Mozambique Country Case Study:
Impacts and Responses to the 1997-98 El Niño Event
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Executive Summary
Socio-economic setting
Mozambique, located in southeast Africa, has three main landscapes: the southern coastal plains rising to 200 meters above sea level and covering about 44 per cent of the country; the central and northern plateau, between 200 and 1,000 meters above sea level covering about 43 per cent of the territory; and the interior large plateau and mountain ranges over 1,000 meters and covering about 13 per cent of the territory. Most agricultural production takes place in the center and north of the country, where most of the population is also located (apart from the major cities), mainly because the low-lying southern coastal plans are prone to drought and floods. The latter come mainly from rivers rising in neighboring countries. Rains in the center and north tend to be produced by westerly winds generated by the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), bringing depressions and occasional tropical cyclones.
The population has grown considerably since 1950, despite a series of wars, from 6.5 million to 16.9 million in 1998, at the time of the last El Niño event. The infrastructure and agricultural profile of the country remain profoundly influenced by its colonial heritage, even though much of the infrastructure has been destroyed in the wars. The other effect of its colonial past, apart from a low level of literacy at independence in 1975, was the widespread use of monoculture crops, particularly cotton. This reduced food security in Mozambique, and encouraged labor migration both within the country and to neighboring countries. The most important labor migration was from the south of the country into South Africa. The combination of monoculture and labor migration rendered the country (especially the south which has long been prone to drought and flood) highly vulnerable to the impact of natural disasters. The lack of investment has meant that there are comparatively few resources to mitigate the effects of such events.
Mozambican independence more or less coincided with the change that took place in 1976 in the frequency and timing of ENSO extreme warm and cold events. Emergency coping institutions were developed rapidly to deal with the effects of serious floods in 1978. These soon developed into a more permanent arrangement in 1980, but the nature of disaster management changed with the intensification of South African backed destabilization and the developing conflict that became much more intense from 1982 until the Peace Accord of 1992. This conflation of war and the effects of the El Niño events of 1982-83, 1987-88, 1991-92 and (after the war) 1994-95 meant that Mozambican disaster management did not distinguish very clearly between natural and war-related disasters. The 1991-92 drought lasted into 1993 in the center of the country, and this meant that the immediate post-war period leading up to the 1994 elections created a huge field for emergency activities, which included massive efforts by the UN peacekeeping mission, the UN Operation in Mozambique (ONUMOZ), and its humanitarian office, the UN Office for Humanitarian Assistance Coordination (UNOHAC).
In 1995, the institutional setting changed with the departure of ONUMOZ and the emphasis shifted to the idea of a coordinating rather than an implementing body, as the DPCCN (Department for the Prevention and Combat of Natural Calamities) had been. This discussion developed further during the 1997-98 El Niño event, as the Mozambican government developed its Multisectoral Action Plan in consultation with SADC (Southern African Development Community) regional agencies or activities such as SARCOF (Southern Africa Regional Climate Outlook Forum), with meteorologists from the US, with the UN and the major international donors. The result was the creation in June 1999 of INGC (Instituto Nacional de Gestão de Calamidades), the body that was soon to be tested by the floods of early 2000.
Within this developing institutional framework, the SNAPSA (Sistema Nacional de Aviso Previo de Seguranca Alimentar) early warning system has had the lead role among Mozambican government agencies for advising on impending extreme weather events. This is composed of staff from INAM (Instituto Nacional de Meteorologia) and INIA (Instituto Nacional de Investigacão Agronomica) with input from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (UN FAO), and with a technical commission including key personnel from other ministries.
Climate-related and other natural hazards in Mozambique
Apart from drought and floods, the other climate-related hazards are tropical cyclones, malaria, cholera, pest infestations (particularly red locust) and famine. The impact of pest infestations has been controlled with considerable success since the mid-1990s, but the use of adequate sanitation facilities to reduce the impact of disease remains a high-priority issue.
