1.1 INTRODUCTION
A natural disaster is a sudden natural phenomenon which usually results in serious damage and loss of lives (Noji, 1991). These natural disasters include earthquakes, landslides, hurricanes, volcanoes, drought, floods etc. (Lyon and Popov, 2022). More so, natural disasters have resulted in serious problems, for example, destruction of property, streets and roads, framework, disturbance of livelihoods for instance animals, stressing of Government's monetary spending plan because of designation of assets that were at first not planned for or more all, loss of lives. There were over 300 natural hazards that occurred annually globally over the past decade (Prasad and Francescutti, 2017). In fact natural disaters claims tens of thousands of lives each year (Ritchie and Roser, 2014). Looking at an average basis over the past decade, approximately 45,000 people globally lost their lives from the natural disasters each year. This represents around 0.1% of global deaths.
There was an initial estimate of the monetary damages caused by Haiti's 2010 earthquake. Using Haiti's economic and demographic data, damages for the earthquake disaster with 200,000 to 250,000 people in total were dead and missing as estimated. The base estimate is $8.1 billion of the infrastructure and properties (Cavallo et al., 2010). These disasters destroyed infrastructure and displaced thousands of people. On the 11th of March 2011, there was an occurrence of a huge earthquake in the Pacific Ocean, which was just off the coast of Tohoku, Japan (Mimura et al., 2011). The combination of the huge earthquake and leading a giant tsunami caused huge damage in the eastern Japan. The earthquake’s magnitude recorded a 9.0, which is the maximum ever recorded magnitude in Japan. The tsunami was also historical in terms of its height and area affected (Mori et al., 2012). The tsunami had a follow up height which reached over 39 meters. As of May 2011, the tsunami claimed about 4659 lives and or 1633 people missing. There has been an increase in scholarly articles that argue that most of these disasters are directly or indirectly caused by climate change.
Climate change has a negative impact on economic growth per capita, climate change effects reduce per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by up to 6.8 percent in the year they occur. Tropical cyclones which are caused by the climate change were responsible for nearly half of all-natural hazard-related disaster losses worldwide from 1980 to 2018, totalling USD 2111 billion in damage (Bakkensen et al., 2018). The change in temperature for instance an increase will lead to heatwaves, lack of rainfall in result in severe droughts and the excessive rainfall will result in cyclones and floods.
In Zimbabwe, the most common natural disasters which happen are tropical cyclones, droughts, and floods (Musarurwa and Lunga, 2012). The government tried to introduced the disaster risk reduction in the rouse of the Cyclone Eline of 2000 which killed more than 700 individuals, left 500,000 destitute and furthermore came about into a 1 USD billion infrastructural harm (Wamukonya and Rukato, 2001)., Cyclone Dineo of 2017 which occurred in Tsholotsho, Cyclone Idai of 2019 which occurred in Chimanimani, According to the Chimanimani District Development Coordinator, Cyclone Idai killed at least 172 people, left more than 327 people missing, and displaced approximately 4500 people (Munsaka et al., 2021) and according to the government about 16000 households need assistance in Chimanimani (8000 households) and in Chipinge (3000 households) and Cyclone Ana of 2021 which occurred in Chimanimani as well.
In-depth qualitative interviews, post-disaster lessons learned workshops and a review of disaster policies provided data on five key preparedness measures which were prepositioning of resources, early warning systems, evacuation, citizen participation, and effective response according to (Mavhura et al., 2020), where the in the research questionnaires and field group helped as the GIS activities emphasized on the need to have reliable information dissemination mechanisms like a local community radio stations in Chipinge. Cyclones, according to (Kunze, 2021), are one of the most destructive natural hazards in the world, if not the most damaging hazard. Climate change is said to have caused an estimated 0.6-degrees Celsius rise in temperatures in Africa, specifically Mozambique, between 1960 and 2009, while simultaneously causing a decrease in total rainfall (Chinowsky and Arndt, 2012). However, little has been done to guarantee the resilience of communication and early warning systems disposable to the community in these disaster-prone areas. In fact, GIS and Remote sensing provides promising and proven techniques in the siting of different phenomena at optimum location through Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) and Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA).
Both AHP and MCDA have been used for the estimation of optimum location for solar farms (Ruiz et al., 2020), for hospital site selection (Şahin et al., 2019), Municipal solid waste landfill site selection (Elahi and Samadyar, 2014) and decision analysis for solar power plant site selection (Shorabeh et al., 2019). However, little has been done to use the same technique in disaster risk management in particular for the optimum location of a radio transmitter to be used as an early warning system and a communication tool before, during and after a disaster.