Editorial: When the environment speaks and we cover our ears

Today, the world observes World Environment Day under the stirring theme, ‘Inspired by Nature. For Climate. For Our Future’. For Our Future. Governments will issue statements. Ministers will appear at podiums, freshly suited, to denounce environmental degradation with the conviction of men who have never signed a mining lease.

Officials will plant trees for the cameras, and perhaps only in the specific patch of ground where the cameras are pointed. Hashtags will trend by mid-morning and expire by evening. And then, as reliably as the rains themselves, we will return to exactly what we were doing before. This will happen all over the world, and Ghana is certainly no exception.

In Accra, we need not strain to find the irony. On Wednesday, June 3, the eleventh anniversary of the nation’s deadliest flood disaster, the skies opened again. The same streets went under. The same markets drowned. The same communities wept the same tears into the same floodwater. The Ghana Meteorological Agency had warned us. NADMO sounded the alarm.

The drains, stuffed with the polythene bags we toss there ourselves daily, did what they do best. Is there a more precise definition of insanity?

The theme this year tells us that nature is “not optional.” One wonders who needed to be told. Did the families at Kaneshie, watching their goods float away on Wednesday evening, consider nature optional? Did the traders at Adjei Kojo believe the floodwaters were a bureaucratic inconvenience that a strongly worded committee report might resolve?

The environment, UNEP informs us with great solemnity, is sending us signals. The question, apparently, is what signal we choose to send back. We have been sending our signal for decades in uncollected waste, in buildings planted defiantly on floodplains, in gutters that function as municipal landfills, and the environment has been responding with admirable, catastrophic consistency.

But let us move beyond Accra’s annual aquatic theatre, because the assault on the environment in this sub-region is not confined to choked drains and unplanned settlements. There is the matter of galamsey, which continues the industrial-scale destruction of the land and water that sustains millions.

Ghana’s rivers did not become a chocolate drink by accident. The Pra, the Ankobra, the Birim — waterways that generations depended upon for drinking, farming, and fishing, have been converted into mercury-laced sewers by illegal mining operations that somehow, inexplicably, always manage to find equipment, capital, and continued access to contested land.

The excavators do not arrive by magic. The fuel that runs them is not conjured from thin air. And yet, every administration since independence has discovered galamsey, been outraged by galamsey, launched operations against galamsey, failed to arrest any galamsey kingpin and bequeathed galamsey, slightly enlarged, to its successor.

How does a country lose its rivers and still find time to celebrate World Environment Day?

The pressure on Ghana’s environment extends well beyond mining. Forest loss remains a concern. Wetlands continue to disappear under urban expansion. Open burning persists despite regulations prohibiting it. Plastic waste clogs drainage systems and pollutes waterways. Rapid urbanisation continues to outpace planning and infrastructure development.

Admittedly, these challenges are not unique to us. Across the developing world, governments face the difficult task of balancing economic growth, job creation, urban expansion, and environmental protection. But acknowledging that tension cannot become an excuse for inaction.

The costs of environmental neglect are becoming increasingly visible, not only in damaged ecosystems but also in lost productivity, rising disaster-response expenditures, public health risks, and growing climate vulnerability.

This year’s World Environment Day theme is a reminder that nature is not merely a resource to be exploited. It is the foundation upon which economic activity, public health, food security, and social stability ultimately depend.

The challenge before us as a nation is therefore not a lack of awareness. The evidence is visible in our rivers, forests, coastlines, and increasingly in our cities. Nor is it a lack of policy. The country possesses laws, institutions, and regulatory frameworks designed to address many of these problems. The challenge is execution.

World Environment Day should be more than an annual occasion for declarations of intent. It should serve as a measure of progress. The relevant question is not what governments, institutions, or citizens say on June 5. It is whether conditions are materially better by June 5 next year.

The environment continues to send very clear messages. The tragedy is not that we fail to understand them. It is that we understand them all too well, yet too often respond with urgency, if any, only after disaster strikes.

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