Scientific research on El Niño in Mozambique
The main centers for research on recent and contemporary ENSO events is INAM, together with INIA. However, there is also research work being conducted at Eduardo Mondlane University (UEM), where there is an undergraduate degree in Meteorology and Physics, and at the Universidade Pedagogica. In addition, there is ongoing work on past ENSO events in the Institute of Geology, and by staff now at the department of Archaeology and Anthropology at UEM. International contacts include the University of Zululand, the SARCOF network, which notably includes the Drought Monitoring Center at Harare and the South African Weather Bureau, the University of Oklahoma, and NOAA (National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration). It is not clear whether links have been maintained with the International Research Institute (IRI) for climate prediction located at Columbia University, but such links were certainly there during the 1997-1998 El Niño event.
Historical Interest in El Niño before the 1997-1998 event
There was some research before the onset of the 1997-98 El Niño, most notably in 1996, but there seems to have been little on current ENSO phenomena before then. The press coverage, indicating public awareness and interest, shows little mention of it before 1992.
1997-98 Event
Information on the 1997 El Niño in Mozambique
The 1997-98 El Niño was noted in a special SNAPSA bulletin in March 1997, but the first serious Mozambican report on it took place in July 1997, and was the result of papers sent from the Drought Monitoring Center and the FAO Regional Headquarters in Harare, Zimbabwe. This led to a series of meetings, most notably a SARCOF meeting in Kodoma on September 8, a MICOA/INAM/IRI meeting on September 15 and 16 and a full national planning meeting from October 1-5. This presented the first draft of a Multisectoral Action Plan to deal with El Niño, the first such initiative undertaken by the Mozambican government.
The UN agencies, especially the FAO and the World Food Programme (WFP), were involved in the development of this plan, and the major donors USAID and the EU were also active from August 1997. The revised Multisectoral Action Plan was considered by a wider group of donors early in December 1997, and changes were required before they would support an international appeal for aid by the Government of Mozambique. This was a little unfortunate since some of the aspects that were objected to were, in fact, quite sensible, although other criticisms were perfectly valid. The criticism that was most misplaced was of the plan to clear the irrigation and drainage canals of the Limpopo irrigation complex near Chokwe. This had already been suggested by FAO in 1993 and enthusiastically supported by the leadership of ONUMOZ, but had not been taken up. This is a measure that is equally sensible for drought or flood, and its implementation would undoubtedly have saved lives in the Limpopo floods of 2000.
The response to the 1997-98 El Niño was in general a very positive experience as the MICOA/INAM follow-up meeting concluded in February 1998. However, the rains continued at normal or above normal levels, even including some flooding. This had an unfortunate impact in terms of credibility of seasonal forecasting and the integration of such information into the national decision-making process. This negative effect was partly overcome by the subsequent forecast on the effects of La Niña, but it meant that it was only really in late 1999/early 2000 that the government reacted seriously to flood warnings. INAM continues to suffer from lack of equipment that would enable it to give forecasts in sufficient detail to warn the government of incoming extreme weather events.
El Niño in the media
There was excellent coverage in the media during the 1997-98 event, although the media tended to be blamed for simplifying the message. This may have been true for radio and TV, whose archives were too poorly organized to be worth accessing, but in general it was not true of the press. Despite this, there was some vitriolic editorial comment when the "drought forecast" did not turn our as expected. There was very little coverage of El Niño before the 1997-98 event, the first mention being in 1992.
Teleconnections
Scientific views on the existence and strength of El Niño teleconnections to Mozambique
The most notable work on this has been conducted in INAM and INIA. The 1996 paper by Lucio and Amade, and the subsequent more detailed study by Lucio,1 are the most detailed analyses on El Niño in Mozambique. Relying as they do on both Mozambican historical data and satellite data, they are probably the most authoritative. The SNAPSA paper of December 1997 is another important piece of work on teleconnections, indicating that since 1950 some two-thirds of El Niño events have been associated with drought in Mozambique, and not simply in the south as conventional wisdom had it. The most extensive and intense drought of this period, and possibly of the twentieth century, was that of 1991-92, clearly related to the El Niño of that time.
