Urbanisation and Climate Change in Africa: Setting the Scene

Abstract

African urban population is developing with a growth rate of 3.2 % per year on average, the highest in the world. Almost all Africa’s cities with one million inhabitants or more are currently located in areas exposed to at least one natural hazard. Inevitably, natural disasters in African urban areas are more likely to occur as expanding cities place an increasing number of people in the path of extreme natural events, often those in vulnerable accommodation, reliant on poor infrastructure with little resilience to impacts. According to the IPCC, Africa is one of the most vulnerable continents to climate change so climate drivers are likely to aggravate this situation still further. In spite of this knowledge, East, West and Central Africa are among the regions of the world that are least covered by climate change studies. The “Climate Change and Urban Vulnerability in Africa (CLUVA)” project was conceived to address this issue for selected African cities (Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, Douala in Cameroon, Saint Louis in Senegal and Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso). CLUVA downscaled climate change projections to a resolution of 8 km for the case study cities and focused on the assessment of five main climate change affected hazards: floods, droughts, desertification, heat waves and sea level rise. Innovative methodologies have been developed in a multi-disciplinary approach, both for climate change vulnerability assessment, and for the definition of new risk mitigation and adaptation strategies, aiming to provide planners and policy makers with tools for the development of more climate resilient cities.