By Ghana News

Copyright ghanamma

The Country Lead for Clean Air Ghana, Mr. Desmond Appiah, has urged the government to develop a consolidated national clean air policy to address Ghana’s worsening air quality.

Data shows the air quality in the country has declined significantly in the last few years, with recent checks indicating that it has crossed the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) and the World Health Organisation (WHO) standards.

A study published by a Ghanaian urban planning and environmental consultancy, PSS Urbania Consult, also noted that air pollution is now the leading cause of death in the country, with about 30,000 Ghanaians dying every year from related illnesses.

This number exceeds the country’s casualties from HIV/AIDS, malaria and road traffic accidents.

Speaking at the 2025 Clean Air Conference held at the La Palm Royal Beach Hotel in Accra, Mr Appiah noted that a unified national clean air policy could help focus efforts to ensure better air quality in Ghana and provide timelines that would enable specific targets to be met.

“We join our voice with a call for a consolidated national clean air policy. The reason for that call is that having a singular document or policy helps you have targets which would then have timelines. What we have in Ghana is that there are so many documents or policies mentioning air quality or aiming to address air quality issues, but without the specific timelines and the targets that we want to achieve, by what percentage reduction, by which date, and by whom. I think that it makes it a lot more difficult,” he said.

Mr Appiah argued that having several unintegrated air quality management policies hinders enforcement and makes it difficult to hold individuals, agencies or organisations accountable.

“If you go and you have a singular policy which has consolidated all these bits and pieces, we can then use that as a guide to our aspiration as a people; where we want to be in the next 10 years, to say by 2030 we want to get to this point, by 2040 this is where we want to get to, how many lives do we intend to save and all that. It also makes it difficult with enforcement because there are so many [policies] that everybody can run away from them, but if it is targeted and direct, we can always go and know we need to hold A.B.C. responsible for those actions. For us advocates, it helps to guide what we advocate for. For investors, it helps to guide them as well,” he added.

Lots of polices, not enough implementation

The Director of the EPA’s Environmental Quality Department, Selina Amoah, says discussions are ongoing on whether a new policy would be beneficial to the quest for clean air.

She added that while a specific policy does not currently exist for air quality management, work is being done to ensure that related polices are implemented fully.

“We don’t have the policy specifically for air quality management. There’s been a lot of discussion; some are of the opinion that we need to have a separate policy for air quality. And I just think that if they are embedded in other policies, must we get another policy? Because the policies are there, the issue is implementation and enforcement. So that discussion is also ongoing,” she said.

The Director of the Zero Waste Cities Project at the Green Africa Youth Organisation (GAYO), the organisers of the Conference, Jacob Johnson Attakpah, expressed worry over the level of methane gas emissions from improper waste management.

He advocated for the upscaling of measures like composting to deal with the large volumes of organic waste produced daily.

“There’s a lot of emissions coming from landfilling. And these are very critical to the climate conversation because in order to keep our average global temperatures at a record low of between 1.5 and 2 degrees, we need to do a lot to ensure that we are beating methane emissions. A lot of people mention methane because research has shown us that it is 80% more potent than carbon dioxide,” he explained.

“The good news is that we can act very much on methane. And so activities like composting that Gayo is doing at our facility at MRF that we are scaling across African cities, specifically in Kampala, lead the way by showing how communities can actively do things to ensure that we cut down emissions.”

He also believes waste management provides an often unexplored avenue to create jobs for the people in the country

“Even more importantly, there’s a part that we oftentimes miss. There’s a part of working on waste; that is where the jobs are. And providing green jobs is an imperative for us because you can’t ask people to take care of the climate when they are hungry. You have to take care of the climate when there’s something in your stomach. But we found innovative ways to show that when you’re taking care of climate and the environment, (1:50) there’s a possibility of creating green jobs.”

The 2025 Clean Air Conference, organised by GAYO, brought policymakers, experts and civil society organisations together at the Lapalm Royal Hotel in Accra to deliberate solutions to Ghana’s air pollution crisis.

And as part of efforts to improve air quality in the country, GAYO donated 150 mobile air quality sensors to the Greater Accra Regional Coordinating Council, which will be available to all the municipalities in Greater Accra.

The sensors will be installed across the region to pick air quality data, which institutions like the EPA and Ministry of Environment will analyse to develop and implement air quality policies in multiple sectors, including transport, construction and agriculture, among other things.