Tapping pop culture for Ghana’s climate change storytelling

A couple of weeks ago, festival producers, art talents, and climate activists shared one platform at the Climate x Culture Summit 2026, themed “Designing Sustainable Creative Experiences for Africa.” They agreed on one thing: if climate action is to mean more than it does today, it has to enter culture, not stand outside it.

As a communications executive invited to speak on storytelling and behaviour change, I left more convinced than ever. Ghana does not lack climate science. It lacks climate stories ordinary people can see themselves in, remember, and act on.

Asked whether climate change is communicated effectively to Ghanaians, speakers said no with most people only learn about it when the impact hits them. Many do not connect their habits to climate consequences. Dumping waste in the street, for instance, clogs drain and turns an hour of rain into a flood.

A climate song by an artist like Okyeame Kwame could reach more people in a year. Ghanaians learn through music, comedy skits and radio. Few will open a climate report, but many will share a song or retell a story.

Ghanaian artists have already proved this. Stonebwoy’s “Greedy Men” (2021) took illegal small-scale mining (galamsey) into mainstream entertainment, spotlighting the destruction of rivers and forests. Years earlier, M.anifest and Obrafour’s “No Shortcut to Heaven” (2013) was shot at a mining site, dramatising the human and environmental cost. These works did what a policy brief cannot: they put galamsey into dinner-table conversation and radio rotation. They turned ecological damage into moral narrative, which in Ghana, moves.

The economics support this. Africa’s creative sector generates more than two million jobs in a single year, a figure from four years ago, and in some countries, it now rivals agriculture as an employer. It deserves a seat where climate policy and finance are decided.

Campaigns must give people clear pathways to respond. The best climate stories are local, using familiar places and languages; human, centred on a farmer, trader or student rather than a graph; specific, linking a small action to a visible consequence; and they end with a next step. Creatives must be involved early, not called in at the end to decorate decisions already made. Artists can also document the indigenous knowledge that has long protected forests. Culture shapes how people understand their environment, organise their communities and decide what to value and protect.

Entertainment must also practise what it preaches. Music band Coldplay reports that direct emissions on the first two years of its Music of the Spheres World Tour were 59% lower than its previous stadium tour, verified by the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative. Solar-charged batteries, kinetic dance floors, sustainable aviation fuel, compostable wristbands and a low-carbon travel app all played a part, and each ticket funded tree planting, with 7 million trees reported so far.

The deeper lesson is participation. Fans were invited to power the show by dancing and to return their wristbands. Behaviour changed because the experience invited it. That is storytelling through participation, and Ghanaian festivals can adapt it, from refill stations and reusable cups to rewards for fans who choose public transport.

Event organisers must establish environmental baselines, track waste generation and energy consumption, and assess their environmental footprint before and after events. Accurate attendance figures are equally important, as inflated projections undermine effective planning and make it difficult to measure the actual impact of sustainability interventions.

Practical solutions must also be built into event production. These include improving waste segregation, reducing dependence on single-use plastics. Existing initiatives, such as the Obroni Wawu Festival by The OR Foundation, offer a glimpse of what is possible, demonstrating how upcycled furniture and event infrastructure can be combined with partnerships involving waste collectors, artisans and community-based cooperatives working on beach clean-ups and the recovery of discarded textiles.

One practical expression of this thinking could be a partnership between the Telecel Ghana Music Awards (TGMA) and The OR Foundation to transform the awards' red carpet into a celebration of circular fashion. Imagine Ghana's biggest music stars arriving in carefully styled second-hand and upcycled outfits sourced from Kantamanto, one of Africa's largest second-hand clothing markets and a significant centre of Ghana's circular economy. Rather than treating second-hand clothing as a symbol of affordability or social stigma, the red carpet would reposition it as a statement of creativity, identity and contemporary African fashion.

Detty December presents perhaps the biggest opportunity to demonstrate Ghana's commitment to sustainable entertainment. With thousands of visitors, diaspora communities, influencers and content creators participating in the festivities, the season offers an influential platform for shaping attitudes towards environmental responsibility.

But the scale of the celebrations also brings significant environmental challenges, particularly plastic waste, energy consumption and event-related pollution. For organisers, sustainability must become an operational priority, not simply a marketing message.

This requires a few practical commitments:

Ghana’s climate future must become part of everyday culture. Through music, fashion, art, festivals and other expressions of pop culture, creatives can make sustainability relatable. The opportunity is to make climate action part of the things people watch, listen to, celebrate and embrace, so that the conversation reaches Ghanaians long before the next environmental crisis.

The author, Ekow Quandzie, is Head of PR & Sustainability Lead at Global Media Alliance