**1 Introduction**

In early February 2000, heavy rains started to fall across much of southern Africa, hitting southern Mozambique the hardest. On 9 February the capital of Mozambique, Maputo, was flooded, with slums in the peri-urban areas hardest hit, and the road north to Beira underwater. The rains continued, and on 11 February the Limpopo River, north of Maputo, broke its banks, contaminating the water supply and bringing dysentery to the local population. The worst came on 22 February when Cyclone Eline hit the Mozambique coast near Beira, with winds of 260 km/h and torrential rains. Eline worked its way inland, dropping huge quantities of water on the Limpopo River catchment area. That water followed its way down the Limpopo River valley, and on 27 February flash floods occurred in the Gaza Province of Mozambique, arriving suddenly and burying the low-lying farmlands in the Chókwe and Xai Xai Districts under four to eight meters of water. Residents climbed trees and rooftops, but with only a few boats and less than a dozen helicopters available to evacuate over 100,000 people, over 7,000 of them were stranded in trees for several days. Eight hundred people died, hundreds of thousands were left homeless, and two million were affected. Over 90% of the irrigation systems in Mozambique were lost. In the immediate aftermath of the floods, losses were estimated at $273 million in direct costs, and $428 million in optimal standard reconstruction costs (World Bank, 2000).

In the months following, after the waters receded, the government and the aid community began to ponder how to prevent such a disaster from recurring. It had been the worst flood in 50 years, but there was concern that climate change could have contributed to it, meaning that the time until the next flood would be less. It was clear that something needed to be done to reduce the vulnerability of the farmers living in the fertile Limpopo River floodplain from Chókwe to Xai Xai, who were hardest hit. In addition to emergency assistance to help most farmers move back to their houses and begin farming again (USAID, 2002), policy makers began working on several longer-term ideas. First, they decided to distribute hand-crank radios to farmers, through which they could hear early warning information, such as a new color code system for cyclones. Second, they provided technical assistance to farmers to help them make their dwellings more resilient, such as by constructing granaries in the treetops, so that they would not lose all of their food and their seed from the next flood. Most ambitious was a voluntary resettlement program, planned and executed by the Ministry of Environmental Affairs (MICOA) and the Ministry of Public Work and Housing (MOPH) at an estimated cost of $13 million (World Bank, 2000). The government built entire villages, equipped with modern services such as electricity, in the hills overlooking the floodplain, for those living in the areas most prone to future flooding (Government of Mozambique, 2000; Mozambique News Agency, 2001). Farmers could farm in the scrubby land around the villages, or else walk or bicycle to their fields in the floodplain. At the time, the government admitted that the success of such a voluntary program was “hard to project”, since the fertile deposits in the floodplain would attract people back to the low-lying areas, though they hoped that people would indeed choose the “risk-reducing” option of the resettlement areas (World Bank, 2000).

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