In recent times, the planning system in Ghana has come under intense public criticism for failure to effectively control physical development in the major cities (Adarkwa 2012). The recurring flooding in the cities of Accra, Kumasi, Tamale and Sekondi-Takoradi seems to testify to this failure. Many lives and property have been lost through these flooding disasters in the country. On 03 June 2015, the most devastating flooding in the history of Ghana occurred in Accra, killing over 150 people.

A multiplicity of issues have been identified as causal agents of flood risk in Ghanaian cities, including uncontrolled urban land use development (Amoako & Inkoom 2017), rapid urbanisation, environmental degradation and worsening poverty conditions. These have overstretched the capacity of existing infrastructure, and exposed urban dwellers to environmental hazards particularly flooding (Korah & Cobbinah 2016). It has been argued that socio-economic pressures rather than ecological, health and safety, and environmental considerations have determined land uses resulting in limited regard to open spaces, areas liable to flooding and ecologically sensitive areas (Korah & Cobbinah 2016). Darkwah, Cobbinah and Anokye (2018) contest that urban planning in Ghana has failed to build resilient cities resulting in compounded stresses and shocks.

Notwithstanding the current nature of things, conscious efforts at ensuring harmonious land use planning and environmental sanity in Ghanaian urban settlements date back to the country’s era of colonialisation (Boamah, Gyimah & Bediako Nelson 2012; Tasantab 2016). Grant and Yankson (2003) attest that ‘zoning and building codes were strictly enforced to maintain an orderly character and environment in the planned district’, especially the Central Business District (CBD). This practice was to ensure that the growth of the cities promotes public health, orderliness and environmental sanity.

The country continued to rely on the provisions of this colonial era legislation, the Town and Country Planning Ordinance of 1945 (Cap 84) to ensure land use and development control until 2016 when a Land Use and Spatial Planning Law was passed by the Parliament of Ghana (Korah, Cobbinah & Nunbogu 2017). Until the Land Use and Spatial Planning Law, land use planning was guided by the Cap 84, the Local Government Act (Act 462, 1993), Development Planning System (NDPS) Act (Act 480, 1994), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Act (Act 490, 1994) and the National Building Regulations (LI 1630, 1996) (Fuseini & Kemp 2015; Tasantab 2015). Even when Ghana’s decentralisation act, the Local Government Act (Act 462), was promulgated in 1993 and made stipulations for land use planning and physical development, the Cap 84 was not repealed (Tasantab 2015). Under these legal provisions, prospective developers were required to obtain development/building permit from relevant planning authorities.

These acts and regulations were meant to complement each other. Yet, their provisions were sometimes contrary. One contradiction that has seemingly facilitated illegal land use developments in flood-prone areas is found in the National Building Regulations (LI 1630, 1996). It states that when an applicant for development or building permit does not receive feedback on an application after 3 months, he or she can commence development with the assumption that the application has been accepted. This is despite the fact that most development applications for varied reasons are not granted after 3 months of submission. It has been found that between 2010 and 2013, only 41% of permit applications in Sekondi-Takoradi received grant notification after 3 months (Tasantab 2016). In addition to these, Ghana has a complex land management system. Ours is a dual land administration system where the majority (about 78%) of lands are under custodianship of chiefs and traditional leaders (Cobbinah & Aboagye 2017; Kleemann et al. 2017; Owusu-Ansah & Braimah 2013). This complex land management system ‘allows multiple traditional leaders to control and sometimes allocate land often contradicting planning requirements’ (Cobbinah & Aboagye 2017).

According to Adarkwa and Post (2001), the cities in Ghana have seen tremendous changes in size, density and areal extent. It is further observed that rapid urbanisation and development in Ghanaian cities have led to physical development problems, including:

These problems persist notwithstanding the fact that these are major cities and considered to be planned. Land use controls are necessary for ensuring a safe living environment in urban areas (Boamah et al. 2012). It also ensures that physical development takes place in a manner that inures to the health and safety of its inhabitants (Tasantab 2016).

The persistence of these problems seems to suggest that current framework for land use planning has been ineffective (Adarkwa & Post 2001). The result of this is the recurrent flooding in the cities (Adarkwa 2012; Korah & Cobbinah 2016). Studies in Australia have observed that land use decisions can result in flooding of affected areas (Bird et al. 2013). The urban planning institutions in Ghana are considered weak, and planning officials are accused of granting permission to developers to construct homes in flood-prone areas (Korah & Cobbinah 2016).

