by Chris Mgidu
NAIROBI, Sept. 26 (Xinhua) -- Sudden-onset natural hazards, primarily floods, caused more than 600,000 new displacements in 2016 in the Greater Horn of Africa, a new report by an international charity published on Tuesday shows.
The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC)'s Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) highlights the need for more investment to track the number of the displaced to strengthen the resilience of displaced communities and their hosts.
"The need to address the risk and impacts of disaster displacement, which will be made worse by climate change, is a global and regional policy priority," said Justin Ginnetti, head of data and analysis at IDMC.
"To do so, however, such risk must be measured, and governments and other agencies need a baseline against which to measure their progress," Ginnetti added.
"To address this need, we have developed a methodology to estimate displacement risk associated with sudden-onset natural hazards, and the result is the first fully probabilistic assessment of the phenomenon for the Greater Horn of Africa," Ginnetti said.
The report said displacement in the Greater Horn of Africa is highly complex: for instance, disasters increase competition for land and resources, which can lead to violence and conflict that increase communities' vulnerability to natural hazards.
The report said the region is among those worst affected by the multiple effects of climate change, including above-average temperature, excessive or insufficient rainfall, desertification and environmental degradation.
Leonardo Milano, Senior Data Scientist at IDMC, said the report's findings also suggest low levels of preparedness to cope with hazards in the region.
"Government and communities need to be better prepared to confront the risks they face, including the establishment of effective early-warnings systems that would cause more short-term displacement, but save many more lives," Milano said.
The report said there are also important conceptual and data gaps on displacement associated with drought, and given that more people are likely to be displaced by drought in the region than by other hazards addressed by the report, such a gap hinders the effort to prevent displacement.
