Overall risks from climate-related impacts are evaluated based on the interaction of climate-related hazards (including hazardous events and trends) with the vulnerability of communities (susceptibility to harm and lack of capacity to adapt), and exposure of human and natural systems. Changes in both the climate system and socioeconomic processes -including adaptation and mitigation actions- are drivers of hazards, exposure, and vulnerability (IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, 2014).
This section provides a summary of key natural hazards and their associated socioeconomic impacts in a given country. And it allows quick evaluation of most vulnerable areas through the spatial comparison of natural hazard data with development data, thereby identifying exposed livelihoods and natural systems.
The charts provide overview of the most frequent natural disaster in a given country and understand the impacts of those disasters on human populations.
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Climate change is now recognized to have a significant impact on disaster management efforts and pose a significant threat to the efforts to meet the growing needs of the most vulnerable populations. The demands of disaster risk management are such that concise, clear, and reliable information is crucial. The information presented here offers insight into the frequency, impact and occurrence of natural hazards. Source (PDF)
Understanding natural hazard occurrence as well as historical climate conditions, in relation to development contexts, is critical to understanding a country’s historical vulnerability. This tool allows the visualization of different natural hazards or historical climate conditions with socio-economic and development datasets. Select the Development Context and either a Natural Hazard or Climate Condition and overlay horizontally by sliding the toggle left or right to gain a broader sense of historically vulnerable areas.
Data presented under Historical Climate Conditions are reanalysis products derived from ERA5-Land data. ERA5-Land is a global land-surface dataset at 9 km resolution, consistent with atmospheric data from the ERA5 reanalysis from 1950 onward. Climate reanalyses combine past observations with models to generate consistent time series of multiple climate variables. They provide a comprehensive description of the observed climate as it has evolved during recent decades, on 3D grids at sub-daily intervals.
This data has been collected, aggregated and processed by the Climate Resilience Cluster of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Earth Observation for Sustainable Development (EO4SD) initiative.
- Repeated droughts have had substantial impacts on Chad’s agricultural production and have affected up to 2.4 million people. Persistent drought has also aided in the acceleration of desertification in the northern part of the country, causing agro-pastoral areas to decline and livestock grazing areas to shift further south.
- Floods are a recurring natural hazard in Chad that may become worse with climate change.
- The country has a high prevalence of endemic diseases such as malaria, and suffers from epidemics of cholera, measles, and meningitis.
- Chad has experienced the drying of rivers and lakes in recent years, most notably of Lake Chad. Climatic forecasts by NASA have indicated that Lake Chad could disappear in 20 years at the current rate of water use and increased silting of upstream rivers.
More information on natural hazards can be found at ThinkHazard.
- Climate change threatens to aggravate endemic diseases through extreme events, increasing the population’s susceptibility to them. Early warning systems as well as better quality medical care are necessary for disaster risk management.
- Agricultural production, livestock farming, and fishing all rely heavily on freshwater resources in Chad and the need for better management of these resources is necessary for the future. Climate change will aggravate the human pressure already on these systems and better management is needed to ensure Chadians have access to freshwater resources.