This CRED Crunch newsletter explores the interplay of drought-flood extreme events in Africa over the last twenty years (2002-2021). The EM-DAT international disaster database indicates that over the last twenty years floods (n=793) and droughts (n=137) represented 55% of natural hazards in Africa (n=1,693), with 14,053 and 20,821 deaths, respectively.
Floods and drought are two extremes of the hydrological cycle. Despite their different physical processes, with different spatial and temporal scales, their interplay can enhance the resulting detrimental cascading effects. In comparison to the previous twenty years (1982-2001), EM-DAT indicates an increasing temporal trend in occurrences of floods and droughts in Africa, with a more important increase for floods (+180%) than for drought (+30%).
