Caught Between Extremes: Understanding Human‐Water Interactions During Drought‐To‐Flood Events in the Horn of Africa

Abstract

Disaster risks are the results of complex spatiotemporal interactions between risk components, impacts and societal response. The complexities of these interactions increase when multi‐risk events occur in vulnerable contexts characterized by ethnic conflicts, unstable governments, and high levels of poverty, resulting in impacts that are larger than anticipated. Yet, only few multi‐risk studies explore human‐environment interactions, as most studies are hazard‐focused, consider only a single‐type of multi‐risk interaction, and rarely account for spatiotemporal dynamics of risk components. Here, we developed a step‐wise, bottom‐up approach, in which a range of qualitative and semi‐quantitative methods was used iteratively to reconstruct interactions and feedback loops between risk components and impacts of consecutive drought‐to‐flood events, and explore their spatiotemporal variations. Within this approach, we conceptualize disaster risk as a set of multiple (societal and physical) events interacting and evolving across space and time. The approach was applied to the 2017–2018 humanitarian crises in Kenya and Ethiopia, where extensive flooding followed a severe drought lasting 18–24 months. The events were also accompanied by government elections, crop pest outbreaks and ethnic conflicts. Results show that (a) the highly vulnerable Kenyan and Ethiopian contexts further aggravated drought and flood impacts; (b) heavy rainfall after drought led to both an increase and decrease of the drought impacts dependent on topographic and socio‐economic conditions; (c) societal response to one hazard may influence risk components of opposite hazards. A better understanding of the human‐water interactions that characterize multi‐risk events can support the development of effective monitoring systems and response strategies.

Uncovering the Dynamics of Multi‐Sector Impacts of Hydrological Extremes: A Methods Overview

“…Several recent studies have provided valuable guidelines on how to assess compound hazard interrelationships (e.g., Bevacqua et al, 2021;Tilloy et al, 2019), the dynamics of risk components (e.g., De Angeli et al, 2022;de Ruiter and van Loon, 2022;Terzi et al, 2019) and multi-sector dynamics (e.g., Reed et al, 2022). However, similar syntheses of methods used in CCI research are still missing.…”

“…• Event timelines (Matanó et al, 2022;Seebauer et al, 2023) • Qualitative matrices (Gill & Malamud, 2014Matanó et al, 2022) • Network diagrams (Gill & Malamud, 2014 Qualitative storylines and scenarios…”

“…For instance, Matanó et al. (2022) conducted an extensive literature review to develop event timelines exploring the temporal interactions between floods and droughts (Challenge 3). Similarly, Seebauer et al.…”

“…Interactions between hydrological extremes have also been investigated. For instance, Matanó et al (2022) and Ward et al (2020) provide examples of interactions between flood and drought impacts. Despite these advances, research on CCI remains fragmented, and an overview of available methods to study them is missing.…”

Dissemination of climate smart agricultural knowledge through farmer field schools (FFS): analyzing the application CAS knowledge by smallholder farmers

“…Climate change has made Kenya and the Horn of Africa susceptible to natural calamities such as floods and droughts, resulting in fatalities, landslides, widespread damage to property and infrastructure, and food insecurity (Matanó et al , 2022). Moreover, a decrease in precipitation puts the water supply for agricultural production under threat of changing climate.…”