Frederick Ato Armah

Association of African Universities · Directorate of Research and Programmes

Smallholder farmers are widely touted as essential to sustainable agricultural development in sub-Saharan Africa and beyond. But what exactly is meant by sustainable development, and how are smallholder farmers expected to contribute to it? In this perspective, we describe and assess two competing visions of sustainable development, namely Capital...

Attribution of environmental outcomes to climate change is a live debate in scholarly and policy circles. Non-scientific attribution by the lay public has value for enriching the discourse, engagements, and decisions on loss and damage, adaptation and mitigation, communication strategies, and the science-policy interface from local to international...

Produced water is the largest waste byproduct from the oil and gas industry with elevated levels of salts, metals, and organic constituents. This comprehensive review summarizes (1) the potential impact, (2) produced water management, and (3) identifies current research thrust areas in future efforts. Complementary treatment systems involving chemi...

Policy and practical efforts to reduce vulnerability, strengthen resilience and drive desirable environmental attitudes or behavior ought to be informed by an understanding of the contextual and compositional factors that shape people’s perceptions of environmental phenomena. The objective of this study was to determine the contextual and compositi...

Economies and livelihoods in the Caribbean strongly depend on the terrestrial and marine natural resource base. There are critical gaps in quantitative data and the contextual and compositional factors affecting perceptions of changes in ecosystems and natural resources. This paper used interview data from 441 households in Belize, Dominican Republ...

Gender inequalities in vulnerabilities and capacities of fishery livelihoods to respond to shocks is a major barrier to sustainable small-scale fishery livelihoods. Eliminating these vulnerabilities and gender barriers to livelihood capacities is increasingly deemed a means to build livelihood resilience in the face of fisheries declines. But livel...

Endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) and potentially toxic elements (PTEs) pose risks to human health, here assessed in soils from a municipal dump, an industrial site, agricultural use and a forest reserve. Across the spectrum, there are significant variations in PTEs and EDCs, and arsenic had minimum and maximum values of 2.58 and 2455.75 mg/kg,...

Bacteriological quality of oil and gas-related produced water is a function of the interaction of a complex set of factors, which invariably determine the ease with which this waste material may be treated effectively. Hitherto, only few studies have examined the interplay of these sets of factors on the incidence of coliform bacteria. The American...

Selected endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) were measured in adult female menstrual blood for the first time in Ghana, Africa, taking into account the importance of non-invasive means of matrices sampling in vulnerable groups, such as pregnant women, the elderly or chronically ill people. The menstrual blood samples of twenty (20) female adults...

The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have been far reaching across almost every sphere of life. Families, which are the basic units of society, have not been spared the ravages of the pandemic. Changes in family daily routines as a result of COVID-19 can affect spousal relationships, parenting and childcare practices. However, the extent to which t...

Tha effects of pollution on land use

This paper is one of series of papers assessing the suitability of formulating titanium dioxide climate smart Portland cement in developing countries using locally available cementitious material like kaolin. In this paper, the authors highlight extraction of titanium dioxide in kaolin deposits in the Central region, Ghana to be used as an additive...

The Central Region of Ghana is endowed with rich kaolin deposits with immense potential industrial application which largely remain untapped due to limited information on geochemical properties. This paper assessed the geological composition of kaolin deposits with the view of elucidating their use in the formulation of climate-smart Portland cemen...

Governments are negotiating actions intended to halt biodiversity loss and put it on a path to recovery by 2050. Here, we show that bending the curve for biodiversity is possible, but only if actions are implemented urgently and in an integrated manner. Connecting these actions to biodiversity outcomes and tracking progress remain a challenge.

Although the role of plants in wetland ecosystems is largely known, not many native plant species have been used in constructed wetlands, especially in sub-Saharan Africa to treat oilfield wastewater, an emerging contaminant of considerable concern to both academics and policy makers owing to its deleterious effects on aquatic organisms and human h...

Background Several environmental factors are associated with the risk of acute lower respiratory infections (ALRIs) and upper respiratory infections (URIs) in children under 5 years of age (YOA). Evidence implicating chemical pesticides remains equivocal. There are also no data on this subject in these children in Ghana. This study investigated the...

Human impacts on the Earth’s biosphere are driving the global biodiversity crisis. Governments are preparing to agree on a set of actions intended to halt the loss of biodiversity and put it on a path to recovery by 2050. We provide evidence that the proposed actions can bend the curve for biodiversity, but only if these actions are implemented urg...

