Rains wreck havoc road infrastructure in Dar city

DAR ES SALAAM city’s infrastructure assets of about 5.3 billion US dollar (over 11.6tri/-) are at risk of projected flood impact due to climate change. This, according to United Nation (UN) survey, need to be prevented due to the fact that Tanzania, Dar in particular, bears the heaviest burden as the most flood-affected country in East Africa bloc. “No disaster is entirely ‘natural’. Risk presents the very real possibility of a disaster; disaster itself is often a failure in development planning,” World Bank said in a statement yesterday. WB said to mitigate the disaster in making, a multi-stakeholder conference will be held for three days from today. The symposium will also be used as a launching pad for Tanzania Urban Resilience Programme (URTZ), which is part of the Understanding Risk (UR) Community. The partners behind the URTZ are led by the UK Department for International Development (DfID), the WB, and the government of Tanzania aimed at improving the country’s resilience to climate risk. According to a UN survey, more than half of humanity now lives in cities, and over the next 90 years 95 per cent of global urban growth will occur in developing and emerging countries. While this growth is bound to alleviate poverty, generate wealth, and fuel global prosperity, cities are struggling to keep up, dramatically increasing the concentration of people and assets exposed to risk. In East Africa, Dar es Salaam, in particular, is the largest and fastest growing East African metropolitan area. 

A street with flooded water that makes motor vehicles' drivers to negotiate their way in downtown Dar es Salaam. Lack of proper drainage system has exacerbated the  situation to become worse.

 The WB hoped that this technical meeting will facilitate discussion on opportunities that the programme will offer under its three priorities. The priorities are risk identification, risk reduction, and disaster preparedness and emergency management and will further forge connections between programme implementers for improved collaboration and sustainable mitigation of climate-related risk. In addition to technical meetings, the conference will include a high-level regional symposium on “Greening Africa’s Cities: Enhancing the relationship between Urbanisation, Environmental Assets, and Ecosystem Services.” The symposium will consider the impact of urbanisation on the environment in Africa and measures that can be undertaken to promote a more harmonious relationship between the built and natural environments to build a resilient future for African cities. Recent research and analysis undertaken on this crucial but under- examined area will be presented, and important initiatives which African cities have begun to take to put themselves on a more sustainable development trajectory will be discussed. UR is an open and global community of over 6,500 experts and practitioners interested and active in the field of disaster risk identification— risk assessment and risk communication.