News from the CEPA e-mail list

The role of CEPA in flood risk management strategies in Mozambique (27/02/09)

Greetings CEPA people:

Mozambique was hit by a flood in 2000 that many of us will remember because of the devastation it caused. Affecting 4.5 million people (25% of the population) it cost the country approximately 20% of its GDP. The authors of a recent paper on risk management strategies for Mozambique note that there is no viable structural ‘fix’, no technical solution to prevent further floods since the country is large, poor, and sparsely populated. The authors suggest that reducing the vulnerability of communities, raising awareness, and improving preparedness are the only practical options to minimize the damage and loss of life from floods in the future. They undertook a project funded by the UKs Department for International Development and the United Nations Human Settlements project (UN-HABITAT) to develop a strategy to reduce vulnerability of rural communities to flooding.

To begin with they did a literature survey on flood management strategies and found plenty of evidence of technical solutions – flood forecasting, warning systems etc – but much less evidence of practical tools aimed at the communities themselves. Of course living on higher ground away from floodplains would easily solve the problem but the reality is that the floodplains provide the fertile soil that support livelihoods and suggesting that people move to less fertile areas is not likely to meet with success. Instead the authors have pilot-tested through a series of workshops with local communities and then produced a number of practical awareness tools to help people live with floods and implement sustainable flood risk management strategies. These included:

Their full report was published in the Journal of Flood Risk Management and is available here http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/120185546/PDFSTART and includes full details of the materials they produced as well as illustrations of the materials.

With best wishes, Sandra Hails, Ramsar Secretariat