EXPERT INPUT TO THE POST-2020 GLOBAL BIODIVERSITY FRAMEWORK: TRANSFORMATIVE ACTIONS ON ALL DRIVERS OF BIODIVERSITY LOSS ARE URGENTLY REQUIRED TO ACHIEVE THE GLOBAL GOALS BY 2050

Livelihood resilience is one of the social-ecological concepts with importance for development, policy and research as crises from human-environment interactions are becoming intense and widespread. Nevertheless, measuring livelihood resilience is a difficult task requiring handy and practical methods, which are missing in the literature. This stud...

The concept of livelihood resilience provides a unique framework for understanding challenges in complex social–ecological systems (SESs) and fostering sustainability. Despite the crises many small-scale fisheries (SSFs) are facing, few studies have operationalized the concept in the context of declining SSFs in developing countries. This study aim...

Background The COVID-19 pandemic and control measures adopted by countries globally can lead to stress and anxiety. Investigating the coping strategies to this unprecedented crisis is essential to guide mental health intervention and public health policy. This study examined how people are coping with the COVID-19 crisis in Ghana and identify facto...

During the past three decades, constructed wetlands have become an integral part of the suite of technologies for removing domestic and industrial wastewater contaminants. The use of constructed wetlands has disproportionately focused on domestic and agricultural wastewaters and storm water runoff and less on oil and gas-related produced water. In...

Abstract Background The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has been associated with several adverse health outcomes. However, few studies in sub-Saharan Africa have examined its deleterious consequences on mental health. Therefore, we investigated the prevalence and changes in boredom, anxiety and psychological well-being before and during the COVID...

Household energy insecurity (HEINS) is detrimental to the health of the poor and most vulnerable in resource-poor settings. However, this effect amidst the COVID-19 pandemic and the uneven implementation of restrictions can create a synergistic burden of diseases and health risks for the most vulnerable in low- and middle-income countries, exacerba...

Onchocerciasis volvulus is the second highest infectious cause of blindness in the world, and is estimated to affect 37 million people, of whom 99% reside in sub-Saharan Africa. As a public health problem the disease is most closely associated with Africa, where it constitutes a serious obstacle to socio-economic development. Using the human ecolog...

One of the most important defining characteristics of groundwater quality is pH as it fundamentally controls the amount and chemical form of many organic and inorganic solutes in groundwater. Groundwater data are frequently characterized by a wide degree of variability of the factors which possibly influence pH distribution. For this reason, it is...

Climate information can help vulnerable populations anticipate disasters before they happen and enable communities prepare for and cope with them. A complementary log-log regression model based on quantitative study in coastal communities in Tanzania was used to assess the likelihood of the rural poor, rural non poor, urban poor, and urban non poor...

Constructed wetlands have been proposed to address the frequency and magnitude of oil and gas-related environmental contamination. The effect of co-variation of hydraulic load and hydraulic retention time on the dynamics of contaminant removal efficiency of heterogeneous plant species was assessed using ordinary least squares regression. The result...

Many children under five years still die from diarrhoeal diseases globally even though much progress has been made. The threat to public health posed by diarrhoeal diseases warrants the need to understand the interaction of the disease determinants from a spatio-temporal perspective to inform policy and intervention design. In this study, a pooled...

A comprehensive assessment of ecosystem health of wetlands is needed to guide protection and restoration activities. However, the conventional methods used in evaluating ecosystem health of wetlands largely rely on field observational data which often do not provide spatio-temporal perspectives to the assessment. Geospatial assessment of remotely s...

COVID-19 is an active pandemic that likely poses an existential threat to humanity. Frequent handwashing, social distancing, and partial or total lockdowns are among the suite of measures prescribed by the World Health Organization (WHO) and being implemented across the world to contain the pandemic. However, existing inequalities in access to cert...

Anthropogenic activities threaten surface water quality across the globe especially in contexts where monitoring is non-existent or weak. Our understanding of the effect, order and magnitude of natural and human-induced environmental factors on surface water quality is limited. This study assessed the effect, predictive order and magnitude of natur...

In groundwater, dissolved organic matter (DOM), a complex material, is a contaminant of concern owing to its ability to influence water quality and stimulate microbial metabolism. Using a 445-nm diode laser-induced fluorescence (LIF) spectroscopy, DOM contamination levels have been investigated of well water samples fetched from ten privately owned...