While not based on scientific data, historical records of drought in southern Mozambique also suggest that about two-thirds of El Niño events are correlated with drought, especially for the period 1850-1912.
The issue then is the nature of the processes in the Indian Ocean and possibly even the Atlantic Ocean, which mediate the probable teleconnections between Pacific Ocean sea surface temperature changes and the climate in northeast Africa. This is clearly a priority for future research, and the extension of the Tropical Ocean-Atmosphere (TAO) array into the Indian Ocean is strongly recommended, as is the upgrading of facilities at INAM, and the fostering of still wider links with southern African and Lusophone climate and climate-related researchers.
Climate-related anomalies and impacts in Mozambique of the 1982-83 event
The 1982-83 event clearly produced a very serious drought, possibly the most serious one of the century until then. (The drought of 1912 was also very serious, and its full extent may not be recorded.) Because the drought began before the El Niño, and was prolonged and intensified by it, and then continued after it, famine was widespread in the south of Mozambique. The war meant that food aid could not be delivered to the affected populations. The official estimate of 100,000 deaths from starvation, while not contested by international agencies, does not seem to have found its way into estimates of the deaths caused by the 1982-83 El Niño, which are put at around 1,500 worldwide.
Climate-related impacts of the 1997-98 El Niño
There were only minor floods in the south of the country, and the damage was more than offset by the increased agricultural production elsewhere. Overall agricultural production grew by around 5 per cent, contributing to a pattern of growth of around 10 per cent per annum for the calendar years 1996, 1997 and 1998. Growth in 1999 was around 14 per cent, partly because of the stable climate conditions for that whole four-year period.
Reliability of attribution
The attribution of drought to El Niño was high, based on a southern African international consensus, which broadly matched that of the WMO. The main issue for attribution now is the improvement of the understanding of western Indian Ocean processes, which clearly outweighed the El Niño impacts in this case (i.e., 1997-98), largely because the Indian Ocean was so anomalously warm. The possibility of Rossby waves generated from the Gulf of Guinea in the Atlantic has not been ruled out, and should be a priority for the TAO array currently being installed in the Atlantic.
Responses
Government reports and statements issued before the impacts of the 1997-98 El Niño became apparent.
The main reports were the July 1997 SNAPSA forecast, derived at least partly from the earlier SARCOF statements, the report on the MICOA/INAM/IRI meeting of mid-September 1997, the Multisectoral Action Plan produced in first draft by early October, and the December update produced in relation to the mid-December SARCOF update meeting.
Reports issued after the impacts appeared
After it became clear that rains had been sufficient to avoid serious drought, the main government report was the followup meeting of MICOA/INAM in February 1998. In addition, the WFP produced a much longer bound report covering the impact of the event on the whole of southern Africa.
The major responses to the event
These were the preparations that took place in the period July – December 1997, which have been described above.
Mozambican research on El Niño
If one ignores geological and archaeological research on past El Niño events, there has been very little research on contemporary El Niño events before 1996, as has been mentioned above.
A government plan to respond to El Niño
There exists no standing plan to respond to El Niño. The government is currently fully occupied in coping with the impacts of the floods of early 2000 and their aftermath, which are still considerable at the time of writing this report in June 2000. However, the 1997 Multisectoral Action Plan, together with the lessons from the floods of 2000, should help in the formulation of such a plan, and should raise awareness as to its necessity.
El Niño as a disaster
El Niño may not be seen as a disaster because the connection was not widely perceived until 1997 and the expected probable teleconnection did not take place. However, the current floods have been related to La Niña, and this may raise awareness of the importance of ENSO events in general for policy making in Mozambique.
