Spatial and temporal inventory of flood and drought disasters for Africa discovered from EM-DAT and FloodList databases
Abstract
Floods and drought result in severe casualties every year in Africa. However, the database available from EM-DAT and FloodList fails to record the disaster events spatially and temporally on the extent, and its severity of floods and drought which limits the utilization of historical disaster records for climate adaptation and investment strategies. This research provides spatial-temporal views of Africas natural disasters recorded in the EM-DAT and ListFlood database for the period of 1950 2020. Using the location details of individual events, the geographic information system (GIS) at the subnational level i.e. district was used to capture the overall occurrence frequency of floods and drought for entire Africa. A total of 1,600 disaster records were digitized of which 1,278 are flood events and drought covers 322 events. A detailed analysis of flood and drought disaster impacts in terms of human fatalities (730,000), injuries, affected (550 million), and property damages (16.3 billion USD) are summarized at sub-national for the whole period. Between 1950 to 2020 the top 10 flood-affected countries in Africa are Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, Algeria, Somalia, Angola, Malawi, Mozambique, and South Africa. Despite the global monitoring of disaster inventory by national and international humanitarian agencies, there is a large gap in reporting drought events. Since 1951, only 322 drought events reported and the inventory lacks details of economic damages and human fatalities, and affected populations. With the current limitation, there is a clear need for fine-scale mapping of flood and drought events using open-source satellite data. The Water Secure Africa Initiative (WASA) project is currently developing unique geospatial water-risk inventory records with spatial resolution from 10m to 250m and temporal range from daily to weekly, to highlight the importance of location accuracy, extent, duration, and severity in systematic ways using multisource earth observation data for disaster preparedness strategies. Such sub-national country outlooks of floods and drought records available spatially and temporally can provide useful insights for developing robust disaster risk management policies from international and national humanitarian efforts towards building climate resilience.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2021
- Bibcode:
- 2021AGUFM.A35I1750A