In this guest post, Dr Andrews Korah describes the ideas behind GeoHeat-SSA: A GeoAI decision-support platform for urban heat governance in Sub-Saharan Africa, an Urban Urgencies project funded by the Urban Studies Foundation.
Extreme heat is an everyday reality in Ghana’s rapidly expanding cities. For market traders, head porters, and outdoor workers navigating the scorching midday sun, and for people living in densely built, informal neighbourhoods with little shade, rising temperatures directly shape health, daily livelihoods, and quality of life. As concrete and asphalt replace natural vegetation, urban heat islands intensify, leaving local authorities in urgent need of actionable insights to protect their most exposed communities and vulnerable populations.
GeoHeat-SSA is a new Urban Studies Foundation (USF)-supported initiative launched to tackle this challenge head-on. Led by Dr Andrews Korah (Data Institute for Societal Challenges and Department of Geography and Environmental Sustainability, University of Oklahoma) alongside Co-Investigators Mr Kwaku Twum (Mapkot Technologies) and Mr Eric Anorrey (Global Youth Innovation Center), the project brings together a multi-institutional team of spatial analysts, climate adaptation researchers, and urban planning experts.
Together with collaborators Prof Emmanuel Frimpong Boamah, Dr Michael Asibey, Dr Gifty Attiah, Mr Desmond Lartey, and Mr Anthony Sarfo, the project combines advanced GeoAI with on-the-ground reality across four key cities: Accra, Kumasi, Tamale, and Sekondi-Takoradi.
Towards actionable insights
Many urban municipalities lack a centralised system to pinpoint heat hotspots and evaluate cooling interventions. GeoHeat-SSA bridges this gap by integrating satellite-derived surface temperatures, land cover patterns, and direct community knowledge.
The project focuses on three core aims:
Uncovering drivers: Pinpointing the localised spatial factors driving neighbourhood-scale heat dynamics.
Scenario forecasting: Simulating future heat risk under practical cooling strategies, such as targeted urban greening, cool roof adoption, and blue infrastructure expansion.
Delivering actionable tools: Producing open-access datasets, policy guidance, and an interactive decision-support dashboard co-designed for and with urban planners and local authorities.
What makes GeoHeat-SSA unique is its commitment to co-production. The platform is being actively shaped alongside the people who understand these spaces best, including municipal planners, community organisations, market traders, and residents of informal settlements. Although we focus on urban thermal dynamics, the underlying GeoAI framework is scalable, paving the way for future applications in flood management, air quality, and drought resilience.
An 18-month journey ahead
This launch marks the start of an 18-month collaborative effort running from December 2026 through May 2028. Over the coming months, the team and partners will move from initial foundation and data mobilization workshops to participatory heat-risk mapping sessions across all four cities.
As the project progresses, we will release open-access heat vulnerability datasets, host a national policy dissemination workshop, and launch the interactive decision-support dashboard.
We invite planners, researchers, and community organizations to join us on this journey, shape our outputs, and help test how this framework can support heat governance across Sub-Saharan Africa.
Stay tuned for upcoming workshop dates, open data releases, and project updates!