International research on El Niño in Mozambique
While there is ongoing historical research conducted by S.J. Young in Oregon, USA, meteorological and climatological research is concentrated in the USA and South Africa. In the USA, the main centers for research on Mozambique are NOAA, the University of Oklahoma, and Purdue University. In South Africa, the most notable links are with the University of Natal. However, important research is also being conducted at the University of Cape Town. The latter is about to establish links with INAM as a result of this project on the 1997-98 El Niño.
Forecasting by Analogy
What could have been done differently?
Very little, in the current state of knowledge, could have been done differently. While plans could always be improved, the main issue was the seasonal forecast itself. This has rightly been identified as a major challenge to climatologists and seasonal forecasters, and can only come about by a combination of improved monitoring and forecasting within Mozambique itself, and international research on the processes in and over the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, preferably through an extended TAO array and the development of better regional climate models.
The information flow, in terms of regular monitoring of meteorological, water, health and agricultural developments, could be improved, as could public education on the interpretation of such forecasts.
In addition, long-term investment in Mozambican infrastructure, especially roads, food security warehouses and health clinics, would make the country better able to withstand the impacts of climate variability and extreme weather events.
Realistic obstacles to perfect forecasting followed by perfect action
The current limitations on INAM both in terms of staff development and equipment, are the main obstacle to better forecasting, which can never be perfect in a situation of climate change. This is followed by the need to strengthen the capacity of INGC to coordinate government and international agencies and NGOs in a disaster management scenario. Some of this could be achieved by the integration of GIS and other information into a common format for use by the whole range of agencies likely to be involved in disaster response activities.
El Niño considerations in Mozambique's national disaster plans
It is perhaps now the main element in disaster planning, especially if one includes the impact of cold ENSO extreme events, such as the one associated with the floods of early 2000.
Strengths and weaknesses in the national response to the forecast
The weaknesses consist of the still-fragile national meteorological service, and in the flow of information across agencies, which affects coordination between them. Response would also be strengthened if the processes mediating the teleconnections from the Pacific to east Africa were better understood.
Influence of the 1997-98 El Niño on the response to the following La Niña
There seems to have been no contingency plan for the following La Niña, and the "failure" of the earlier forecast of drought undoubtedly played a major role in this.
Lessons Learned
The main lessons are for the Mozambican government regarding longer-term policy formation. There are also lessons for the international donor community, regarding both dialogue with the recipient government over aid priorities and long-term measures to enhance the resilience of the Mozambican economy in the face of climate variability that will never disappear. The more specific lessons concern the functioning of the INAM (National Institute for Meteorology) and of the INGC (National Disaster Management Institute). The highest-priority lessons are as follows:
First: Prevention! Prevention! Prevention! Recent floods in Mozambique in early 2000 (a La Niña year) showed that small preventive measures could have spared a great number of lives. These have to be done in connection with local communities making use of local solutions.
Second: Education! Education! Education! This is the only way, in the short and long run to raise societal knowledge and sensitivity toward this issue. El Niño-related educational activities would include schools at all levels and the media.
Third: Forecast! Forecast! Forecast! Last, but not least, Third-World states tend to neglect investments in forecasts. It is expensive (even if not very expensive, there are always other priorities) and results do not seem evident. It is important to change this mentality. It is necessary to strengthen, on the one hand, the international and regional forecasting networks and, on the other, to include (again) local participation. Forecasting cannot be considered an aseptic technologically based activity (or something which belongs only to the rich Western countries). Human, cultural, and local factors have to be taken into account.
Mozambican Government Policy Formation
There is a grave danger that Mozambican government decision making will continue to show the same old attributes of ad hoc gathering together of people with relevant expertise as a response to events, rather than a sustained process of policy development, with investment in the long-term development of expertise. It is symptomatic of the country's political culture that the agricultural season is still described as a "campaign."
