Afghanistan river flood hazard

The geographical location of Afghanistan and years of environmental degradation in the country make Afghanistan highly prone to intense and recurring natural hazards such as flooding, earthquakes, snow avalanches, landslides, and droughts. These occur in addition to man-made disasters resulting in the frequent loss of live, livelihoods, and property. The creation, understanding and accessibility of hazard, exposure, vulnerability and risk information is key for effective management of disaster risk. Assuring the resilience of new reconstruction efforts to natural hazards, and maximizing the effectiveness of risk reduction investments to reduce existing risks is important to secure lives and livelihoods. So far, there has been limited disaster risk information produced in Afghanistan, and information that does exist typically lacks standard methodology and does not have uniform geo-spatial coverage. To better understand natural hazard and disaster risk, the World Bank and Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) are supporting the development of new fluvial flood, flash flood, drought, landslide, avalanche and seismic risk information in Afghanistan, as well as a first-order analysis of the costs and benefits of resilient reconstruction and risk reduction strategies. For fluvial flood risk a flood modeling framework is being developed that consists of three components: • Hydrological analysis which models how much precipitation comes to runoff. The hydrological analysis is used as a back-bone to compute flow and flooding through the full catchment area during selected events as well as selected return periods. The hydrological simulations also form the backbone of the drought risk assessments (work package 3). • Hydrodynamic analysis, to translate runoff into river flow and inundation and flow over floodplain areas. • Flood impact analysis for calculating the impacts of a flood applied to flood prone areas with high damage potential.

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Additional Info

Field Value
Author World Bank Group
Maintainer None
Version None
Last Updated November 28, 2023, 04:27 (UTC)
Created March 23, 2021, 09:18 (UTC)
Topic Environment
Country Afghanistan
Published year 2016