Rising incidence of urban floods: understanding the causes for flood risk reduction in Kumasi, Ghana
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Rising incidence of urban floods: understanding the causes for flood risk reduction in Kumasi, Ghana Kabila Abass
Accepted: 8 October 2020 Ó Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Urban areas in Ghana have experienced worsening floods in terms of scale and number of affected people. In many instances, attribution has been made to one dominant factor as the cause of the rising flood incidence. The nature of the problem however suggests a complex interplay of factors at work but which have received limited research attention. Drawing on climatic data, household and key informant interviews, as well as direct observations, the paper examined the factors that underlie the rising incidence of floods in Kumasi. From the lens of urban political ecology, findings from the study suggest that multiplicity of factors rooted in weak institutional and legal frameworks underlie the worsening flood situation in the city. Key among these are rapid and unplanned urban growth, poor waste management culture and institutional ineptitude. Effective land-use planning and control through smart growth policies, alongside efficient waste management culture, are critical in stemming the problems of floods but the effectiveness of these measures depend on adequate resourcing of the relevant institutions and enforcement of land use regulations.
K. Abass (&) Department of Geography and Rural Development, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana e-mail: [email protected]
Keywords Flood incidence Rainfall variability Anthropogenic Kumasi Urban ghana
Introduction Projections show that the level of urbanization will increase in all regions in the coming decades but at a faster rate in Africa and Asia (United Nations Population Division 2015). Unplanned urbanization can lead to changes in land use and land cover with implications for floods. Floods are the most common natural hazard at the world scale and pose a major risk to life and property at global and local levels (Clement 2012). Annually, floods affect about 520 million people and their livelihoods and claim approximately 25,000 lives worldwide (WMO-UNESCO 2007). In Africa, floods represent 77.3% of all disasters, causing huge losses to life and property (Yengoh et al. 2017). Urbanization is associated with landscape conversion to built-up environments which are characterized by high population density (Barasa and Perera 2018), changing hitherto permeable surface to impermeable concrete surface. With little or no open surface such as soil necessary for water storage, surface runoffs from heavy rainfall flow into surface waterbodies or urban sewage systems. Thus, urbanization has a direct relationship with hydrological characteristics by reducing infiltration, increasing runoff rates and
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frequency of floods (Alaghmand et al. 2010). However, urban floods are results of the multivariable socio-ecosystem process with many drivers (Zambrano et al. 2018). Heavy rainfall (Manhique et al. 2015), poo
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