tse Addo illustrates this reality. The area sits within the low-lying coastal plain of the Kpeshie Lagoon system, one of Ghana's officially recognised coastal wetlands. Over the past decades, encroachment and unregulated development around the lagoon and its buffer zones have disrupted natural drainage and heightened flood risk in surrounding communities, a pattern documented in both municipal and community accounts. Every wetland lost in this way reduces the valuable ecosystem services and increases the need for investment in engineered infrastructure, relief and recovery.

This is precisely where biodiversity finance becomes relevant. Biodiversity finance mobilises and directs investment to protect, restore and sustainably manage nature, ensuring that ecosystems continue to provide essential services such as flood protection, clean water, food security and climate resilience. In this sense, biodiversity finance shifts the conversation from treating ecosystem restoration as an environmental cost to recognizing healthy ecosystems as productive national assets that reduce disaster risk, protect livelihoods and generate measurable economic returns.

Ariel view showing before and after the Tse Addo Flood

Aerial view of a rural town along a winding river with houses and dirt roads.

Financing nature as infrastructure

Through the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)'s Biodiversity Finance Initiative (BIOFIN), implemented in partnership with Ghana's Ministry of Finance and Ministry of Environment, Science and Technology, the Government is working to identify and mobilise innovative financing solutions that enable greater investment in biodiversity and ecosystem services. Several of these approaches have direct relevance for strengthening urban flood resilience and reducing future disaster risk.

Restoring wetlands and degraded catchments in river systems such as the Densu and Odaw basins can improve water retention and slow peak flows before they reach Accra. BIOFIN’s role is to help cost these investments and mobilise financing, so ecosystem-based adaptation is treated as public infrastructure, not an environmental add-on. But restoration alone is not enough; the incentives shaping land-use decisions must also change. Ecological fiscal transfers (i.e. government funding that rewards environmental stewardship) can help by rewarding Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies, as well as communities and landowners, for conserving wetlands and natural drainage systems instead of approving developments that increase flood risk.

The same logic applies upstream. When natural drainage areas around Accra are degraded, more water and silt rush into the city’s drains, increasing the risk of flooding. Payments for ecosystem services can support communities in these catchments to keep forests and wetlands intact, turning an often-unpriced public good into a financed resilience measure that helps reduce downstream flood damage. Such investments need not depend only on public budgets. Urban wetland restoration and green corridors can be supported through blended finance, combining public investment with climate finance and concessional resources. Biodiversity budgeting and expenditure tagging can also help government track, demonstrate and scale investment in nature-based resilience over time.

Underlying this is a simple point: what gets measured is more likely to be funded. The costs of flood response, repairs, business disruption and lost productivity are visible and immediate. The value of wetlands, floodplains and watersheds in reducing these losses is less often captured in investment decisions. Biodiversity expenditure reviews and finance needs assessments can help close this gap by showing the economic case for investing in prevention, alongside recovery.

From disaster relief to resilience

The GHS 300 million released in the floods’ aftermath s necessary and will support urgent relief and recovery. At the same time, each rainy season with associated floods, reinforces the importance of balancing emergency response with sustained investment in the ecosystems that help reduce flood risks before disaster occur.

Biodiversity finance does not replace the need for better drains, planning, or enforcement; it complements them by ensuring nature itself is valued and financed as critical infrastructure. As Ghana advances the ongoing review of its National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan (2025–2030), alongside its climate adaptation priorities, there's a clear opportunity to embed nature-based resilience more strongly into national budgeting and planning.

The choice ahead is no longer between emergency relief and long-term resilience. Ghana needs both. The task now is to make sure that the next round of investment protects lives and livelihoods by reducing flood risk before the next extreme rainfall event becomes a disaster.