Abstract
AbstractOver the past two decades, Haiti was struck by 30 storm events and 40 floods, affecting over 3.5 million people. Being the poorest country in the Northern hemisphere, it is unable to allocate funds to risk assessment and management. Therefore, this research developed a low‐cost methodology to analyse flood risk in data‐sparse regions. The floodplain of the river Moustiques was chosen as study area. First, a methodology was developed and input data were gathered from existing data, literature, field data, and open source data. Then, a flood risk assessment was performed for the area. The resulting economic risk map and social risk map indicate that the region is at risk for nearly 2 million USD and has potentially 60 casualties per year. Although the assessment was performed as a quantitative analysis, the resulting maps should be interpreted qualitatively, as the values could not be validated. Nonetheless, the results clearly indicate the high‐risk areas where measures should be taken. Furthermore, this research shows the potential of citizen science, in the form of a questionnaire survey conducted in the floodplain. This low‐cost and fast acquisition method provided many different input data for flood risk assessment, from population data to damage factors and validation information on historic flooding.
Highlights
Since its independence in 1804, the republic of Haiti is plagued by political instability, war, and revolution
This paper focuses on the applied data acquisition methods and their possible implementation on a wider scale
As the main reason for the lack of adequate flood risk assessment in the study area is the absence of adequate input data, this paper presents a flood risk assessment methodology based on a new, low-cost data acquisition method in the form of a questionnaire survey
Summary
Since its independence in 1804, the republic of Haiti is plagued by political instability, war, and revolution. Based on the household survey of 2012, conducted by the International Household Survey Network, the World Bank concludes that over 6 million Haitians, equal to 59% of the total population, live below the national poverty line of 2.41 USD per day. (World Bank, 2018) year by year, Haiti is ranked lower in the Human Development Index. This index of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) represents the wellbeing of the population in reference to the life expectancy, the degree of education and the Gross National Income of a country. In the most recent ranking of 2017, Haiti is ranked 168th of 189 countries with a score of merely 0.498 on a scale of 0 to 1, losing 19 places in comparison to the Human Development Index of 2009 (UNDP, 2011; UNDP, 2018)
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