ReliefWeb

Background

The Western branch of the Eastern African Rift is characterized by eight volcanoes located on the borders between Uganda, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Of these volcanoes, only two (Figure 1b), on the Congolese side, are currently active: Nyiragongo and Nyamulagira.

On 17 January 2002, two lava flows from Nyiragongo volcano invaded Goma in a few hours, one of them reaching Lake Kivu. By the time the eruption ended, 13 per cent of the city was completely destroyed. The Nyiragongo showed for the second time in 25 years its devastating impact, leaving more than 200 persons dead and 130,000 people homeless.

The city slowly recovered from this catastrophic natural event, and started expanding dangerously towards the volcano. Houses rapidly colonized the newly formed lava, often the only land affordable to the hundreds of thousands of newcomers who arrived in the city fleeing conflict and economic hardship or attracted by local income opportunities, mostly unaware of the risks they were facing.

Today, Goma is considered to be one of the most dangerous cities on the planet from the natural disaster viewpoint. It is built between the two most active volcanoes in Africa and on the shore of a lake with a gigantic carbon dioxide and methane reservoir at its bottom, in a highly seismic region exposed to deadly natural carbon dioxide emissions from the soil, acid rains due to the scrubbing of the big volcanic plume by rain waters, landslides and mudflows, which have caused tenths of deaths in recent past, and lacking access to good‐quality groundwater. All these natural phenomena have caused significant human and economic losses throughout the city’s history. Over the last decade, though, rapid population growth has created the conditions for an exponential increase in disaster risk.

For the above reasons, Disaster Risk Reduction Programmes are highly needed for the city of Goma. IOM, as the Camp Coordination and Camp Management lead agency in natural disaster situations, is implementing a pilot project that started in February 2014, directly participating to build a contingency plan that will help enhance the capacity of several government entities (e.g. the Goma Volcano Observatory and the Civil Defence of the Democratic Republic of the Congo) as well as increase awareness, preparedness and resilience of the local population.