Risk of Environmental Management in Countries of African Union

Abstract

A comparative assessment and analysis of risk of environmental management across the African Union has been carried out. It is mainly characterized by two types of natural hazards: lithospheric — earthquakes, volcanism and related processes, and hydrometeorological — droughts, floods, accompanying landslides and soil degradation caused by global climate change and anthropogenic changes in the landscapes. A great hazard for tourist business, which is a basis of economy of island states with high enough level of development, is a sharp rise in the level of World Ocean as a result of melting of glaciers in Antarctica and Greenland. The sector most exposed to natural hazards in the African Union is agriculture, which suffers from soil erosion and degradation, droughts, desertifi cation and landslides. Vast areas of the African continent are at low risk of exploitation because they are uninhabited and undeveloped. Th ese are pristine areas with naturally developed landscapes where extreme natural processes and phenomena certainly occur, but there is simply no one and nothing to affect them. Good disaster resilience is related to the overall high level of economic development of the countries — Seychelles, Mauritius, South Africa, the political will of the governance structures and well-established security systems — Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, and the growing infl uence of private capital in recent years on national disaster protection policies — Nigeria, Ghana, Cape Verde. Countries with low disaster resilience are the poorest countries in the world, with widespread famine, epidemics, forced migration due to ongoing military conflicts and coups d’état, poverty, etc. Correlation and regression analysis for the countries of the African Union has shown the dependence of the risk of environmental management coeffi cient on nominal GDP per capita per year, although the correlation coefficientis rather low. The highest risk is observed in the poorest countries that are unable to cope with natural disasters on their own, where natural hazards are widespread — Ethiopia, Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia and Eritrea. Low risk is ensured in countries with developed economies and eff ective government — Mauritius, South Africa, Algeria, Tunisia, etc.