Pre-Disaster Preparedness/Prevention and Mitigation Strategies for Floods: A Use Case of Lagos, Nigeria

Climate change-induced phenomena are increasingly becoming frequent and intense causing global challenges. Urbanization and population growth continue to aggravate flood events, making building resilient cities a vital way to combat them. This research reviews flood preparedness and mitigation strategies employed in developed countries to reveal flood risk management practices that promote resilience in these countries to allow adoption in struggling and developing countries such as Nigeria. The review from previous and current studies followed three methods consisting of Inclusion & Exclusion criteria, Abstract screening, and Full-text review. The findings from past studies present multifaceted measures taken to prepare for and mitigate floods and how they have enabled people and cities to live with floods, however, developing countries still face a major risk of a severe impact from flood inundation. The use case area, Lagos, was found to be continuously inundated by floods and is in grave need of better management strategies to mitigate the impact resulting from floods. The results from the review show that flood risk mitigation is primarily affected by risk perception, indicating its effect on response measures which are either structural or non-structural. This research concludes by proposing an approach or framework that is an outcome of a comparative assessment of flood risk management from developed countries to consider for the implementation of preparedness and mitigation strategies in the use case area.