West Africa floods fed by urban surge
A general view shows ruins of houses destroyed by floods in Agadez, a market town northeast of Niger's capital Niamey, September 3, 2009. REUTERS
DAKAR, Wednesday
Mamadou Ndiaye wades across his flooded house as his children bail out dirty water bucket by bucket. He and his family are among many thousands of Senegalese whose homes have been under water for days.
Thirty years ago when Ndiaye moved to Guédiawaye, 26km outside the city centre of the capital Dakar, the land was dry and cheap. Now residents of this densely populated suburb endure floods every rainy season.
Recurrent flooding in towns and cities across West Africa is more about people than rains, according to Professor Cheikh Mbow at the Institute of Environmental Sciences at the University of Dakar, who studies the impact of climate variability on urban flood risk.
The region’s annual flooding reflects explosive population growth in the cities, poverty and poor urban management, he said.
“The rural poor come and settle on unsuitable land and are then exposed to flooding and other hazards like landslides and industrial risks.”
West Africa’s population is expected to grow at an average rate of 2.4 per cent from between 2005 and 2010, and the population is likely to more than double from 293 million in 2008 to 617 million in 2050, according to the UN Population Fund, most of this growth in urban areas.
Amid this year’s flooding in West Africa, which the UN says has killed at least 160 people to date, observers repeatedly point to the problem of urban congestion.
In Sierra Leone’s capital Freetown the main cause of recent flooding was “indiscriminate building” in green belt zones (undeveloped land) according to national disaster management head Mary Kamara.
In northern Nigerian cities overpopulation has people building homes on waterways, with natural drainage systems becoming blocked by rubbish, according to Mr Hassan Musa, an environmentalist at Bayero University in Kano.
“In some cases when people build houses on waterways and the government hardly restrains them, this leads to a cycle of flooding, destruction and sometimes death,” Mr Musa told Irin. (Irin)