The reasons for this have long been clear:
- Policy formation has long suffered from being in a "response mode" rather than proactive. Some attempts at longer term policy development, such as the Indicative Perspective Plan of the early 1980s, were not seriously debated, and depended on intellectual inputs from donor countries with their own unrealistic agenda. The 1997-98 El Niño Action Plan was a notable exception to this tendency. However, it suffered from the sometimes poor process of dialogue with the aid donors.
- There has been a constant process of a loss of expertise to international agencies and NGOs or abroad. A country that began in 1975 with 95 per cent illiteracy and a very small group of people with higher education has long found that a policy of training staff suffered from high rates of "brain drain."
- The dependence on donor aid, induced by drought and war, has given some donors a de facto institutional interest in weakening Mozambican government structures, to minimize debate over their preferred policy prescriptions. Other aid agencies have tried to strengthen decision-making processes with Technical Assistance programs, but these have usually depended on a few key personnel who have often been enticed away by better career opportunities elsewhere.
- Policy formation without the resources for implementation is inherently problematic. The difficulties in raising taxes in an economy that was in decline from 1981 to 1994 have seriously depleted the capacity of the Mozambican government to act on its own account. The main exception to this has been the delivery of food and other emergency aid. Yet, this has been financed by international donors who understandably wanted a say in its distribution, as well as transparency in decision making. The result has been a silent struggle over aid distribution, which is typical of the politics of emergency aid, especially in situations that were perceived as linked to the Cold War.
The issue now is how to foster a change in the political culture in favor of a longer-term view of economic development and management that is not hidebound (constricted) by issues of debt repayment. The South African-backed Maputo Corridor has contributed to the long-term development of Mozambique, but it is not clear whether this success can be repeated in the cases of the Beira and Nacala Corridors. The question of investment to increase resilience to drought and flood in the South and Center is now on the political agenda, with the "award" of US $500 million to Mozambique at the recent Rome donors' conference. However, the link between emergency rehabilitation aid and long-term development is apparently not yet being made, either within the Mozambican government or within the donor community.
The other main lesson is that monitoring meteorological conditions within Mozambique needs to be improved. This is not only a matter of increasing the number of weather stations, but of improved communication with provincial governments and NGOs, to increase coverage of the whole country with its different sub-climates.
International Donor Community
(i) Emergency aid versus development aid
The donor community has, for budgetary accounting reasons, set up an artificial distinction between emergency aid and development aid. It then poses the question of how the transfer from one to another can be made. Part of the answer lies in the simple fact that a little judicious foresight can mean that emergency aid can have long-term benefits, and that some long-term aid can increase capacity to deal with quick-onset disasters. Thus, for example, design and construction of decent flood-resistant roads in southern and central Mozambique could be implemented as a disaster recovery project, but would have long-term economic benefits. A recent search of current UK patents shows that appropriate technology exists to build flood-resistant roads that would be much less likely to be washed away. One wonders if this has been taken into account in planning the reconstruction on EN1, the main road north from Maputo to Xai-Xai and Inhambane.
Similarly, reed-bed construction would reduce vulnerability to malaria and cholera, but is unlikely to be financed as part of a disaster recovery strategy. It could, however, conceivably be funded, for example, by a developed nation under the Kyoto carbon credit measures. The point is that the budgetary distinction between emergency and development aid, which seems to make sense, can at times get in the way. There is little sign of the international donor community interweaving aid in an intelligent way to reduce future vulnerability to climate-related disasters, which remains a serious long-term threat in Mozambique.
(ii) Dialogue between donors and recipients
More important than this "eternal dilemma" (between spending on emergency and on development aid) is the need to enhance dialogue both within the donor community and between it and the Mozambican government. There is no doubt that events such as the recent Rome donors' conference do enhance donor coordination. However, in the period before El Niño, despite the good job done by various UN agencies, and by USAID and the EU Delegation in Maputo, there was still a problem of dialogue in response to the Mozambican government's plan to mitigate the effects of the predicted drought. The EU's private response document was a mixture of perfectly reasonable and quite mistaken points. Rather than dialogue on this to clarify the issues, there was an attempt at imposition of all the EU points as a condition of making an international appeal for aid. Such a paternalistic attitude, which, inter alia, undermined the advice being given by UN Technical Assistance personnel, was not conducive to good coordination in what was expected to be a serious emergency.