Energy insecurity, the lack of access to adequate, affordable, reliable, acceptable, and clean sources of energy for a healthy and sustainable livelihood, poses a challenge to several households. However, the conceptualization of its dimensions and role in the health outcomes of women, infants, and children in most sub-Saharan African countries hav...

In the era of global environmental change, land transformation is acknowledged as a critical subject that needs to be addressed. Even though some studies have been carried out in Ghana on land use and land cover (LULC) change of wetlands, the conventional methods used were unable to reveal the underlying processes associated with the land transform...

The destabilizing impacts of climate change make mitigation measures a global imperative and urgent. The Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goal 13 give fresh impetus for climate change mitigation action. However, mitigation policies can have unintended consequences for food security. The current study assessed the impacts of UK climat...

Barley is a major ingredient for the malting industry which is highly sensitive and vulnerable to malt barley supply. The United Kingdom (UK) has the second highest malting capacity in the EU and the third largest malting industry in the world, supplying malt to major global breweries. Premium whisky, which has both economic and cultural significan...

The flow of water through food commodity trade has been rationalized in the virtual water concept. Estimates of future virtual water flows under climate, land use, and population changes could have instrumental value for policy and strategic trade decisions. This paper estimated the virtual water flows associated with feed barley and meat imports t...

The burden of disease from direct environmental causes is significantly higher in developing countries, where solid fuel use is predominant than in developed countries. However, the mechanism by which this happens has not been thoroughly examined. Therefore, this study examined the multiple health effects associated with the use of solid fuel stove...

The data presented here are from the Offinso North District Farm Health Study (ONFAHS), a population-based cross-sectional study among vegetable farmers in Ghana. The paper addresses knowledge, pesticide handling practices, and protective measures related to pesticide use by self-reported symptoms for 310 adult farmers who completed a comprehensive...

Water productivity has become a key requirement in sustainable crop production and environmental management. Deficit irrigation (DI) and partial root-zone drying irrigation (PRDI) are two strategies that have been exploited to maximize crop production per unit water, with attendant effect on the quality attributes of harvest index. We employed meta...

Objective: This study aimed to develop and validate a household energy poverty index (HEPI) that measures the energy problems associated with accessibility, affordability, and resource constraints. Methods: A series of interrelated steps including item identification, content validity, item reduction, factor and parallel analyses, and tests of reli...

Access to clean cooking fuels is critical for human health and features, prominently in the UN SustainableDevelopment Goals. However, our understanding ofthe probabilities of access to clean cooking across sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is emergent. A pooled regression analysis of the compositional and contextual factorsthat cumulatively influence access...

One out of every eight deaths globally is attributable to air pollution and these disproportionately ensue in high population density areas in lower income countries characterized by higher long-term levels of ambient pollution. Yet, our understanding of how population attributes and neighborhood effects jointly influence exposure to e-waste relate...

The realization of the scale, magnitude, and complexity of the water and sanitation problem at the global level has compelled international agencies and national governments to increase their resolve to face the challenge. There is extensive evidence on the independent effects of urbanicity (rural-urban environment) and wealth status on access to w...

The World Health Organization (WHO) has highlighted the beneficial role of adequate intake of potassium (K) in combating the global burden of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs), mainly hypertension and cardiovascular diseases. Diets are the main source of K supply to humans and can contribute to both K deficiency (hypokalemia) and excess (hyperkalemia...

Background Food insecurity and poverty rates in Ghana are highest in the districts from latitude 8° N upwards. These have motivated several interventions aimed at addressing the food insecurity via promoting agricultural growth. An assessment of the overall impact of these interventions on food security is necessary to guide policy design and futur...

List of projects included in the review after screening processes and summaries of selected case studies. (DOCX)

PRISMA flow chart. (DOCX)

Renewable energy policies, in tandem with favourable market conditions, have culminated in large increases in biodiesel use globally. With increasing volumes of biodiesel and a broader range of suitable feedstocks, including used oils, stabilisation is becoming ever more important. The quality of biodiesel depends on the feedstock, purity of the mi...

Techniques that reduce the volume of water applied in irrigation are desirable in the face of dwindling water resources and increasing demand for food. Various water-saving irrigation strategies, involving, the application of water below full crop-water requirements, have been advanced. This study employed meta-analysis to examine the relative crop...

