AGRHYMET: A drought monitoring and capacity building center in the West Africa Region

Traoré, Seydou; Ali, Abdou; Tinni, Seydou; Samaké, Mamadou; Garba, Issa; Maigari, Issoufou; Alhassane, Agali; Samba, Abdallah; Diao, Maty Ba; Atta, Sanoussi; Dieye, Pape Oumar; Nacro, Hassan B.; Bouafou, Kouamé G. M.

doi:10.1016/j.wace.2014.03.008

Cited by 37 publications

(36 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…ICPAC disseminates early warning climate hazard information to East African countries while AGRHYMET provides information on food security and environmental issues for countries in the Economic Commission of West African States (ECOWAS). Traore et al (2014) note that because of an increased occurrence of climate extremes throughout West Africa, AGRHYMET has developed additional services, including climate change impact assessments for agriculture and water resources. The SADC-CSC provides climatic information to Southern and Central African countries, covering operational services for climate monitoring, predicting extremes and hydrometeorological products.…”

Section: Weather and Climate Information Provision In Africamentioning

confidence: 99%

The utility of weather and climate information for adaptation decision-making: current uses and future prospects in Africa and India

Singh

Daron

Bazaz

et al. 2017

Climate and Development

165

108

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(2018) The utility of weather and climate information for adaptation decision-making: current uses and future prospects in Africa and India, Climate and Development, 10:5, 389-405, DOI: 10.1080/17565529.2017 Developing countries share many common challenges in addressing current and future climate risks. A key barrier to managing these risks is the limited availability of accessible, reliable and relevant weather and climate information. Despite continued investments in Earth System Modelling, and the growing provision of climate services across Africa and India, there often remains a mismatch between available information and what is needed to support on-the-ground decision-making. In this paper, we outline the range of currently available information and present examples from Africa and India to demonstrate the challenges in meeting information needs in different contexts. A review of literature supplemented by interviews with experts suggests that externally provided weather and climate information has an important role in building on local knowledge to shape understanding of climate risks and guide decision-making across scales. Moreover, case studies demonstrate that successful decision-making can be achieved with currently available information. However, these successful examples predominantly use daily, weekly and seasonal climate information for decision-making over short time horizons. Despite an increasing volume of global and regional climate model simulations, there are very few clear examples of long-term climate information being used to inform decisions at subnational scales. We argue that this is largely because the information produced and disseminated is often ill-suited to inform decision-making at the local scale, particularly for farmers, pastoralists and sub-national governments. Even decision-makers involved in long-term planning, such as national government officials, find it difficult to plan using decadal and multi-decadal climate projections because of issues around uncertainty, risk averseness and constraints in justifying funding allocations on prospective risks. Drawing on lessons learnt from recent successes and failures, a framework is proposed to help increase the utility and uptake of both current and future climate information across Africa and India.

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Section: Weather and Climate Information Provision In Africamentioning

confidence: 99%

The utility of weather and climate information for adaptation decision-making: current uses and future prospects in Africa and India

Singh

Daron

Bazaz

et al. 2017

Climate and Development

165

108

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…At the regional level, the Inter-State Committee for Drought Control in the Sahel (CILSS) collects regional level monitoring data from the Agrometeorology, Hydrology, Meteorology (AGRHYMET) center in Niger, and creates a forum to connect national level decision-makers (Traore et al 2014). The CILSS EWS was established in the 1970s and has made great advances in regional monitoring and capacity building, but the AGRHYMET monitoring system still faces issues of data acquisition from countries, limited observation points, and less than rapid transfer of data to monitoring organizations (Traore et al 2014).…”

Section: Sahel Regionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The CILSS EWS was established in the 1970s and has made great advances in regional monitoring and capacity building, but the AGRHYMET monitoring system still faces issues of data acquisition from countries, limited observation points, and less than rapid transfer of data to monitoring organizations (Traore et al 2014). Finally, individual states in the Sahel region have varying operational levels of monitoring and EWS.…”

Section: Sahel Regionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mainstreaming Early Warning Systems in Development and Planning Processes: Multilevel Implementation of Sendai Framework in Indus and Sahel

Zia

Wagner

2015

Int J Disaster Risk Sci

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The third UN World Congress on Disaster Risk Reduction, held in Sendai, Japan in March 2015, agreed on a new framework to guide disaster risk reduction policy and practice for the next 15 years. The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 (SFDRR) leaves important implementation issues unspecified and potentially creates both problems and opportunities for complex, multilevel governance systems in coping with hazards and disastrous events. Early warning systems (EWS), if built into the mainstream of planning for development and disaster relief and recovery, could present a significant opportunity to realize many SFDRR goals. We explore the complexities of using hydrometeorological EWS to prepare for drought and flood disasters in the densely populated communities of Pakistan's Indus River Basin in contrast to the African Sahel's less densely settled grasslands. Multilevel governance systems are often dominated by a topdown, technocentric, centralized management bias and have great difficulty responding to the needs of peripheral and vulnerable populations. People-centered, bottom-up approaches that incorporate disaggregated communities with local knowledge into a balanced, multilevel disaster risk management and governance structure have a dramatically better chance of realizing the SFDRR goals for disaster risk reduction.

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“…In fact, and given the high uncertainty in the simulations, it can be reasonably assumed that decisions related to the establishment or reinforcement of preparedness plans for adaptation and mitigation in those regions can be devious for stakeholders. This is increasingly relevant for those food-insecure African regions with high dependence on subsistence agriculture and primary sector activities that have been subject to severe impacts in the 1980's: drought events combined with poor governance and poorly functioning market systems, oppressive policies, and intermittent or insufficient food aid, had historically lead to food insecurity, famine, human conflicts and widespread mortality there (Hulme 1996;Reed 1997;Below et al 2007;Gráda 2007;Traore et al 2014). Note that significant changes are always robust in our analysis.…”

Section: Analysis Of Contemporary Dh From Observations and Climate Momentioning

confidence: 99%

Global projections of drought hazard in a warming climate: a prime for disaster risk management

2017

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changes emerge for global Mediterranean ecosystems and the Amazon region, which are identified as possible hotspots for future water security issues. Taken together, projections of dH changes point towards two dilemmas: (1) in the near-term, stake-holders are left worrying about projected increasing dH over large regions, but lack of actionable model agreement to take effective decisions related to local prevention and adaptation initiatives; (2) in the long-term, models demonstrate remarkable agreement, but stake-holders lack actionable knowledge to manage potential impacts far distant from actual human-dominated environments. We conclude that the major challenge for risk management is not to adapt human populations or their activities to dH changes, but to progress on global initiatives that mitigate their impacts in the whole carbon cycle by late-century.

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AGRHYMET: A drought monitoring and capacity building center in the West Africa Region

Cited by 37 publications

References 7 publications

The utility of weather and climate information for adaptation decision-making: current uses and future prospects in Africa and India

The utility of weather and climate information for adaptation decision-making: current uses and future prospects in Africa and India

Mainstreaming Early Warning Systems in Development and Planning Processes: Multilevel Implementation of Sendai Framework in Indus and Sahel

Global projections of drought hazard in a warming climate: a prime for disaster risk management

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