Several generations ago the communities in Ghana’s capital – Accra – derived their livelihoods from fishing in lagoons and rivers. In modern Accra the life in these aquatic ecosystems has disappeared as the areas surrounding lagoons and rivers were opened up to industrial development and associated persistent problems.
We will present the challenges surrounding the Korle Lagoon and the (failed) past efforts to restore this ecosystem. In particular on the following:
- A multi-source-pollution problem, with the lagoon’s water’s high turbidity and high concentrations of phosphorus, lead and ammonia. At present the total absence of dissolved oxygen such that it can no longer sustain most animal or plant life.
- The lagoon is surrounded by informal settlements wherein hundreds of thousands of people live, increasingly encroaching upon its banks inducing more siltation and waste pollution thereby clogging up the ecosystem.
- The absence of functioning waste-water treatment, and limited solid waste collection, such that the large majority of solid and liquid wastes from the city, including industrial effluents, end up in the Odaw River and Korle Lagoon, before entering the sea.
- On its banks sit Agbogbloshie, a renowned dumping ground of imported electronic waste, which provides local communities with a labour intensive means to live from recycling, despite the cancer inducing toxic hazards and environmental pollution.
The aim is to provide food for thought so as to spark a discussion on what combination of approaches, and at what scale, could work to solve such a wicked problem. Be it behavioural regulatory, economic, technological, incremental, or radical.
Rembrandt Koppelaar has since 2010 been a Researcher at the Institute for Integrated
Economic Research (IIER), where he works on analysis at the intersection of resource flows, energy, and economics, and more recently city-region water and sanitation modelling. Since June 2012 he is also a PhD. researcher at Imperial College’s Center for Environmental Policy, focusing on the simulation of company decisions of investment and technology choice. Prior to joining IIER he was President of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas Netherlands from 2005 to 2010, a Dutch non-profit which carried out research and public outreach on fossil fuel depletion and the potential of alternative energy sources. He has written several industry and peer-review articles on resources and economics, published among others in The European Energy Review and the journal of Global Environmental Change. He wrote the best-selling non-fiction book “De Permanente Oliecrisis” discussing the end of cheap oil and its societal consequences (Nieuw Amsterdam publishers, 2008, 11.000 copies sold), Rembrandt holds a BSc in Economics and an MSc in Business Management & Economics from Wageningen University, the Netherlands.