Welcome to the PARADeS project
About us
The project rationale and objectives of the project as well as detailed information about our consortium partners and their tasks.
Activities
Read all about recent and upcoming activities of the PARADeS project.
Publications
Learn more about what has already been published from the project.
Flood Information System
The FIS is intended to support stakeholders on understanding the evolution of flooding and its impact on the population and critical infrastructure (CI) under different rainfall return periods, climate change and hydraulic scenarios with proposed adaptation measures.
PARADeS Handbook
The PARADeS Handbook includuing all important aspects and outcomes of the project.
OER Traning Material
An overview of publicly available learning content and Open Educational Resources (OER) created within the PARADeS-project.
About the PARADeS project
Ghana is one of the countries in West Africa that is most challanged with flood disaster on annual basis leading to devastating impacts on humans, infrastructure, and the economy. In 2017, the country's northern and southern parts experienced devastating floods, which affected over 1 million people. Besides the annual floods, Ghana experienced several flood-related cascading disasters, which destroyed critical infrastructures such as roads, drainage systems, houses, and bridges. To build resilience to flood disaster risk, the PARADeS project aims at strenghtening Ghana's flood disaster risk management (FDRM) through an inclusive participatory approach.
The overall objective of the PARADeS project is to contribute to Ghana’s national flood disaster risk management (FDRM) strategy, thus increasing the country’s resilience to flooding disasters. The project is composed of a combination of research, development, and institutional strengthening activities. It integrates diverse information and data sources and develops collaborative scenarios and socio-technical tools in order to support coherent decision-making processes. A key aspect will be investigating and modeling cascading risk effects regarding critical infrastructure. All processes and working steps are realized in a participatory way together with Ghanaian stakeholders. The end products are strengthening institutional and citizens’ capacity through a series of activities on societal awareness and training of specialists, decision, and policymakers. Technologically, PARADeS will produce a set of decision support tools to effectively disseminate vital information to citizens, researchers, and decisionmakers to alleviate the impact of flooding. This will be demonstrated in three case study areas identified during the definition stage:
1. Accra – urban-runoff and coastal floods
2. Kumasi – urban-runoff and river floods
3. White Volta river basin – river floods
- Provision of hydrologic, hydrodynamic, and agentbased models to generate new information, which will provide the basis to understand flood risk
- Assessment of scenario-based flood hazard, vulnerability and risk, and flood hazards impacts on Critical Infrastructure (CI) with cascading disasters
- Identification of feasible prevention and adaptation measures
- Assessment of existing institutional settings and networks and policy options for participatory flood risk governance
- An integrated decision support system (DSS) tool named GaPS-fDSS for FDRM. The GaPS-fDSS consists of the Floodlabel for raising risk awareness and knowledge of prevention and ProMaIDes as a supporting tool for the FD-CRISys DSS to increase decision-makers’ capacity to manage, prevent, and respond to hazards and impacts caused by floods to critical infrastructure systems
- Strengthen the research and educational capacities of partner institutions, and to further develop the capacity of stakeholders, communities, specialists and practitioners
- Integration of developed technologies and innovative infrastructures of PARADeS into the institutional systems
- A concept for a flood risk and disaster prevention
center in Ghana
Sustainable development of flood disaster risk management (FDRM) needs the understanding and integration of the social, technical, and governance perspectives. Based on intensive stakeholder participation and socio-technical tools the projects’ work packages address these different perspectives and mutually exchange their findings to contribute to the development of sound FDRM measures. The work plan is composed of seven work packages (WP). All WPs are closely interlinked, with results and information passed on between them.
Who does what?
WP 1: Data, modeling, and risk analysis and assessment: WP Lead U-BN. Parties involved: U-BN, WASCAL, WRC, HS-M, NADMO, HKC
WP 2: Development of disaster scenarios, and prevention and adaptation strategies: WP Lead HS-M. Parties involved: HS-M, NADMO, U-BN, WASCAL, HKC, WRC
WP 3: Policy and governance of FRM and DRR: WP Lead U-FR. Parties involved: U-FR, U-BN, WRC, WASCAL, NADMO
WP 4: Human-floods dynamics and participation: WP Lead U-BN. Parties involved: U-BN, WASCAL, WRC, NADMO, U-FR
WP 5: Integrated FDRM technical tools: WP Lead HKC. Parties involved: HKC, HS-M, WASCAL, NADMO, U-BN
WP 6: Capacity development: WP Lead U-BN. Parties involved: U-BN, HKC, WASCAL, NADMO, U-FR, HS-M, WRC
WP 7: Sustainable implementation of disaster risk policy, strategies, and mechanisms: WP Lead HS-M. Parties involved: HS-M, U-BN, NADMO, WASCAL, WRC, U-FR, HKC
WP 8: Project coordination, management and dissemination (U-BN)
Study areas in Ghana
The three case study areas in Ghana identified during the definition stage:
- Accra – urban-runoff and coastal floods
- Kumasi – urban-runoff and river floods
- White Volta river basin – river floods
Consortium parters
In this section, a brief introduction of the project's consortium partners will be given.
