Flood risk management in Africa

Based on the number of people affected, over the past 30 years, floods and droughts are the two natural hazards that have the largest humanitarian impacts in Africa (Lumbroso, Brown, & Ranger, 2016). However, in the past decade, across Africa, floods have overtaken droughts in terms of the number of people that they impact.

This special issue of the Journal of Flood Risk Management on Africa brings together the eight papers that have been published in the past 12 years which explicitly focus on aspects of flood risk in Africa.

Urban flooding is a pressing issue on the continent and one that, in many African countries, requires transformative change, which will be challenging to deliver in the face of a changing climate.

Most cities and urban centres in Africa are now regarded as flood disaster risk hotspots (Baker, 2012). The unplanned urbanisation in Africa and the associated increase of people living in floodplains have led to an increase in the number of fatalities related to floods in African cities (Di Baldassarre et al., 2010).