The war in Yemen, ongoing since 2014, has spawned one of the worst humanitarian crises in recent history—causing substantial loss of life, displacing an estimated 4.5 million people, accelerating poverty, damaging vital infrastructure, and resulting in the collapse of the economy. Natural hazards such as floods, landslides, and droughts have amplified the effects of conflict, just as these effects have tended to increase people’s vulnerability to these hazards. For example, the conflict had already displaced most of the more than 73,000 households affected by the 2022 monsoon season while also limiting the country’s ability to organize and implement disaster management and emergency response in the aftermath of such disasters.

For nearly a decade, GFDRR has been on the frontlines of helping Yemen understand and address the disaster–fragility, conflict and violence (FCV) nexus. A key focus of this engagement has been the provision of technical support for a series of damage and needs assessments that have helped explain how the nexus has affected the Yemeni people and, by extension, how Yemen and its development partners can address this challenge. Those assessments, conducted in 2015, 2018, 2020, and 2023, also provided preliminary estimates of needs for reconstruction of physical infrastructure and restoration of service delivery. The technical teams used remote data collection methods and collaborated extensively with national and subnational authorities to ensure that the assessments could be successfully conducted in a difficult operating environment.

In undertaking the assessments, the technical teams have adapted traditional methodologies of damage and needs assessment to ensure that the analytical work fully accounts for the interaction between disasters such as Cyclone Tej in 2023 and FCV dynamics in the country. Such FCV dynamics include internal displacement, food and water insecurity, and conflict-induced damage to infrastructure. For instance, the assessments in Yemen have not only estimated direct physical damage to residential and non-residential buildings, agriculture, and infrastructure, as with most traditional methodologies, but have also evaluated the socioeconomic impacts, such as economic losses, costs of relocation, and labor. This is vitally important because the socioeconomics impacts that people feel after a disaster are magnified to the extent that there are also FCV dynamics, as in the case of Yemen. Limiting the analysis to physical damage estimates has the potential to significantly understate the extent to which disasters affect the lives of people already vulnerable because of FCV dynamics.

A priority for the teams has been to ensure that the scope and methodology for the assessments have been continuously adapted to the evolving FCV dynamics on the ground. For instance, whereas the 2015 assessment focused on damage and needs in six sectors (education, energy, health, housing, transport, and water and sanitation), subsequent assessments have expanded coverage to include additional sectors, such as food security, governance, information and communications technology, power, social protection, social resilience, and solid waste management. This was needed, in part, because the length and breadth of the conflict in Yemen have caused damage and needs to be manifested much more broadly in society and the economy than before.

By fully accounting for interactions between disasters and FCV dynamics in conducting the damage and needs assessments, the technical teams have unearthed critical findings that continue to inform efforts by national and subnational authorities and development partners such as the World Bank to support the people of Yemen. For example, the 2023 assessment found that Cyclone Tej had exacerbated the internally displaced persons (IDP) crisis and could present an opportunity for armed groups to exploit IDPs affected by the disaster. On that basis, the assessment has highlighted the importance of prioritizing IDPs in the recovery, including through implementation of appropriate safeguards to protect them from exploitation. The findings and recommendations from the 2023 assessment have informed the preparation of $50 million in assistance for Yemen’s response to Cyclone Tej through the Crisis Response Window (CRW), in addition to two World Bank– financed projects on disaster recovery and reconstruction through the $120 million Integrated Urban Services Emergency Project II in Yemen. CRW is a financing window of the World Bank that provides funding to help countries respond to exceptionally severe crises.

GFDRR’s latest support for tackling the disaster-FCV nexus in Yemen builds on nearly two decades of partnership for resiliencebuilding with the country. For example, support from the facility proved vital in incorporating disaster risk reduction elements in the country’s urban, climate, food security, and water sector development policies. In addition, the facility helped pave the way for flood modeling analysis that contributed to the development of a flood protection plan for Sana’a, the capital and largest city of Yemen.