Climate Change, Flooding and Water Supply in Angola's Coastal Cities

Angola has begun to address some of the serious issues related to adaptation to climate change. Angola’s water resources will be increasingly important in the southern Africa region, which is likely to become drier. Angola completed its initial national communication to UNFCCC in early 2012. Angola has joined regional and Portuguese-speaking networks and is beginning a GEF-funded programme. The Institute of Water Resources has recently been created specifically to study and manage Angola’s river basins. However there are significant gaps in meteorological and hydrological data for the post-1975 period, which hinders planning for climate change, though the network of such stations is being re-established.

The coastal areas of Angola where urban populations are growing most
rapidly experience lower rainfall than inland areas and are subject to
sudden storms and high annual variation. In urban coastal areas there
are risks from flooding and erosion. There has been serious flooding in
Angolan cities in recent years. There is a lack of urban land-use and
disaster planning capacity to deal with these issues, though
institutions have been created in the last five years. Limited
information is available on the vulnerability of these coastal cities,
on rainfall variability and trends, on river flows and on areas at risk
(now and in the future). Similarly limited demographic and
socio-economic information is available. Low rainfall affects water
supplies in urban coastal areas creating a water market in which the
poor pay for inadequate quantities of low quality water. It is only in
the last five years that serious attempts have been made to improve
water supplies in these areas.

The overall objective of the
proposed project is to strengthen Angola’s efforts in climate change
adaptation by developing tools and providing information that address
information gaps about rainfall patterns and hydrology and their likely
impact on environmental risks and water-supply issues in Angola’s
coastal urban areas.