Abstract

Agro-climatic zones are geographical areas delineated based on climate homogeneity and impact on agriculture. Ghana's agro-climatic zones have been in use since the 1960s, with no consideration given to current climate change and variability. The continued use of this age-old classified zones suggest Ghana's climate remains stable despite previous research findings to the contrary. In this study, we reconstructed a more appropriate and dis-aggregated agro-climatic zone map of Ghana that is in tandem with the current climate change and variability. Our findings revealed significant changes in the number of climate zones, their boundary sizes and geographical orientation. The newly proposed agro-climatic zones map consist of five distinctive climate regimes namely Sudan Savannah, Guinea Savannah, Transition, Forest and Coastal zones. The Sudan and Guinea Savannah zones showed a southerly expansion. The transition zone shriveled in size as the Guinea Savannah zone took over most of it, notably in the southeast. The forest zone also shrank in size with a northwest shift while the coastal belt grew to encompass the whole coast of Ghana. These changes are strong evidence of climate change and possible food production changes. The findings of this study are useful to agriculture sector in planning their activities, the health sector in predicting specific diseases caused by changes in weather and climate, Ghana Meteorological Agency for weather forecasting purposes, and the National Disaster Management in identifying disaster prone zones.