Presentation short abstract

This paper examines the adaptation responses to extreme heat in Ghana. It shows that extreme heat vulnerabilities go beyond the visible male-female and poor-rich neighborhood divide and reveal how their adaptation challenges mirror remnants of the colonial legacy of gendered access to resources.

Presentation long abstract

Ghana has developed and implemented various policies and practical measures to establish and lead a national approach to climate change adaptation and mitigation. These frameworks notably consider gender and space as critical analytical lenses for assessing and addressing climate vulnerabilities. Similarly, academic literature has explored gendered and spatial inequalities in people's lived experiences of climate change. While this is encouraging, a closer look at the research and policy responses reveals a continuation of colonial discourses that reinforce dichotomous female-male gender categories and rural-urban or north-south spatial vulnerabilities. Using empirical data from extreme heat adaptation research in Accra, we demonstrate how current climate policies perpetuate colonial legacies that can hinder effective action. Moreover, we argue that the adaptation strategies employed by participants replicate colonial remnants of framing care, particularly in relation to domestic care, thereby entrenching and perpetuating female domestication and creating an added burden of care and adaptation responses. Thus, we argue that Ghana’s approach to extreme heat adaptation requires a nuanced, intersectional, and critical understanding of vulnerabilities that moves beyond rural-urban, north-south, and socio-economic divisions. It must account for urban dynamics shaped by colonial structures that influence access, opportunities, barriers to resources, displacement, and neglect