Climate change disproportionately impacts developing countries like Mozambique, through the intensification of tropical extreme weather and increased flood hazards. For example, recent floods following the landfall of Cyclone Idai and Kenneth in 2019 displaced over 400,000 people and damage estimates exceed $1.4 billion. Climate change exacerbates the complex and multifaceted impacts of these natural disasters, which forces governments to respond.  However, a lack of accurate systematic environmental data leads to uncertainties regarding the magnitude of future flood hazards, which makes it difficult to determine where and which interventions should be prioritized. On the other hand, pressure to take measures forces governments to act, often with invasive policy measures that affects people’s land rights, especially the poorest ones. Flood infrastructure, nature-based solutions, or resettlement programs away from flood-prone areas, require states to obtain land, but weak legal protection of people’s land rights puts livelihoods at risk.

Taking Mozambique as a case study, the aim of this research is to develop a methodology for improving flood risk assessments by extending hydrological records using paleo hydrologic evidence of past floods, combined with a socio-legal assessment of the land rights of those impacted by climate change response measures. These assessment will be combined in a GIS mapping framework that allows for an innovative risk mapping approach that can allow key stakeholders including governments and international organizations to locate vulnerable communities and design innovative and fairer climate change response measures.

This interdisciplinary research, focused on climate change response to flood hazard in central Mozambique, brings together recent developments in hydrology, climate science, and socio-legal research methods, which addresses the core of the Leiden University College (LUC) research focus on interconnected global challenges of Sustainability, Justice and Prosperity. In this project we work together among others with researchers and students from Universidade Eduardo Mondlane in Maputo.

Methods

Paleoflood hydrology has the potential to extend streamflow records in developing countries with limited resources and little (systematic) observed data. We propose to explore a method that involves short sediment cores, but has the potential to contain up to a century of data. Through qualitative research combining legal analysis and ethnographic fieldwork, the socio-legal part of this study will analyze and explain the dynamics surrounding the implementation of climate change response laws and policies in developing countries with a weak rule-of-law environment, and their (unforeseen) effects on vulnerable peoples’ land rights.  We further explore a new dimension to flood risk by adopting the socio-legal data to risk assessments through spatial mapping framework. Within disaster risk management, vulnerability is often defined through a socio-economic lens measured by monetary losses due to damaged property or post-disaster relief plans. The lessons learned from this interdisciplinary research could serve to improve natural disaster risk assessments.

• climate change
• land rights
• mozambique

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