admin October 27th, 2010
Largely unnoticed by the rest of the world – and certainly invisible when competing with stories from Pakistan or even Haiti, where cholera has now raised its ugly head – the West African state of Benin has been devastated by floods over the past two weeks.
Just over a week ago UNICEF reported that it was responding to mass flooding that had covered more that two thirds of the country. Unseasonably heavy rains had caused the Oueme and Mono rivers to overflow and the resulting floods destroyed homes, schools and health centres, claiming 43 lives and leaving nearly 100,000 homeless.
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Tags: Benin, Floods, Haiti, natural disasters, Pakistan, Plan International, Red Cross, UNICEF
admin September 17th, 2010
Floods have been everywhere in the news recently, and UNHCR is now reporting that 150,000 people in Chad have been affected by flooding in recent weeks, including 70,000 who have become homeless because their homes were destroyed.
They are suffering from the heaviest rains to hit that part of the country for 40 years – this rain following on from a fierce drought. UNHCR says that, “Humanitarian access to affected areas across Chad remains a challenge due to destroyed roads and bridges in areas where populations are in need of help.” Early in August, northern Chad was hit by what were reported to be the heaviest rains for 50 years.
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Tags: Chad, Drought, FEWS, Floods, Mali, Mauretania, Niger, OCHA, UNHCR
admin September 1st, 2010
Job creation and enterprise development are one of the key elements of Advance Aid’s mission in Africa and we have been delighted to be able to assist with the establishment of a new tarpaulin factory in Athi River, outside Nairobi.
Owned and run by Reltex Africa, the factory opened earlier this summer and is already employing 200 people, with 300 employees the target. What is more, it is now exporting tarpaulins to Pakistan to help with the relief effort there.
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Tags: Floods, Kenya, Pakistan, Red Cross
admin August 30th, 2010
The eyes of the world, of course, are on Pakistan and the terrible damage and displacement that the floods there are causing. But in West Africa a crisis of similar proportions is affecting just as many people – but generating only a tiny percentage of the column inches (or the donor dollars) that accrue to Pakistan.
First, drought led to crop failures and the threat of famine – especially in Niger and Chad, where more than seven million people are affected. Now the drought has broken, but it has been replaced by torrential rain, which has created further problems by causing flooding and destroying crops.
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Tags: Chad, China, Drought, Floods, natural disasters, Niger, OCHA, Pakistan, UN
admin August 10th, 2010
Shortly after we published the last entry on this blog, where we asked why there had been no DEC appeal, DEC announced that it was mounting a coordinated appeal for money to help the estimated 15 million people now affected by the floods in Pakistan. You can donate here.
The 15 million figure comes from Maurizio Giuliano, a spokesman for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) who said on Monday that, if the Pakistan government’s calculations are correct, the scale of the disaster could be worse than Haiti’s January earthquake, the 2004 Tsunami, and the 2005 Pakistan earthquake combined.
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Tags: Chad, Floods, Haiti, Indian Ocean Tsunami, Myanmar, natural disasters, Niger, OCHA, Pakistan
admin August 3rd, 2010
The complexities of global warming and the interconnectedness of world markets have been starkly illustrated this week. And, as so often, the people to suffer from these random events are the poor in general and the African poor in particular.
As the worst famine for several years stalks Niger and Chad, IRIN News reports that the 2010 rainy season in West Africa has opened with hail storms in Guinea and the heaviest rain in 50 years in northern Chad. Floods have killed at least 80 people and destroyed homes, bridges, septic tanks, livestock, crops and food stocks; dams have broken, and wells and latrines and have been submerged.
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Tags: Chad, Climate change, Drought, Floods, Global warming, natural disasters, Niger, Pakistan, Russia, UNICEF
admin July 31st, 2010
In Thursday’s post we reported that floods were affecting Pakistan – possibly brought on by the La Niña effect. Today the BBC is reporting that one million people in Pakistan are affected by these floods, and that the city of Peshawar, with three million inhabitants, is cut off.
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Tags: Floods, La Nina, OCHA, Pakistan
admin July 29th, 2010
Opinion is growing that a La Niña phenomenon has officially arrived and this means that disaster response teams probably need to brace themselves for heavier monsoons, bigger and more frequent hurricanes, and angrier cyclones.
“There is global consensus that we are at the beginning of a La Niña, but we cannot pronounce the intensity of the event yet – we have to wait for it to evolve,” Rupa Kumar Kolli, Chief of the World Climate Applications and Services Division at the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) told IRIN News.
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Tags: Afghanistan, Australia, Climate change, DRC, Floods, IDPs, Indonesia, Kenya, Madagascar, Malaysia, Mexico, Mozambique, NASA, Pakistan, Red Crescent, Red Cross, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, WMO
admin June 29th, 2010
The number of natural disasters around the world fell year-on-year in 2009 according to the Annual Disaster Statistical Review 2009 produced by CRED (Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters). And it also fell below the 2000-08 average.
But CRED, which is a World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Centre, warns that although the upward trend in disaster occurrence has stabilized in 2009 it is not possible to identify a trend from this fact: “In general, a high variation exists in the reported number of deaths and victims from one year to the next. This is mostly due to single disaster events that cause a tremendous human impact.” In 2009 there were no events like the 2002 drought in India (300 million victims), the 2004 Tsunami (226,408 deaths across 12 countries) or cyclone Nargis, which hit Myanmar in 2008 causing 138,366 deaths.
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Tags: China, CRED, cyclone, Drought, earthquake, Floods, Global warming, India, Indian Ocean Tsunami, Myanmar, natural disasters, Storm, WHO
admin June 26th, 2010
Five of the ten countries in the world with the least secure supplies of water are in Africa. And Africa has the unpleasant honour of taking the top four places in a new report, ‘Water Security Risk Index’ published this week by Maplecroft, a firm specialising in corporate risk intelligence.
The top ten countries with the least secure supplies of water – shown in dark blue on the map below - are 1. Somalia, 2. Mauritania, 3. Sudan, 4. Niger, 5. Iraq, 6. Uzbekistan, 7. Pakistan, 8. Egypt, 9. Turkmenistan and 10. Syria.
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Tags: Brazil, Climate change, Drought, Egypt, Ethiopia, Floods, Global warming, Himalaya, Iceland, India, Iraq, Mauretania, New Zealand, Niger, Nile, Norway, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Turkmenistan, UK, Uzbekistan
