Ghana’s climate finance: Stop counting the money, Start counting the outcomes

Dr Michael Addaney , Senior Lecturer, University of Energy and Natural Resources (UENR), Sunyani

On 16th June 2026, I joined fellow panellists at the Environmental Sustainability Summit convened by the Business and Financial Times (B&FT) under the theme ‘Inspired by Nature. For Climate. For Our Future’. The summit assembled government officials, financiers, regulators, researchers, and private sector leaders to confront a question Ghana cannot defer any longer: Are we translating climate finance commitments into measurable outcomes on the ground?

The honest answer, based on the evidence, is not yet. Take urban flooding in Accra. The Greater Accra Resilient and Integrated Development Project mobilised US$200 million from the World Bank, with a further US$150 million facility extended thereafter. And yet, each major rainfall season continues to strand residents, damage homes, and take lives in communities along the Odaw basin.

The disparity between disbursement and delivery is not principally a funding problem. It is a governance problem. Capital expenditure without recurrent maintenance budgets degrades rapidly. Infrastructure built on floodplains, where land use planning is disconnected from flood risk mapping, fails before it is tested.

Procurement delays and weak technical supervision compound the loss. Ghana needs to reframe the accountability question: not how much we have disbursed, but what resilience outcomes those disbursements have produced.

Ghana’s Updated Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC), submitted under the Paris Agreement in 2021, is explicit about the scale of investment required. The country needs between US$9.3 billion and US$15.5 billion between 2020 and 2030 to implement 47 adaptation and mitigation programmes across 19 policy areas. The unconditional component, covering nine mitigation programmes financed from domestic resources, is expected to deliver 24.6 million tonnes of greenhouse gas reductions by 2030.

An additional 39.4 million tonnes of reductions depend entirely on conditional international and private finance. We are now six years into that ten-year window. The Ministry of Finance’s CLIMFINTRACK system provides partial tracking, but cross-ministry expenditure reporting remains inconsistent. Ghana cannot state with confidence what fraction of the US$9.3 billion floor has been mobilised. That is a governance failure, and it directly undermines investor confidence.

The Environmental Protection Act (EPA) of 2025 is a genuine advance. Its dedicated climate change chapter gives the Environmental Protection Authority a stronger statutory mandate and begins to establish the legal connective tissue between environmental regulation and capital markets disclosure. But the Act does not yet require financial institutions to disclose climate-related financial risks in their portfolios.

Without mandatory climate risk disclosure, the pricing of green versus non-green capital cannot function efficiently. The Act also lacks a statutory audit mechanism for public climate expenditure across ministries. That gap must be legislated closed.

On green bonds, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) published comprehensive Green Bond Guidelines in March 2024. Multiple institutions are working on issuances. Yet not a single corporate green bond has been listed on the Ghana Stock Exchange (GSE). The pipeline problem is real, but so is investor caution following Ghana’s 2022 debt restructuring.

Rebuilding that confidence requires more than guidelines. It requires demonstrated fiscal discipline, transparent climate expenditure reporting, and credible environmental performance data.

Then there is the question no one wants to answer directly.

Ghana has authorised 5.2 million tonnes of carbon dioxide for international trade under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, and the national pipeline holds 402 million tonnes of potential carbon credits, largely derived from forest conservation. At the same time, illegal small-scale mining continues to poison the Pra, Offin, and Ankobra rivers and degrade the very forest belts underpinning those credits. Carbon credit buyers conducting due diligence will see the satellite imagery.

A country cannot simultaneously claim forest carbon removals and permit the destruction of its forests. No financing instrument resolves what is fundamentally a governance and political will problem. But community-based REDD+ income schemes that make forest protection economically rational for forest-edge communities, and green transition finance for mercury-free artisanal operators, are practical steps Ghana can take now.

My recommendation from the summit floor was direct. The Ministry of Finance, the EPA, and the SEC should jointly publish Ghana’s first Climate Finance Transparency Report by March 31, 2027. A single, publicly accessible document consolidating all public climate expenditure, all private climate finance mobilised, and all Article 6 carbon registry transactions, independently assessed against NDC trajectory requirements.

Every ambition discussed at ESS 2026, from green bonds to carbon markets to adaptation investment, depends on one foundation: the confidence of investors and citizens that Ghana accounts for climate money with integrity. That confidence is built through transparent, verified, public reporting. The summit was inspired by nature. The test of whether it was also inspired by accountability will come when that report is either published or quietly missed.

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