Monitoring and moderating extreme indoor temperatures in low-income urban communities

Climate change presents significant threats to human health, especially for low-income urban communities in the Global South. Despite numerous studies of heat stress, surprisingly little is known about the temperatures actually encountered by people in their homes, or the benefits of affordable adaptations. This paper examines indoor air temperature measurements gathered from 47 living rooms within eight low-income communities of Accra and Tamale, Ghana. Using multiple temperature indices and a tiered analysis, we evaluate indoor temperature variations linked to roof type, ceiling insulation, presence of fans, and tree shade, for different housing types and locations. Our data reveal indoor temperatures in the range 22.4 ◦C to 45.9 ◦C for Accra, and 22.2 ◦C to 43.0 ◦C in Tamale. Using dummy regression analysis, we find that tree shade reduces the number of very hot days (>40 ◦C) and nights (>30 ◦C) by about 12 and 15 d per year, respectively. Building materials also strongly moderate indoor temperatures but in opposing ways: rooms with traditional mud walls and thatch roofs are on average 4.5 ◦C cooler than rooms in concrete block houses with uninsulated metal roofs during the day but are 1.5 ◦C warmer at night; rooms with ceiling insulation are on average 6.9 ◦C cooler in the day but 1.4 ◦C warmer at night. We conclude that sub-daily data are necessary for reporting extreme indoor temperatures, and that trade-offs between minimum and maximum temperatures require interventions to be assessed carefully before attempting to counter extreme heat inside homes

Testing the Performance of Fresh Tomato Markets Following Import Trade Liberalization in Ghana:

A chronic issue of policy concern in Ghana is the implication of trade liberalization for the performance of agricultural markets. Much public opinion in Ghana blames the perennially volatile, highly dispersed and uncompetitive prices of tomato on the importation of cheap tomato products into Ghana. There is however insufficient empirical evidence to confirm this opinion. To the best of our knowledge, no empirical research on the performance of tomato markets in the post-liberalization period in Ghana has ever been conducted. This paper therefore seeks to provide evidence on the performance of Ghana’s tomato markets following trade liberalization. Such evidence is useful in assessing the implication of liberalization for the performance of Ghana’s food commodity markets. We used the threshold autoregressive model to analyse wholesale prices of fresh tomato gathered from four major markets in Ghana. The findings reveal that price transmission and adjustments parameters, key indicators of market performance, declined following the actual liberalization of Ghana’s agricultural markets. It appears that the underlying factors responsible for the performance of the tomato markets deteriorated over the period of the study. This may be evidence of liberalization being partly responsible for the marketing problem of tomato in Ghana.Key Words/Descriptors: Trade Liberalization, Price Transmission, MarketIntegration, Tomato, Commodities Market

Monitoring and moderating extreme indoor temperatures in low-income urban communities

Climate change presents significant threats to human health, especially for low-income urban communities in the Global South. Despite numerous studies of heat stress, surprisingly little is known about the temperatures actually encountered by people in their homes, or the benefits of affordable adaptations. This paper examines indoor air temperature measurements gathered from 47 living rooms within eight low-income communities of Accra and Tamale, Ghana. Using multiple temperature indices and a tiered analysis, we evaluate indoor temperature variations linked to roof type, ceiling insulation, presence of fans, and tree shade, for different housing types and locations. Our data reveal indoor temperatures in the range 22.4 ◦C to 45.9 ◦C for Accra, and 22.2 ◦C to 43.0 ◦C in Tamale. Using dummy regression analysis, we find that tree shade reduces the number of very hot days (>40 ◦C) and nights (>30 ◦C) by about 12 and 15 d per year, respectively. Building materials also strongly moderate indoor temperatures but in opposing ways: rooms with traditional mud walls and thatch roofs are on average 4.5 ◦C cooler than rooms in concrete block houses with uninsulated metal roofs during the day but are 1.5 ◦C warmer at night; rooms with ceiling insulation are on average 6.9 ◦C cooler in the day but 1.4 ◦C warmer at night. We conclude that sub-daily data are necessary for reporting extreme indoor temperatures, and that trade-offs between minimum and maximum temperatures require interventions to be assessed carefully before attempting to counter extreme heat inside homes