This morning, I cannot scroll past it.We have all seen this picture before. A street swallowed by water. Cars half-submerged. A city stalled until it drains.It happens often enough that we scroll on without a second thought.Not today.This is Adabraka, in the centre of Accra, as I write — and it is not Adabraka alone. Kaneshie. Weija. Mallam. Spintex. Achimota. Tse Addo. The N1. The Kwame Nkrumah Interchange. The rain began on Sunday night and has not stopped.Right now, soldiers from the 48 Engineer Regiment are wading through Klagon and Dzorwulu, pulling stranded families from their homes. A fire has broken out in the rain at the Odawna market. The Interior Minister is asking anyone still indoors to stay where they are. Lives are at risk: there are reports of people caught in the water, and of at least one feared electrocuted.The water has not receded. The forecasters say more is coming. And it is tempting, even so, to look away — to call it the rainy season, to wait for it to drain, to scroll past.I cannot. Because the longer I look, the harder it becomes to unsee what this also is — a balance sheet, underwater.The first cost is, and will always be, human. A trader in Kaneshie who loses a year’s stock loses far more than inventory. She loses a child’s school fees, a roof that will not be mended before the next storm, years of patient saving gone in a single night. For a household living close to the edge, a flood is not an inconvenience; it is a shock that can erase everything. This is, first and last, a human story.But in a modern economy, the loss does not stay at the front door. Every submerged car and breached home is collateral against a loan. A flood strips that security, cuts off the borrower’s income, and pushes a sound loan toward default. The loss travels — from the family to the lender, and from the lender into the cost of borrowing for the whole economy.The figures have been warning us for years. This morning they are playing out in real time. The World Bank estimates that some 3.2 billion dollars of assets across Greater Accra already sit in the water’s path — a figure it expects to quadruple by 2050 — and that climate damage could cost Ghana as much as 1.7 per cent of its annual output by mid-century. Nearly two pesewas of every cedi the nation earns, gone.Economists at the Bank for International Settlements call hazards like these green swans — rare, severe, and invisible to risk models built on the past. Climate loads the dice on extreme weather. Nature strips away our defences. Left unpriced, the loss does not vanish; it metastasises into bad loans, consumed capital, and a higher cost of borrowing for everyone. And it falls hardest where there is least protection. In wealthy countries, roughly half of all disaster losses are insured; here, fewer than one in twenty. The family in Weija rebuilds out of its own pocket — or it does not rebuild at all.Some of this is finally beginning to change. In November 2024 the Bank of Ghana issued a Climate-Related Financial Risk Directive, and this year — this very rainy season — it became binding on the banks, requiring them to weigh climate risk in how they lend and to report on it each quarter. The flood and the rule have arrived in the same season. One is the test the other was written for.And by that test we are falling short — not because the directive is flawed, but because the capital to back it is not yet flowing.Ghana adds almost nothing to the warming of the planet; we are simply on its receiving end. More than half of our national climate plan is adaptation, not mitigation. Adaptation is not a slogan. It is money for drainage that can hold a thirty-millimetre hour. It is restoring the wetlands that soak up water before it reaches a doorway. It is resilience built into the loans behind our roads, homes and markets. And it is insurance that pays the moment the rain crosses a threshold, so a trader can reopen in days rather than seasons. The Ministry of Finance and the UNDP have begun exactly this kind of cover for Greater Accra.The government puts the cost of its climate plan near 22 billion dollars by 2030. Barely 800 million a year is flowing. Closing that gap is the defining national project of this decade, and no single actor can do it alone:The government must enforce the plans and clear the waterways.The central bank and the lenders must price and finance resilience, not merely flag the risk.The development institutions and insurers must carry the risks a poor country cannot carry by itself.The rain will keep coming. The Meteorological Agency says it will spread and persist. And when this flood finally drains, the cameras will move on, the headlines will fade, and the pull to scroll past will return with them.I will not. As a banker responsible for sustainability, sustainable finance and environmental and social risk across 34 African markets and 38 globally, I know the true cost of this water is only beginning to surface — in emptied savings accounts, in defaulted loans, in children kept home because the road to school has become a river.We can keep paying for these floods after they arrive, season after season, in lives and savings and capital alike. Or we can decide, at last, to finance ourselves against them before they do.The water is still rising across Accra as I write. It has already asked the question. The answer is ours to write — and we are already late.The writer leads sustainability, environmental and social risk management, and sustainable finance governance across Commercial, Consumer and Corporate & Investment Banking, covering 34 African markets and 38 globally. The views expressed are her own.