Pre-disaster planning and preparedness: drought and flood forecasting and analysis in Zimbabwe

Abstract

A situational analysis of future drought and flood impacts in Zimbabwe is outlined in this present study. The assessment under different scenarios is carried out using Aqueduct Global Flood Analyzer in which all the analyses are based on the gross domestic product (GDP), population, and the present and future (2030) urban damage. In this study, to effectively estimate future changes, three scenarios were employed, namely, IPCC Scenario A2, the Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP) scenario which represents climate change, and the Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSP) scenario which represents socio-economic change. All these scenarios were employed from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 5th Assessment Report. To determine current mean monthly precipitation, 1981–2010 data were used and Meteonorm V7 software was employed for the generation of the mean monthly precipitation from 2011 to 2100. The level of flood protection employed is a 10-year one which is used to identify the population at risk, the effects of this event on the GDP and to determine the rate at which urban damage is happening. Utilizing Meteonorm V7 software, average monthly precipitation is predicted. This study determined that, in any year, the majority of Zimbabwe has a low to medium (2–3% probability) flood occurrence in which a 10-year flood has a 10% occurrence probability in any given year. If there is no flood protection employed, this 10-year flood could cause around 74.9 million USD affected GDP, 119 thousand affected population and 49.5 million USD urban damage. As much as it is impossible to eliminate drought and flood events, a diminution approach and proper planning and preparation before their occurrence reduce the economic and social losses.

How Far Disaster Management Implemented Toward Flood Preparedness: A Lesson Learn from Youth Participation Assessment in Indonesia

“…In the pre-disaster phase, planning activities include the alertness of preparation plans (Figure 4) to deal with potential disasters or emergencies [34]. It is the main foundation of disaster management fruitfulness, and is proved to play important role in reducing economic and social losses [35]. The planning is based on a specific disaster scenario or single hazard, called the Contingency Plan [36][37][38], in this case, the flood disaster.…”

Assessing Progress in Reducing the Number of Disaster-affected People: Insights from Zimbabwe

“…In the last 30 years, the most severe agricultural drought episodes include 1991-1992, 1994-1995, 2002-2003, 2015-2016, and 2018-2019 seasons [11]. The 1991/1992 agricultural drought was so severe that Zimbabwe became a chief food importer in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region [12]. Likewise, the 2015/2016 and 2018/2019 agricultural droughts caused drastic crop failure to the extent that about 7.5 million and 5.1 million people were food-insecure respectively [43].…”

“…Zimbabwe has not been spared by such disasters. The country is prone to droughts, floods and hailstorms [11,12]. Given this, Zimbabwe joined other countries in adopting a global framework for disaster risk reduction -the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (SFDRR) in 2015.…”

Using multi criteria decision analysis in a geographical information system framework to assess drought risk

“…Influenced by natural and anthropogenic factors, droughts are widespread causing economic, social and environmental losses ( Prabnakorn et al., 2019 ) they are becoming increasingly frequent across the world at national and international levels ( Stampfli et al., 2018 ). When considering rural areas, droughts can create unfavourable conditions for crop development, affecting global water supplies and thus food security ( Samu and Akıntuğ, 2020 ; Wijitkosum, 2018 ) due to depleted yields ( Prabnakorn et al., 2019 ). According to Cordão et al.…”

“… Samu and Akıntuğ (2020) measured drought severity during 1901–2008 using monthly soil moisture hydrographs, so that when the soil moisture fells below the 20th percentile, this was classified as a drought. Han et al.…”