admin December 30th, 2009
Advance Aid’s mission is all about emergency preparedness, but the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) has taken this a step further by commissioning a radio drama in Mozambique – in both Portugese and Sena, the local language in the Zambezi valley – that addresses the problems involved.
In recent years, natural disasters in Mozambique have caused widespread devastation and large-scale displacement of the population. Between 2000 and 2008, the country was hit by several severe floods and cyclones that forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee their homes. In 2000 alone, at least a quarter of a million people were displaced to 89 makeshift camps as the result of flooding. The 2007 flooding along the Zambezi River threatened an estimated 285,000 people in river communities and displaced about 163,000 persons.
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Tags: Floods, International Organisation for Migration, Mozambique, Zambezi
admin December 15th, 2009
The map below, published last week, is from the Global Climate Risk Index 2009 (CRI), produced by Germanwatch and re-insurance giants Munich Re. Taken at face value it appears to show that the continent with the lowest climate risk in the world is Africa.
Asia has the highest risk, with China and India at the forefront, but even Europe is shown to be at greater climate risk than Africa. Only Mozambique and Madagascar appear within the top 50 countries in the world.
But, as in so many things statistical, all is not as it seems.
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Tags: China, Climate change, cyclone, Floods, Global warming, Mozambique, Munich Re, Myanmar, Storm, USA
admin December 4th, 2009
Water basin management, as we have commented before is a complex matter, rivers being no respecters of man-made boundaries. And effective river basin management is key both when controlling usage and when managing flood risk.
So it is encouraging to hear that representatives of the seven countries that share the Zambezi basin – Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Botswana, and Namibia – have been meeting in Maputo this week, to plan coordinated actions to prevent and mitigate the effect of floods including the establishment of an early warning system to alert communities living near the river’s banks, in the event of an impending emergency .
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Tags: Angola, Botswana, Floods, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Zambezi, Zambia, Zimbabwe
admin November 17th, 2009
FEWS Net (Famine Early Warning System) is one of the main forecasting systems available to the humanitarian community to predict where some natural disasters may strike next.
Crops needs water, so an offshoot of FEWS is a rainfall and therefore a flooding, forecast. The chart below shows the latest forecast of the risks of flooding in Mozambique in the first quarter of 2010. The first quarter is typically when the Zambezi floods and there were bad floods in 2007 and 2008.
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Tags: FEWS, Floods, Mozambique, Zambezi