Abstract
Flood risks continue to pose serious threats to developing countries with dire ramifications for livelihoods. Yet, contemporary research on determinants for coping with flood hazards is driven mostly by individual cases with less effort to systematically identify coping strategies across multiple floods. This research analyses potential determinants of coping strategies to flooding across multiple floods using two case studies in Cameroon. Via empirical research and qualitative or descriptive statistical analysis, the research investigated how human, social, and economic or financial variables influence household coping decisions across the two flood sites. Results suggest a great influence of social and human capital on household decisions to adopt specific coping strategies and that over 80% of flood victims in both study sites applied post-flood informal coping strategies. Analysis also shows significant inconsistencies with human capital variables, which reveal that coping determinants can be quite different even for floods occurring in the same agroecological zone. The findings also reveal that economic and financial capital has little influence on flood victims’ coping decisions, contrary to popular contentions in the literature. The results of this study have implications for research and policy implementation on flood-induced coping strategies in developing countries.
Highlights
The consequences of upsurging natural hazards and disasters are a terrifying reality with dire ramifications for natural, social, human, financial and physical capital
This paper has assessed the different drivers for household decisions to flood hazards, based on two case study floods in Cameroon
The objective was to identify drivers that go beyond individual, isolated case studies currently dominating the topical literature and identify potential determinants robust across multiple floods, which could be appropriated for flood hazard policy making
Summary
The consequences of upsurging natural hazards and disasters are a terrifying reality with dire ramifications for natural, social, human, financial and physical capital. Managing their impacts remains one of the greatest contemporary challenges in flood-prone countries. Natural hazards took away 1.2 million lives over the decade between 2002 and 2012, affecting 268 million people and causing economic damages worth $1.7 trillion (UNISDR 2015). The number of people affected by natural disasters worldwide is on the rise with annual economic losses between $250 million and $300 million (UNISDR 2015; World Disaster Report 2015). Earthquakes and severe weather were the topmost hazards, which together, produced 70% of the economic losses in 2016 (Aon 2017)
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