Restricting the supply of used cars, in other words, doesn't reduce the demand for these cars that's there. To do that, Festival says, governments need to offer people other ways of getting around that are affordable and accessible, such as improving public transport, cycling paths, walking paths, helping people to work from home or often, or to work closer to home.

So what we are extrapolated from the Ghanaian experience is that, if you really want to reduce used vehicle consumption, and social environmental homes, you will need more than just restricting supply, through import restrictions. And so you need to plan to reduce the need to travel. You have to make public transport, walking, cycling, safer, efficient and attractive, so that people wouldn't even need the cars in the face. So if you really don't tie such interventions to address the demand side of things, and just restrict supply, you only create more problems for the market to shift to and background where you are in which you even account for the dynamics that's happening.

Those kind of reforms are, of course, largely up to national governments to implement. But Festival says that the wealthy countries exporting these old cars also have a role to play. For example, the kinds of overseas projects that they choose to invest in using international aid, their trade agreements, the number of cars they're manufacturing in the first place, all of these factors have an impact on the used car trade in low-income countries such as Ghana, which, as Festival points out, affects the global climate too.