Learning from History of Natural Disaster in Sahel: A Review of EM-DAT Database

One of the first environmental crises to attract interest in development initiatives and aid was the great drought of the 1970s in the Sahel. This study examines the damage caused by natural disasters from one of the most widely used databases—EM-DAT—with a sample size of 10 countries, all of which are considered to be Sahelian, over the period 1960–2020. These countries have been divided into two regions: Western Africa Sahel (WAS) and Eastern Africa Sahel (EAS). We considered four groups of natural disasters—biological, climatological, hydrological, and meteorological. We used descriptive statistics to summarize the natural disaster records. In doing so, we investigated tendencies to identify the most reported natural hazards, establishing their spatial distribution and assessing their impacts in terms of damage and people affected. In total, 705 events were recorded in the database over the study period. The East Africa Sahel (EAS) region experienced 390 events, making it the most disaster-prone area, followed closely by the Western Africa Sahel (WAS) region with 315 events. Hydrological disasters were the most frequent (43%) in the Sahel. Although only occurring at a frequency of 15%, climatological disasters, mainly droughts, had a very significant impact on the population (88%). These people were enumerated at 55% in EAS. In the WAS region, Niger stands out in terms of frequency of occurrence of natural disasters of any kind. This phenomenon is also seen in the EAS region having Ethiopia standing out. In general, EAS is observed to be more impacted by natural disasters, which may be due to the way of life adopted by the populations such as pastoralism. However, WAS is also very exposed to biological disasters, which could be due to its proximity to the Guinean zone (more rainfall, more forest) where certain viruses and bacteria spread more rapidly. However, this could also be related to food consumption habits. Going forward, this work can be used as a further guide for future research.