Accounting for heterogeneity: A qualitative assesment of national climate disaster management policies in Africa

This paper examines the heterogeneity within Africa’s institutional arrangements for climate-related disaster risk management and introduces a classification that ranks each country as one of three disaster management policy types: the ‘Unprepared Firefighters’ (whose response to disasters is late, delayed and ineffective), the ‘Prepared Firefighters’ (for the most part effective disaster responders) and the ‘Disaster averters’ (who experienced a paradigm shift and moved focus away from the hazard itself towards a reduction of the underlying risk factors that cause disasters).

The road ahead for the Disaster Risk Management research community striving to better understand and address Climate Change Adaptation and Disaster Risk Reduction needs at the macro-policy level in African countries is to address the data issues identified herein, and invest in making available more data sources and perfecting our assessment methods. Increased data sources reduce subjectivity in the assessment process, a necessary pre-requisite to inform policies, effectively promote disaster public policy building in Africa and circumvent the trap of misinformed “mal-Adaptation”.

This document is an input paper of the 2015 Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction.