Multihazard Risk Assessment for Planning with Climate in the Dosso Region, Niger

Maurizio Tiepolo,Sarah Braccio,Maurizio Bacci

doi:10.3390/cli6030067

Abstract

International aid for climate change adaptation in West Africa is increasing exponentially, but our understanding of hydroclimatic risks is not keeping pace with that increase. The aim of this article is to develop a multihazard risk assessment on a regional scale based on existing information that can be repeated over time and space and that will be useful during decision-making processes. This assessment was conducted in Dosso (Niger), the region most hit by flooding in the country, with the highest hydroclimatic risk in West Africa. The assessment characterizes the climate, identifies hazards, and analyzes multihazard risk over the 2011–2017 period for each of the region’s 43 municipalities. Hazards and risk level are compared to the intervention areas and actions of 6 municipal development plans and 12 adaptation and resilience projects. Over the past seven years, heavy precipitation and dry spells in the Dosso region have been more frequent than during the previous 30-year period. As many as 606 settlements have been repeatedly hit and 15 municipalities are classified as being at elevated-to-severe multihazard risk. The geographical distribution of the adaptation and resilience projects does not reflect the risk level. A third of the local development plans examined propose actions that are inconsistent with the main hydroclimatic threats.

Highlights

The Sendai Framework for disaster risk reduction [1] and the Sustainable Development Goals [2]recommend that more efforts should be made to carry out risk analysis with a holistic vision.This should orient a new generation of plans and projects towards communities that are most at risk, towards the main hydroclimatic threats, and should help monitoring, evaluation, communication [3], and awareness-raising activities [4]
The aim of this article is to develop a multihazard risk assessment on a regional scale based on existing information that can be repeated over time and space and that will be useful during decision-making processes
The goal of this article is to propose a multihazard risk assessment on a regional scale that will be useful during decision-making processes and that can be updated over time by personnel lacking advanced skills

Summary

Introduction

Recommend that more efforts should be made to carry out risk analysis with a holistic vision. This should orient a new generation of plans and projects towards communities that are most at risk, towards the main hydroclimatic threats, and should help monitoring, evaluation, communication [3], and awareness-raising activities [4]. In this vast region, widespread warming, an increase in both the intensity and frequency of extreme heat waves, and heavy precipitation events [24,25,26,27,28,29] were combined with an increase in the number of hydroclimatic disasters [30] during the 1990–2010 period. In the six years that followed, Climate 2018, 6, 67; doi:10.3390/cli6030067 www.mdpi.com/journal/climate

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion