Afghanistan river flood hazard

The geographical location of Afghanistan and years of environmental degradation in the
country make Afghanistan highly prone to intense and recurring natural hazards such as
flooding, earthquakes, snow avalanches, landslides, and droughts. These occur in addition to
man-made disasters resulting in the frequent loss of live, livelihoods, and property. The
creation, understanding and accessibility of hazard, exposure, vulnerability and risk
information is key for effective management of disaster risk. Assuring the resilience of new
reconstruction efforts to natural hazards, and maximizing the effectiveness of risk reduction
investments to reduce existing risks is important to secure lives and livelihoods.

So far, there has been limited disaster risk information produced in Afghanistan, and
information that does exist typically lacks standard methodology and does not have uniform
geo-spatial coverage. To better understand natural hazard and disaster risk, the World Bank
and Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) are supporting the
development of new fluvial flood, flash flood, drought, landslide, avalanche and seismic risk
information in Afghanistan, as well as a first-order analysis of the costs and benefits of
resilient reconstruction and risk reduction strategies.

For fluvial flood risk a flood modeling framework is being developed that consists of three
components:
• Hydrological analysis which models how much precipitation comes to runoff. The
hydrological analysis is used as a back-bone to compute flow and flooding through the full
catchment area during selected events as well as selected return periods. The hydrological
simulations also form the backbone of the drought risk assessments (work package 3).
• Hydrodynamic analysis, to translate runoff into river flow and inundation and flow over
floodplain areas.
• Flood impact analysis for calculating the impacts of a flood applied to flood prone areas
with high damage potential.