A similar attitude was evident in the UK government's approach before the recent Rome conference. The Minister for International Development, Clare Short, publicly criticized the Mozambican government's capacity to respond to the Cyclone Eline disaster, implying that there was little point in devoting too many resources to disaster recovery in these circumstances. This comment had considerable validity, but took no account of the major restructuring that INGC had been undertaking as a response to a consultancy report from a UK University. As such, a short-term ministerial view was in danger of undermining the long-term perspective of work that was probably instigated by UK-funded aid!
In any case, the UK Department for International Development had had a serious disagreement over emergency aid with the UK Ministry of Defence. The latter was publicly criticized by the House of Commons for its stance, which delayed the delivery of helicopters to Mozambique after Cyclone Eline. The US government was also slow in its response. While these are not El Niño events, they do illustrate the point that it is not just the governments of developing countries that have problems with policy coordination and implementation.
While transparency, speed and effectiveness are very important for disaster preparedness, and while dialogue cannot eschew criticism of the recipient government's performance, the objective should surely be to enhance the future performance of the aid-receiving government in terms of disaster prevention, mitigation and recovery.
(iii) Long-term investment
Donor governments and agencies need to get away from the so-called "sick children syndrome," where TV pictures of starving children or other stricken people are used to evoke the political response required to justify the emergency aid. To reduce the vulnerability to drought and flood that can be expected with ENSO's extreme events, investment in vulnerable areas is necessary. A simple way to illustrate this is to compare the 1997-98 warm event with that of 1877-78. In the earlier event, tens of millions of people died in India and China. In the latter, stronger event comparatively few died. This difference is largely a result of the stronger condition of both economies 120 years later, despite their far greater populations.
Hence, the issue is how to identify the vulnerable areas. In the case of Mozambique, this is comparatively easy. NVDI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) and CCD (charge -coupled device) images linked to weather station and udometric data with the results feeding into GIS (geographic information systems) make it comparatively simple to identify the drought-prone areas on the basis of historical evidence. This could be modified by the use of dynamic climate models of the southern African region, of the type being developed by Professor Bruce Hewitson of Environmental Sciences, University of Cape Town. The reason for the need for such models is that global warming of the atmosphere means that the past is now less useful as a guide to the future and, therefore, forecasting long-term changes or impacts by analogy will likely become less reliable.
Such climatic data could then be linked to soil type data (again, readily available in Mozambique in GIS format) and to population data such as the recent census. Even voting data could be used to give an up-to-date picture of how the still-mobile population is distributed. Mozambique has had a recent comprehensive survey of poverty, which facilitates the identification of economically vulnerable groups. The levels of poverty are even greater than previously thought, which probably means that Mozambique should again be considered one of the poorest, if not the poorest, country on the globe. Such evidence should inform disaster planning. Hence, the role of INGC could be enhanced to facilitate the integration of such data into dialogue with the international donor community.
(iv) Improved forecasting
However expensive it is, it is still a rational use of resources from the viewpoint of a country as poor as Mozambique to complete the TAO array of buoys by adding the Indian Ocean to the global network, now that the Atlantic network is under construction. This would enhance the dynamic climate models, and improve short-term prediction, thereby enhancing the credibility of ENSO-related disaster planning. The improved understanding of Indian Ocean dynamics would benefit the whole of eastern Africa, as well as the more densely populated Pakistan, India and Bangladesh.