The University of Bonn (U-BN)
The University of Bonn (U-BN), Department of Geography’s research group Eco-hydrology and Water Resources Management of Prof. Evers is the overall coordinator of the project.
The group has experience in the development and implementation of hydrological and hydrodynamic modeling, scenario development, vulnerability assessment, flood disaster risk management (FDRM), and decision support system (DSS). And have a good track record in the engagement and participation of stakeholders on FDRM, participatory modelling and enhancing social learning. The research group is currently involved in several projects related to FRM (BMBF), climate change adaption (BMBF), Human-Water-Research (SfB/DfG) as well as flood risk and health in Accra/Ghana (NRW Fortschrittskolleg). Click here to know more.
The University of Freiburg (U-FR)
The University of Freiburg (U-FR) professor chair of Forest and Environmental Policy is part of the Faculty of Environment and Natural Resources. The core competency of the chair lies in the sound analysis and development of innovative and applicable policy approaches and solutions for urgent environmental policy problems.
The chair has in particular experiences in the area of flood risk, climate risk and disaster, and disaster resilience at different policy levels, from local to global. The group collaborated on a number of international projects funded by BMBF, EU-FP7 and DFG and has a tradition of training Master and PhD student as well as collaborating with scholars from Ghana and other African countries. Click here to know more.
University of Applied Sciences Magdeburg (HS-M)
The research group Flood Risk Management (AG FRM) is part of the Department Water, Environment, Construction and Safety (WUBS) of the University of Applied Sciences in Magdeburg (HS-M).
The group was founded 20018 by Prof. Bachmann who is also the current group leader. Primary goal of our research work is the development of methods and tools that contribute to the improvement of flood protection and support adaptive and sustainable flood risk management. The aim is to develop holistic, interdisciplinary approaches. Hydrology, statistics, hydrodynamics, consequences for economy, critical infrastructures, ecology and people, reliability of structures and the risk analysis itself have to be integrated into approaches and tools. The free software package PROMAIDES which supports a multi-criteria, risk-based evaluation of flood mitigation measures is developed by us. Click here to know more.
The Flood Competence Center
The Flood Competence Center (HKC) is a registered non-profit organisation in Germany, which brings together a unique network of people and institutions affected by flooding, including municipalities and universities.
The HKC has more than 140 members in Germany and abroad. At HKC, science and practice are brought together for the purpose of holistic flood pre-vention and therefore the sustainable development, provision and transfer of expertise. Click here to know more.
West African Center on Climate Change and Adapted Land Use
The West African Science Service Center on Climate Change and Adapted Land Use (WASCAL) is a research, capacity building and climate service center with its head quarters based in Accra, Ghana.
It conducts research on many areas of climate science to impacts of climate change as well as adaption and mitigation of climate change. WASCAL has over 5 years of experience in natural hazard mapping, risk and vulnerability assessments at multiple scales in West Africa with particular monitoring assets located in Burkina Faso, Ghana and Benin. In this project, WASCAL will contribute to the collection and analysis of data, to the coordination and organisation of workshops, meetings and working sessions and to the formulation of R&D oriented research proposal. Click here to know more.
Water Resources Commission
The national coordinating institution for the management of water resources and related activities, the Water Resources Commission (WRC), will be a ground-supportive institution for the identification and establishment of contact with other institutions and stakeholders.
It will actively participate in the discussion and the evaluation of the proposed solutions for improvement and elaboration of research and development project. The commission will play the lead role by providing the platform to coordinate the various institutions such as the earth observation providers, disaster management organisation and the local governance institutions in Ghana. Click here to know more.
National Disaster Management Organization
The vision of the National Disaster Management Organization (NADMO) is to enhance the capacity of society to prevent and manage disasters and to improve the livelihood of the poor and vulnerable in rural communities through effective disaster management, social mobilisation and employment generation.
Its mission is to manage disasters by co-coordinating the resources of government institutions and non-governmental agencies, and developing the capacity of communities to respond effectively to disasters and improve their livelihood through social mobilization, employment generation and poverty reduction projects. WRC and NADMO will contribute in interviews, the realisation of the workshops, identification of key stakeholders and provide data, information and knowledge. Click here to know more.
Cooperation Partner: The Maria Sibylla Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa
The Maria Sibylla Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa (MIASA) in Ghana is an international research college at the University of Ghana in Legon, Accra.
The Institute facilitates the cooperation of Ghanaian scientists with their international peers beyond disciplinary and geographical boundaries. MIASA is committed to reducing global asymmetries in knowledge production, simultaneously bridging the cultural divide between anglophone and francophone Africa, as well as increasing the visibility of humanities and social science research by academics in and from Sub-Saharan Africa. Click here to know more.
Project Partner Leaders
University of Bonn – Prof. Dr. Mariele Evers (Consortium project leader)
University of Freiburg- Dr. Sylvia Kruse
University of Applied Sciences in Magdeburg – Prof. Dr.-Ing. Daniel Bachmann
Flood Competence Center – Dipl.-Hydrologe Georg Johann
WASCAL – Prof. Kehinde O. Ogunjobi and Prof. Daouda Kone
Water Resources Commission – Dr. Mawuli Lumor
National Disaster Management Organization – Ms. Charlotte Norman
