Community perception, response and adaptation strategies towards flood risk in a traditional African city

In many world cities, flood incidences are on the increase due to climate change and increasing urbanization. Relying on structural flood control measures is becoming unsustainable, and new approaches revolving around improved land use planning, relocation, proofing, forecasting, warning and insurance are being advocated. These new measures require increasing understanding of the socioeconomic, cultural and political drivers that influence city dwellers’ flood risks perception and adaptation. Unfortunately, public perception of flood risk and flood risk information is often overlooked when developing flood risk management plans. For Many cities, not much is known about peoples’ flood risk awareness and perception, how much resilient they are, what adaptive capacities they possess and what socioeconomic, cultural and political drivers influence their risk perception and adaptive capacities. This was investigated in Katsina city of Nigeria through a questionnaire survey of 290 households, complemented with field observations and interviews. Results showed that the respondents in general have a fairly good perception of the nature, causes and consequences of flooding. However, flood-conveying structures were inadequate, with the few in most cases largely being used as waste-disposal sites. There was inadequate coordination between institutional stakeholders responsible for physical planning, waste and emergency management in the area. The respondents undertake some small-scale, ineffectively coordinated household-level proactive actions to minimize flood impacts, but no community-level flood early warning system exists. These create high flood-risks in the area and limit the flood resilience. Socio-cultural and income factors were the main determinants of flood adaptation, as the larger households with heads that are older and richer adopt more adaptation. However, there is general over-reliance on institutional bodies to provide and maintain flood-resilience promoting structures in the study area. Recommendation was made that a system needs to be put in place to incorporate some more robust preventive actions to bring about flexibility in flood management. To particularly be incorporated here include improved early warming, synchronous functioning of stakeholders, adequate physical planning, urban renewal, effective urban governance including harnessing of local social capital, increased community collaborative actions and use of local knowledge.