This article therefore aims to investigate why land use control practices seem to be inadvertently creating flood risk in Sekondi-Takoradi, Ghana. The research question to be answered in this study is: in what ways do land use control practices influence flood risk in Sekondi-Takoradi?

Data for this article were obtained from a review of relevant literature and primary data collected in 2014. The review included extant literature on land use planning, flood risk and DRR. The review involved searches of databases such as Web of Science, Science Direct, Mendeley, Google Scholar and general Internet search engines.

The primary data were collected through face-to-face interviews and a survey in the STMA. The main aim of the 2014 data collection was to investigate the processes and practice of development or land use control in Sekondi-Takoradi. The objective was to investigate how it is done and the factors that promote or inhibit its effectiveness. By doing so, data on how people in Sekondi-Takoradi participate and/or patronise land use planning were obtained. This data was collected from homeowners and the land use planning institutions.

Semi-structured interview guides were used to collect data from key informants, while a survey instrument was used to collect data from the homeowners. The interviews were conducted with an official of the Town and Country Planning Department (TCPD), three officials from the Building Inspectorate Unit (BIU) of the STMA and a chief of one of the suburbs in Sekondi-Takoradi as participants. These key informants were experts in their fields and enabled the research to glean valuable knowledge from their expertise in land use management and planning.

Furthermore, the survey was administered to 400 homeowners (or their caretakers) in the Sekondi-Takoradi suburbs of Windy Ridge, Chapel Hill, Fijai, Adiembra and Keikuma. The sample size was determined using a sample size table available on the Internet at the confidence level and confidence interval of 95% and ±5, respectively. The sample communities were purposively selected for the sole purpose of focusing on the characteristics in Sekondi-Takoradi that would provide the best insight into the research problem. The research intended to capture common patterns (Palinkas et al. 2015) in land use planning that cut across communities in Sekondi-Takoradi. This helped to simplify analysis despite the multi-site case study.

In each community, 80 surveys were conducted. This was because of the non-availability of clear population data for some of the suburbs sampled. Regarding the recruitment of homeowners for the household survey, a random starting point (mainly a prominent landmark like a church or chief palace) was determined. The survey team then followed routes in the settlement and picked houses to interview beginning from the random starting point. A selection interval of every fifth house was used. Because of considerations for availability and willingness to participate in the research (Palinkas et al. 2015), convenience methods were also used to select the houses in which to conduct the survey. Therefore, only house owners who were available at the time of the survey were included. For instance, if there were no occupants in the fifth house selected or the occupants were not willing to participate, it was replaced with the next house. At the beginning of each survey, verbal consent was obtained. The consent process made it explicit that participation in the study was voluntary and that the research was for academic purposes only. It also assured the participants of confidentiality. The participants were also assured that the final results of the study will be aggregated with others. Therefore, no personal identifying information would be included. Overall, the survey instrument included both close-ended and open-ended questions.

The interview data were recorded through audio recordings and notes. The audio recordings were later transcribed and synchronised with the notes. This was then formatted into themes and analysed accordingly. The survey responses, on the contrary, were recorded on the survey instruments and later transferred into Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). A codebook was prepared of the survey responses. After each day, the entries on the survey instrument were vetted to check for entry errors and corrected accordingly. The data were then generated into simple frequency tables and charts. The following analysis is based on this data.

More than 80% of the disasters in Ghana are considered to be climate related (GoG 2013). It is expected that climate-related hazards, such as floods, will increase in frequency and magnitude (Brown et al. 2018; GoG 2013). The national climate change policy of Ghana therefore sought to ‘establish various measures to protect livelihoods and assets of vulnerable communities from climate-related risks’. It also sought to ‘strengthen the institutional framework for disaster risk response and management, and the capacities of agencies in disaster risk management’ (GoG 2013). Although the Ghanaian Government has implemented programmes such as public education of residents in flood-prone areas (Danso & Addo 2017) to reduce flood risk, risk are continuing to be created by land use practices. These are processes and practices that can render flood risk reduction programmes ineffective and defeat the objectives of the national climate change policy. One of these processes is the control of how land is used, what land is used, when land is used and the purpose for which it is used.

