Abstract
Flood disasters have regularly been reported in the Congo Basin with
significant damages to human lives, food production systems and
infrastructure. Losses incurred by these damages are huge and represent
a major challenge for economic expansion in developing nations. In the
Congo River Basin, where availability of in-situ data is a significant
challenge, new approaches are needed to investigate flood risks and
enable effective management strategies. This study uses recently
developed global flood prediction data in order to produce flood risk
maps for the Congo River Basin, where flood information currently does
not exist. Flood hazard maps that estimate fluvial flooding at a grid
cell resolution of 3 arc-seconds (~ 90 m), gridded
population density data of 1 arc-second (~ 30 m) spatial
resolution, and a spatial layer of infrastructure dataset are used to
addresses flood risk at the scale of the Congo Basin. The global flood
data provides different return periods of exposure to flooding in the
Congo Basin and identifies flood extents. The risk analysis results are
presented in terms of the percentage of population and infrastructure at
flood risk for six return periods (5, 10, 20, 50, 75 and 100 year). Of
the 525 administrative territories, 374 are AGU Books