Africa: Red Cross warns against unacceptable levels of urban risk
By Henry Neondo
The location of cities will affect the types of climate hazards to which they are exposed, but vulnerability is mitigated through the social and economic circumstances of the city and its residents, a world disaster report by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) launched Wednesday says.
Over half of 37 cities in Africa with more than 1 million residents are in the low-elevation coastal zone. A sea level rise of just 50 cm would lead to over 2 million people in Alexandria, Egypt, needing to abandon their homes.
In the vulnerable east coast of Africa, potential costs of 10 per cent of GDP have been calculated to help vulnerable communities adapt to the consequences of climate change and the growing incidences of weather-related disasters.
The report states that the root cause of why so many people are affected by urban disasters is because a billion people live in poor-quality homes on dangerous sites with no hazard-reducing infrastructure and no services.
Bekele Geleta, IFRC Secretary General, said: “For the first time in human history more people live in towns and cities than in the countryside, but the world has not kept pace with this change. This is why more people live in slums or informal settlements than ever before, which will lead to more people being affected by urban disasters.”
In any given year, over 50,000 people can die as a result of earthquakes and 100 million can be affected by floods, and the worst-affected are most often vulnerable city dwellers.
The report states that the 1 billion urban dwellers now living in overcrowded slums or settlements will rise to 1.4 billion by 2020. It points out that Africa, which is often considered predominantly rural, now has an urban population (412 million) larger than North America (286 million).
It also calls for better statistical information on how disasters have an impact on urban areas. At present, it is difficult to understand the number of urban disasters, the extent to which disaster has an impact on urban areas or how trends in urban disasters differ between global regions.
Global statistics are available through CRED (Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters) database, but it is often not possible to make an accurate distinction between the urban and rural affected or to get a breakdown of the statistics by urban district.
The report criticizes existing measures of risk and vulnerability for undervaluing the impact of disaster losses on slum dwellers in favour of measuring the impact of disasters on large economies and major infrastructure where loss of life may be minimal but economic damage is considerable.
“There is a knowledge gap,” says Geleta. ”Official statistics do not capture the true cost that disasters have for poor households. It is difficult to put a price on what it means to a poor family when their humble home is washed away in a flood with all their worldly goods. Many will never recover from such a blow.
David Satterthwaite, World Disasters Report lead writer and Senior Fellow at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), said: “The crisis of urban poverty, rapidly growing informal settlements and growing numbers of urban disasters arises from the failure of governments to adapt their institutions to urbanization. “It stems also in part from the failure of aid agencies to help them to do so – most aid agencies have inadequate or no urban policies and have long been reluctant to support urban development at a sufficient scale.
“People living in well-governed cities are among those who benefit from the world’s best quality of life and highest life expectancies. Generally, the more urbanized a nation, the stronger its economy, the higher the average life expectancy and the literacy rate, and the stronger the democracy, especially at local level.
“The housing, land and property rights of people who live in slums need to be respected and protected particularly in post-disaster situations. The strong emphasis of this year’s World Disasters Report is on supporting community-level initiatives – both to avoid disasters and to cope with them – but large development assistance agencies frequently do not know how to support community-level organizations. Indeed, often they never talk to them.”
The report also draws attention to the non-availability of health services in informal settlements, both for communicable diseases (for instance diarrhoeal diseases, acute respiratory infections and TB); and for non-communicable diseases such as heart disease and diabetes, which kill 35 million a year and, on current trends, could be responsible for 75 per cent of all deaths within a decade.
In most developing countries, communicable diseases remain the main cause of ill health and premature death, especially for children, but the contribution of non-communicable diseases including chronic ‘lifestyle’ disease is increasing.
In Kenya’s urban slums, much of the population not only has to contend with high levels of infectious disease, but also the increasing burden of non-communicable diseases with 17 per cent of people suffering from diabetes or hypertension and unable to get screening services or drugs.