INAM
INAM, the National Institute for Meteorology, has lost key personnel to Portugal in the last few years. This has doubtless been because of the lack of up-to-date equipment and prospects for serious research in INAM, and has adversely affected its prospects for serious international research collaboration. To some degree, this has been overcome by contacts that have been established by the current Director, Filipe Lucio, to conduct international collaborative research and sustain the research program of INAM. However, prior to Cyclone Eline, it was evident that INAM did not really register as an important part of Mozambican government policy making.
As an illustration of this point, it is worth mentioning that the former Director of INAM returned from Portugal with some colleagues, one whom was also a former INAM staff member, just after Cyclone Eline, on a longstanding engagement to lecture on the latest developments in meteorology and climate monitoring. While this was an imaginative and stimulating evening of lectures, and much of it was new material to most of the staff of INAM, in reality there was little that would have been new to anyone reading WMO material and surfing the Web regularly. (This would include the Director of INAM and a few others present.2)
While the number of weather and udometric stations remains so low compared to colonial times, and compared to real needs in a topographically and climatically diverse country, INAM will struggle to take its proper place in the international research community, as this evening of lectures indirectly indicated. The fact that it was taking place showed that the current director is doing everything that he can to maintain international links and to upgrade the qualifications of his staff (there is a program to send staff abroad for further training). It also showed how much remains to be done, in that what should have been material that could be accessed from within Mozambique was being introduced as news from the developed world. It was gratifying that the new minister was present, and one hopes that this was an indication that Cyclone Eline had prompted the senior levels of the Mozambican government to take meteorology and climatology seriously as an integral part of its decision-making process.
Nevertheless, it is worth stating that INAM did well in terms of issuing good weather forecasts, both during the 1997-98 El Niño and later during the floods. The performance could have been improved with Doppler radar and more weather stations, however. Thus, just prior to Cyclone Eline, there had been more rain in three days than during the previous major cyclone, Domoina in 1984. Although rain had been forecast, the intensity had not, and thus the floods of mid-February 2000 prior to Eline were not expected to be so severe. Hence, it is not special pleading to say that the deterioration of the weather station network needs to be reversed, and that equipment needs to be updated, if not to the levels evident in Macau, at least to give the basic minimum of modern equipment, including the ability to receive data from the new ESA (European Space Agency) satellite.
INGC
This, the National Disaster Management Institute, is a fairly recent creation in its present form, having started its coordinating role in mid-1999. The national action plan for responding to the 1997-98 El Niño was drawn up by its predecessor (DPCCN) in conjunction with other relevant Mozambican ministries. It was unfortunate that this plan was not better received, either by the donors in late 1997 or by the media in 1998 when the El Niño-related drought forecast was thought to have been "wrong." It forms a reasonable basis on which to build a standing contingency plan for disasters, since many of the measures would be the same for flood or drought. It would also help if it were translated into English.
Its role of coordinating ministries means that it has to have the political backing to be heard when necessary, an issue which seems also to have affected the new ISDR (International Strategy for Disaster Reduction) in the UN. Further work is necessary on improving the coherence and financial aspects of the planning process, but the experience of the recent floods should facilitate this improvement. The issue of resources to implement any plan remains a critical one, as the floods showed, and this means that investment in infrastructure to mitigate the effects of droughts should be an ongoing process. It has to be built into donor priorities, until such time as the Mozambican government is able to raise sufficient taxes to finance its own activities. Thus, skill at the politics of international aid will be a continuing prerequisite for the leadership of INGC and for ministries.
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Lucio, F., and J. Amade, 1996: Estudo para a identificação das zonas afectadas pela seca e/ou em perigo de desertificação em Moçambique. Maputo: unpublished.
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This lecture was part of a programme of establishing a Lusophone network of meteorological services, and coincided with the Portuguese Presidency of the European Union in the first six months of 2000. There had been a meeting of all Lusophone meteorology services, except Macau (where flight difficulties had prevented the new director there from attending) in São Tome a few weeks earlier.
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