Land development in Ghana is expected by law to pass through several processes, including acquisition of land from chiefs, acquisition of land title documents from the Lands Commission, grant of building permit from the TCPD and inspection of building developments by the BIU. All these institutions and processes influence the nature of land use controls in Sekondi-Takoradi and Ghana at large. These processes and institutions also influence how land use planning reduces existing and expected flood risk. Findings from this study show that land use control processes and practices in the study area can create flood risk. These processes include grant of building permits and inspection or monitoring building developments in the study area.

In answering our research question, in what ways do land use control practices influence flood risk in Sekondi-Takoradi, the article tried to portray how land use practices (actions and inactions) create flood risk. The study depicts that when land use controls are unable to properly order the right use of land, individual house developers will make decisions about the use of land that create flood risk. It is posited that risk is the combination of the probability of a hazard event occurring and its negative consequences (UNISDR 2009). Therefore, land use control processes or practices (actions and inactions) that situate people in locations that would bring negative impacts when flood hazard events occur are creating risk.

The presence of risk (specific physical and social conditions) directly influences the occurrence of disasters (Lavell et al. 2012). Land use is a component of the broader social, economic, environmental and physical processes shaping risk (Romero-Lankao et al. 2014). It is therefore important to understand how the interaction of hazards and vulnerabilities takes place at the local level (families, communities and individual buildings) (Lavell et al. 2012). More people in urban areas are exposed to flood risks because the process of urbanisation has amplified failures in the land use planning regime as our findings show (Oliver-Smith et al. 2016; Wisner et al. 2015).

Our findings portray that land use control processes and practices are in a sense allowing housing developments to take place in floodable areas. This has been revealed to be a result of lack of staffing and logistical capacity to effectively control land use development in the area. The task of ensuring that every land use in Sekondi-Takoradi ensures the health and safety of lives and property seems to be under-resourced. This allows housing developments in flood-prone areas. Thus, any sustained precipitation results in flooding as identified by Amoako and Inkoom (2017) and others (Amoako & Frimpong Boamah 2014; Erman et al. 2018; Rain et al. 2011). This is worrying because heavy precipitation is anticipated to increase in Ghana over the period 2010 and 2050 (World Bank & GFDRR 2011).

Although there have been attempts to reform the land use planning system through the Land Use Planning and Management Project (2007–2010) to make it more efficient, the study area being one of the pilot locations, the bottlenecks persist. Flood risk is created when populations are located in flood-prone areas, creating the possibility for property and lives to be lost when extreme flooding occurs (Raaijmakers, Krywkow & van der Veen 2008). Although there are many measures such as embankments and dikes to defend against floods, land use planning is considered a viable compliment to these measures. This is because of its ability to remove developments from the floodable areas through zoning. However, this is not being done in the study area because of the aforementioned findings. There are pressures for urban development to extend into areas with higher flood risk (COAG 2011). If executed properly, land use control can be the first line of defence to limit exposure to these risks (Wilby & Keenan 2012).

In conclusion, if land use planning is to be a potent flood risk reduction and mitigation measure in Ghana, then efforts must be made by the Government of Ghana, and land use and management institutions such as the Town and Country Planning Authority and BIU to address the challenges revealed in this study. Therefore, permit approval times should be improved so that most permits are approved within the stipulated 3 months. It is also important to improve the inspection and monitoring of the entire metropolis to enforce permit conditions and building regulations and ensure compliance. The land use planning institutions should also actively engage the chiefs and citizens of the metropolis and encourage them to report all physical development taking place in their locality. This will enable the departments to be up-to-date about developments in the communities. Compliance with land use regulations will be improved if enforcement is pursued rigorously. With the current resource and staffing constraints hampering every aspect of land use planning in Sekondi-Takoradi, it is highly imperative for the government to give prominent attention to resourcing these departments. It is only then that they can effectively execute their functions.

Land use planning or control is an essential aspect of flood risk reduction. Planning in Sekond-Takoradi should therefore ensure that development occurs in areas where risk is less likely to be created. ‘If there are no people or buildings in areas prone to floods, then there will be no risk’ (Maier, Riddell & van Delden 2017).