The burgeoning literature on the climate change–human health nexus has focused almost exclusively on the health impacts of climate change with little attention to how ill-health and disease influence public perception of the health risks of climate change. Based on a cross-sectional survey of 1,253 individuals, linear regression was used to examine...

Chemometric techniques were applied to evaluate the spatial and temporal heterogeneities in groundwater quality data for approximately 740 goldmining and agriculture-intensive locations in Ghana. The strongest linear and monotonic relationships occurred between Mn and Fe. Sixty-nine per cent of total variance in the dataset was explained by four va...

Although the independent effects of the predictors of the yield in transesterification are well documented, there are still gaps in our current understanding of how specific process variables cumulatively influence the yield of biodiesel. In this study, a two-level Plackett–Burman experimental design was used to assess the set of active process var...

Public perception of the underlying causes of anthropogenic climate change is a complex and subjective issue that is critical to effective risk communication. This issue is important to scientists and policymakers because of the role of individual perceptions in influencing their protective behaviour towards risk (e.g., the adoption of climate risk...

Soils generate agricultural, environmental, and socio-economic benefits that are vital to human life. The enormity of threats to global soil stocks raises the imperative for securing this vital resource. To contribute to the security framing and advancement of the soil security concept and discourse, this paper provides a working definition and pro...

The dependence of humans on the ecosystem services that natural resources provide is absolute. The need for social taboos as frameworks for governing natural resource abstraction is gaining widespread recognition especially within the context of climate change. However, the complex relationship between resource and habitat taboos (RHTs) and human h...

With urban populations worldwide expected to witness substantial growth over the next decades, pressure on urban land and resources is projected to increase in response. For policy-makers to adequately meet the challenges brought about by changes in the dynamics of urban areas, it is important to clearly identify and communicate their causes. Flood...

The relationships between environmental exposure and health outcomes are complex, multidirectional, and dynamic. Therefore, it is required to have an understanding of these linkages for effective health risk communication. Artisanal gold mining is widespread globally, in spite of its associated health hazards, with an estimated 30 million people en...

Rooting media used in current root phenotyping studies can have substantial effect. In this study, the effects of three different nutrient conducting papers (Black construction paper, Anchor blue germination paper and Kimpak paper) and soil-filled boxes on root growth and root system architecture (RSA) of Brassica rapa (cultivars ‘R500’ and ‘IMB211...

The public debate on GMOs is one of the most controversial science-policy issues of the 21st century. In sub-Saharan Africa, where food shortages and food insecurity are rife, the polar debate on the socio-economic benefits and human health risks of GMOs has been mounting in the past decade. Increasingly, scientists, advocacy groups and civil socie...

Enticing economic benefits for host nations and the notion of large areas of land considered available are often put forward as the main reasons for large-scale land acquisition in many areas of sub-Saharan Africa. However, country-level datasets of land acquisitions seem to indicate a clear divide between a majority of countries engaged in land ac...

Gold mining has played an important role in Ghana's economy, however the negative environmental and socio-economic effects on the host communities associated with gold mining have overshadowed these economic gains. It is within this context that this paper assessed in an integrated manner the environmental and socio-economic impacts of artisanal go...

Artisanal and small scale mining (ASM) provides a livelihood to more than 100 million men and women worldwide, mostly in the global south. Although the sector is male-dominated, the number of women engaged in its activities has increased dramatically in recent years, underscoring the need for critical assessment of their environmental, health and s...

A human health risk assessment of artisanal miners exposed to toxic metals in water bodies and sediments in the PresteaHuni Valley District of Ghana was carried out in this study, in line with US EPA risk assessment guidelines. A total of 70 water and 30 sediment samples were collected from surface water bodies in areas impacted by the operations o...

Understanding context-specific barriers to effective climate change adaptation encountered by individuals is necessary to elicit a nuanced understanding of adaptation processes in order to support decision-making. Recent scholarship highlights poverty as a critical element in barriers to climate change adaptation in developing countries. However, e...

Adequate dietary intake of potassium (K) helps fight noncommunicable diseases (NCDs), mainly hypertension and cardiovascular diseases. This paper (i) estimated the K intake of Ghanaian population using food supply and food composition data and (ii) compared this estimate with the WHO recommended requirement for K in order to assess if there is a ri...