What this framework is

Durban's informal and peri-urban settlements face intensifying flood risk, but the city-scale early warning systems built to protect them lack the granularity to know whether a warning is actually received, understood and acted upon at settlement level. The April 2022 floods, which killed more than 450 people and displaced 40,000 across the eThekwini Municipal Area, exposed the cost of that gap.

The Community-Based Flood Early Warning System (CBFEWS) is a response built over a decade in Quarry Road West and piloted in three further settlements: Pholani, Umzinyathi and Tshelimnyama. This framework distils that experience into a replicable roadmap for extending CBFEWS to other settlements, built around three interlocking pillars (Knowledge Foundation, Procedural Core and Guiding Principles) plus a cross-cutting layer that keeps each step aligned with existing municipal systems.

It's written for municipal disaster risk managers and practitioners setting up CBFEWS in a new settlement: the Procedural Core pillar below works as a step-by-step implementation guide, and the Knowledge Foundation pillar helps align a settlement's specific flood characteristics with the municipality's own Forecast Early Warning System.