Towards a Framework for Flood Vulnerability Assessment in Rural and Urban Informal Settlements in Malawi: A Study of Karonga District and Lilongwe City

Abstract

Flood vulnerability assessment (FVA) is a significant step for developing flood mitigation plan. However, there is lack of FVA that proposes a framework to support flood mitigation and preparedness in rural and urban areas of Malawi. This informed the need to assess households’ flood vulnerability (HFV) in Mtandire ward of Lilongwe city (LC) and Traditional Authority Kilupula of Karonga district (KD) in order to propose a FVA framework for rural and urban informal settlements in Malawi. Analysing spatial-temporal flood vulnerability (FV), predicting HFV, assessing perception of HFV and evaluating household adaptive capacity were the focus of this study. These were attained using flood frequency analysis (FFA), indicator-based method and hazard, vulnerability and capacity assessment (HVCA) approach. Baseline data was collected from Departments of Water Resources and Disaster Management Affairs in the Ministries of Water and Sanitation and Natural Resources and Climate Change respectively. A household survey was used to collect data from a sample of 545 households’ participants, 17 key informants and 21 location points. Statistical methods (Gumbel, R and SPSS), ArcGIS 10.8, Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA), Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and qualitative data analysis (QDA) miner level 6.0 were used for data analysis. The Flood Vulnerability Index (FVI) was applied to determine HFV. The results found a higher expected floods for Lingadzi compared to Lufilya catchments in LC and KD respectively at different return periods. The results further show a higher flood risk in T/A Kilupula of KD (6) compared to Mtandire Ward in LC (2). The FVI revealed high HFV on Enviro-Exposure Factors (EEFs) ( 0.9 ) in LC and (0.8) in KD, followed by Eco-Resilience Factors (ERFs) (0.8) in KD and(0.6) in LC and Physio-Exposure Factors (PEFs) (0.5) in LC besides 0.6 in KD. The findings show that perception of household flood vulnerability is significant by age (0.0065), education (0.0045) and marital status (0.0085) in LC, while only occupation is significant in KD. The findings revealed high (3), medium (2) and low (1) for the respective of physical, social organisation and economic livelihoods adaptive capacity measures. The study developed the framework with a reconstituted equation as sum of UVFs, VCs, hazard (H) and (-) adaptive capacity (AC). The FVA reveals variations of causes that contribute to households’ flood vulnerability. The study recommends that FVA framework can be applied in promoting resilience of communities to mitigate flood risks and key component for planning and decision-making process.