Gabon is at risk of hydrometeorological hazards and natural disasters, which primarily affect the agricultural, water, energy, and oil and mining sectors through seasonal flooding, changing precipitation, extreme winds and landslides. Temperatures are already observed to be increasing, and there appear to be more extreme weather events occurring in Gabon’s near to medium term future. This is expected to have impacts on agriculture, water and wider population health. Vulnerable groups, such as those with fewer economic opportunities and the elderly are particularly at risk to natural hazards and increasing impacts of climate change. Flooding, including coastal, urban and riverine, is a particular high-hazard for Gabon and life-threatening river floods are expected to occur at least once in the next 10 years. Gabon is also at risk of sea-level rise which could lead to coastal area flooding and may impact coastal cities as well as oil extraction operations.
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.
- Flooding in the coastal area is expected to cause significant economic losses. For example, the Port of Gentil is only 4 meters above sea level.
- Temperature will increase year-round and will put pressure on key sectors such as agriculture, and transport, posing risks for vulnerable groups. Gabon’s high degree of rainfall with high heat presents additional population risks.
- Gabon is expected to experience variable adverse impacts including increased temperatures, changing precipitation patterns with areas at risk of annual decreases in rainfall, prevalence of new disease vectors, rises in sea temperature, and increasing number of consecutive dry and hot days.
- Water resources will be affected by changing temperatures, precipitation regimes, and humidity, which will have long-term implications on the amount and quality of water available.
- Variable precipitation and increasing temperatures are resulting in an increasingly riskier agricultural and water availability environment.