Disaster risk profiling in southern Africa: inventories, impacts and implications

Enhanced ways to cope with climate change and environmental change are being made at various levels across the world. In the southern African region, despite the regions’ potential for economic growth, several disasters associated with climate stresses (particularly evidence made for repeated floods and droughts) can retard economic growth, development and livelihood security. In this paper, disaster inventories are argued to be useful ways of revealing nuanced analyses of extreme climate events and other challenges such as the spatial–temporal distribution of events and their impacts, particularly for vulnerable people groups. Despite repeated calls for vigilance about current and future climate variations and environmental change impacts, there are few detailed regional and country-specific inventories of disasters and records of subsequent humanitarian responses that record both impacts and possible implications of disaster events in the region. This paper draws together those data that do exist and offers a review of the occurrences, impacts and past responses to humanitarian crises in the region (for 14 countries over the period of 2000–2012). From this research a number of critical areas are profiled: first, the convergence of compound and complex shocks that occur simultaneously and/or sequentially is compounding disaster risks—including those associated with climate challenges. A review of international and regional UN agency, NGO and governmental reports all illustrates the need to articulate between internationally significant, ‘signature’ events and smaller, sub-national events with a higher recurrence interval that may be just as damaging to local communities. Second, the reach of disaster impacts is changing with the region becoming increasingly more mobile in terms of the movement patterns of people within countries and across borders, which brings with it new compound and complex threats such as cholera and measles outbreaks. Third, the nature of the changing disaster profile is placing strain on countries and the region. Sub-national disaster response due to personnel capacity limitations, at the national and municipal levels, is unable to effectively respond to and reduce risks associated with various shocks. In the paper, by providing an inventory of disasters and humanitarian responses in the southern African region, we point to the changing regional and national dimensions of the region’s disaster risk profile that, we suggest, will require a variety of responses.