Attachments
RISK ANALYSIS
Prioritized hazard and its historical impact.
The vast majority of Djibouti’s rural population is highly susceptible to climatic uncertainty – they live in deserts or marginal and infertile areas, often with highly erodible soils, poor ground cover, and limited water supplies where food security is a serious concern. The major hazards in Djibouti are floods, droughts, sea level rise, and epidemics, whose frequency, occurrence, and impacts have increased in recent years, and already pose a significant risk to the country’s vulnerable population.
As shown in the table on page 2, floods and drought are the two main hazards affecting Djibouti. This first simplified EAP will address floods mainly as a result of flash floods and seasonal rivers and runoff from hills forming streams in the basement valleys later, based on this experience, the National Society will consider working on a drought-simplified EAP.
Floods are one of the exacerbated hazard effects of global climate change and Djibouti is at risk of both flash floods due to the topographic nature of its landscape of volcanic formations and seasonal riverbeds and tributaries draining to the ocean as well as oceanic effects of climate change including sea level rise, floods and relative tsunamis making Djibouti one of the non-island high-risk countries. These features contribute to the vulnerability and exposure of Djibouti to increased intensity floods in the event of heavy rains.
In 2021 the World Bank carried out 40 years of comparative trend analysis for different hazards, illustrated in the graph on page 3 which shows floods have a high effect in terms of population affected in Djibouti followed by drought.
The mean annual precipitation is 244.6 millimetres (mm), with the highest rainfall occurring from July to September, but flash floods events have been experienced outside of this season like the case of the flash floods in November 2019 when the National Society requested DREF funding to support the affected population. Djibouti has somewhat highly variable rainfall, however, the country is expected to experience an increase in the occurrence and intensity of heavy rainfall events, increasing risks of floods as well as likely resulting in increases in the intensity and frequency of dry periods and water scarcity. An estimated 33% of the population lives in high-hazard risk zones and 35% of the economy is chronically vulnerable to floods and drought. In Djibouti, floods and droughts are expected to occur more frequently in coastal as well as inland areas, with urban centres around the coast at risk of flooding.
The Djibouti Red Crescent from experience estimates on average about 30,000 people are annually affected by adverse effects of floods with the peak realised in 2019 when 250,000 people were affected.