TY - JOUR
T1 - Quantifying vulnerability of rural communities to flooding in SSA: a contemporary disaster management perspective applied to the Lower Shire Valley, Malawi
AU - Adeloye, Adebayo
AU - Mwale, Faidess Dumbizgani
AU - Beevers, Lindsay Catherine
N1 - "This study is part of the work funded by the Government of Malawi under a Ph.D program granted to the first author."
PY - 2015
Y1 - 2015
N2 - In response to the increasing frequency and economic damages of natural disasters globally, disaster management has evolved significantly to incorporate vulnerability assessments that are multi-dimensional, integrated and metric-based. This is to support knowledge-based decision making and hence sustainable disaster risk reduction. In Malawi and most of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), however, flood vulnerability assessments mainly focusing on social vulnerability, have been largely qualitative. The subjective nature of such qualitative assessments makes their use for identifying relative vulnerabilities of specific people and places, targeting of interventions, allocation of scarce resources and monitoring of benefits that may arise from interventions extremely problematic. Viewing vulnerability through exposure, susceptibility and capacity dimensions, all linked to social, economic, physical and environmental factors, this study has used an index-based approach to quantify and profile vulnerability to flooding of rural, subsistent communities in the Lower Shire Valley, Malawi. Results show that vulnerability to flooding is susceptibility-driven with susceptibility magnitudes manifesting as high to very high. In particular, socio-economic and to a large extent environmental susceptibilities are predominantly high to very high. Economic and physical capacities tend to be low but societal capacity tends to be high thereby attenuating overall capacity-induced vulnerability to medium levels. Physical exposure is medium. Except for environmental vulnerability, spatial differentiation in all forms of vulnerability across communities is in general marginal.
AB - In response to the increasing frequency and economic damages of natural disasters globally, disaster management has evolved significantly to incorporate vulnerability assessments that are multi-dimensional, integrated and metric-based. This is to support knowledge-based decision making and hence sustainable disaster risk reduction. In Malawi and most of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), however, flood vulnerability assessments mainly focusing on social vulnerability, have been largely qualitative. The subjective nature of such qualitative assessments makes their use for identifying relative vulnerabilities of specific people and places, targeting of interventions, allocation of scarce resources and monitoring of benefits that may arise from interventions extremely problematic. Viewing vulnerability through exposure, susceptibility and capacity dimensions, all linked to social, economic, physical and environmental factors, this study has used an index-based approach to quantify and profile vulnerability to flooding of rural, subsistent communities in the Lower Shire Valley, Malawi. Results show that vulnerability to flooding is susceptibility-driven with susceptibility magnitudes manifesting as high to very high. In particular, socio-economic and to a large extent environmental susceptibilities are predominantly high to very high. Economic and physical capacities tend to be low but societal capacity tends to be high thereby attenuating overall capacity-induced vulnerability to medium levels. Physical exposure is medium. Except for environmental vulnerability, spatial differentiation in all forms of vulnerability across communities is in general marginal.
KW - flooding; integrated; index; multi-dimensional; rural communities; vulnerability
U2 - 10.1016/j.ijdrr.2015.01.003
DO - 10.1016/j.ijdrr.2015.01.003
M3 - Article
VL - 12
SP - 172
EP - 187
JO - International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction
JF - International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction
ER -