In the 1990s natural events triggered disasters that cost the international economy more than $608-billion — three times the global losses caused by natural disasters in the 1980s.
By 2050 this cost could reach $300-billion a year. Africa, like the rest of the world, is vulnerable to all kinds of natural disasters: floods and drought, fires, earthquakes, tsunamis, rockfalls, landslides and erosion and extreme weather conditions.
The dominant media image of Africa is hunger, but this is just one of the many disaster risks Africans face year after year.
The Western Cape is a good example: floods, gales and high waves wreak havoc along the coast in the winter, drought threatens parts of the province as summer approaches and there is constant fire risk in the forests and informal settlements. The condition that is likely to spark humanity’s most difficult run of disasters, in Africa and the rest of the world, is urbanisation.
Today roughly 3.3-billion people live in cities worldwide; by 2030 that number is expected to increase to five billion. In Africa, the most rapidly urbanising continent, city populations are forecast to double to 742-million in total. That’s more people than are now living in all of Latin America.
It gets worse: by 2030 two billion of the world’s urban dwellers are expected to be living in informal settlements or slums, more than double the 924-million in 2001. Most of these informal settlements will be in Africa.
Today there are already about 220 informal settlements in Cape Town alone. As these population densities spiral, so will the associated risks.
Public healthcare will be strained by outbreaks of cholera, malaria, tuberculosis, HIV/Aids and other diseases. Many migrants to the cities have little education and few skills: jobs will remain scarce and crime will increase.
The cost of urban infrastructure will rise as more demands are placed on roads, public transport, bridges, schools and health clinics, sewerage and water facilities and the electricity grid.
As population centres become denser, the cost of disasters associated with extreme weather — flooding, for instance — will affect a growing number of people, especially in disadvantaged communities. These people have a much harder time recovering from hardship.
The cost of replacing infrastructure in these areas, as well as assisting disaster victims, comes out of tax revenue. But there are bright spots in the gloom. And they come from a sector you would probably not associate with disaster risk reduction: academia.
In the past decade or so a handful of universities around the world have taken up the challenge of conducting research into the science of disaster risk reduction. They are encouraged by organisations such as the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction, which has helped define a global framework for developing disaster risk reduction strategies.
This framework focuses on building resilience: the aim is not just to respond to the disasters that happen, but also to reduce the harm they can do, and even to reduce the likelihood of disasters occurring.
For instance, a municipality could prevent annual flash floods by simply strengthening the nearby riverbank with gabions — rocks held in place by wire mesh. By disseminating information about purifying water, health clinics could reduce the risk of cholera or diarrhoeal disease in an informal settlement.
Disaster risk reduction relies on a range of disciplines, from healthcare to geology, meteorology, engineering, urban planning and economics. When the Disaster Mitigation for Sustainable Livelihoods Programme (DiMP) was established in 1998 at the University of Cape Town, one of the key challenges was developing a curriculum.
There was a glaring lack of academic literature on the Western Cape’s disaster risk profile, for instance, and there were many popular misconceptions about the province’s urban risks. So we combined academic research with hands-on engagement in Cape Town communities.
DiMP postgraduate students have since conducted exploratory disaster risk reduction research on topics such as informal-dwelling fires as well as studies of the economic and social losses caused by severe weather events such as floods.
The DiMP interacts with government. As a result, South Africa’s 2002 Disaster Management Act and its national implementation framework have a strong disaster risk reduction focus, prioritising education, training and disaster management research, as well as skills to implement the new legislation.
With $2.9-million provided by USAid, DiMP is implementing a programme called Periperi U (Partners Enhancing Resilience for People Exposed to Risks — focus on Universities) to strengthen disaster risk reduction scholarship and practice at universities in Algeria, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Mozambique, Senegal, Tanzania and Uganda, as well as South Africa.
Since 2000 the DiMP has taught professional ‘Disasters and Development” short courses to more than 500 delegates from diverse countries. This cross-disciplinary collaboration supports academic programmes in fields as diverse as public health and seismic engineering to integrate disaster risk reduction into their own courses.
As a result, for the first time in Africa, there is now an emerging academic architecture for disaster risk-related scholarship and engagement. This can change the stereotype of Africa as a beneficiary of international relief.
It also highlights the value university-based units, such as the DiMP, can bring to partnerships that address Africa’s urgent development priorities.
Dr Ailsa Holloway is director of the Disaster Mitigation for Sustainable Livelihoods Programme at the University of Cape Town. She was a technical adviser on the Disaster Management Bill and coordinated the drafting of the National Disaster Management Framework