The Climate Resilient Infrastructure Development Facility (CRIDF) catalysed a public–private partnership to manage floods in the Lower Incomati Basin. The aim is to deliver economic benefits to all Basin inhabitants and to reduce the vulnerability of poor communities. The approach taken was to encourage a switch from flood avoidance to flood risk management. Given the capacity and budget constraints in the public sector, flood risk management promises to be more sustainable than flood avoidance. Presenting infrastructure options for managing floods developed by hydraulic modelling enabled CRIDF to facilitate a basin management committee including large sugar estates and, with the cooperation of Mozambique, Swaziland and South Africa, to pilot an early warning flood forecasting system for the entire Basin which can benefit over 250,000 people in Mozambique.
