As a Las Vegas native, Amanda Grossi grew up surrounded by more than just casinos. “It’s a very ecologically interesting place and close to some amazing geologic and natural wonders—canyons, wetlands, mountains and forests,” Grossi says. These unique landscapes, as well as the extreme heat she experienced, encouraged Grossi’s curiosity and passion for science from an early age.

Grossi is currently a senior staff associate at Columbia Climate School’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI), and manages IRI’s country-level activities in Ethiopia, Kenya, Zambia, Senegal, Ghana and Mali. Below, she talks about her inspiration, work initiatives and hopes for the next generation of women in science.

How did you get into science?

My last name means “well-fed” or “likes to eat” in Italian, I was born on World Food Day, and I love food and making sure everyone gets enough of it. Perhaps it was destiny that I would work with food and toward advancing food security.

I don’t remember a specific moment in time when I “got into science.” Rather, I would say science got into me. Anybody who is curious about the world, asks why things are the way they are, and systematically seeks to understand these things has science in their heart.

I was born in Las Vegas, Nevada, which many people may not realize is in a valley surrounded by old volcanoes, and despite being a desert was once entirely submerged by water millions of years ago. It’s also a very hot place that can reach 120 or 125 °F in the summer. When you’re melting away, it’s easy to wonder “why me?” but also just “why?”

I remember being so interested watching the weatherman on the nightly news explain how the Sierra Nevada mountains were stealing my city’s rain, why temperatures were so high or so low and that we could predict these things.

As I got older, learned more and travelled more widely, I also came to understand that for many people, access to this kind of information often means the difference between hunger and food security, whether a family can send children to school, and so much more.

How did this interest bring you to your current research?

Most of Africa relies on rainfed agriculture, and the forecast helps farmers—especially smallholder subsistence farmers—understand when and what to plant and how to grow their crops. Planting the wrong thing or planting at the wrong time, which unfortunately is becoming more common with increasingly erratic climate patterns, can mean a poor or even failed harvest.

This is one of the reasons I am proud to work with IRI. Innovative forecasting approaches coming out of our institute, and especially our NextGen forecasting approach based on more than 25 years of research at IRI, are helping farmers to plan for their seasons and decision-makers to better predict and plan for climate extremes like droughts and floods in more than 30 countries in Africa.

I am no longer a child watching this information flash across my television screen, but playing an active and catalytic role in ensuring those in countries whose livelihoods are most impacted by the climate challenge can access and use climate forecasts to improve their decision-making, livelihoods, income and lives.

Is there a woman in science who inspired you?  

Unequivocally, I am most inspired by Wangari Maathai, who was a Kenyan social, environmental and political activist, and the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

She was the first woman in East and Central Africa to earn a doctorate degree, and founded a visionary movement and organization called the Green Belt Movement, which focuses on planting trees, environmental conservation and women’s rights.

Even though Maathai was facing some of the most serious issues of her time, she moved people with her humor and grace to truly understand the global links between poverty and environmental degradation, and that communities and especially women could be a driving force at the center of conserving the environment and changing their own futures.

What really sticks with me about Maathai is her relentless determination to show people how important it is to connect the science to social action and education. I carry that simple but powerful idea with me every day.

In my current role at IRI, I spend most of my time trying to connect the best-available climate information and research to the people who need it most on the ground—especially farmers—through education and curriculum development.

We have worked with more than 70 institutions across Africa to co-develop curricula to help farmers manage climate risk. We are also working with higher education institutions to ensure that the next generation of humanitarian workers, policymakers, researchers and others are climate-literate and equipped with the knowledge skills to understand, analyze and communicate climate data and information to improve lives and livelihoods.

When I’m travelling with IRI in Senegal, Ghana, Zambia, Ethiopia and Kenya doing this work and feeling a little tired, I will often think of Maathai and how fearless and committed she was toward helping people understand how intertwined environmental and social issues are.

How can we continue to support and mentor women scientists?

We can continue to support and mentor women scientists by recognizing the importance not just of women in science but of young women in science.

By 2050, Africa will have 2.5 billion people, and 70% of those will be young people. If we are serious about equipping people in parts of the world most affected by climate variability and change to tackle these issues meaningfully and sustainably, young people will be at the center of those solutions.

Beyond participation, we need young women and especially young women scientists in positions of leadership and mentorship. Concretely, we can work toward ensuring young women have equal access to technical education and capacity-development opportunities. We can put systematic practices and policies in place to ensure they are connected to mentors who can provide guidance, advice and opportunities to develop themselves professionally and personally.

I want people to understand that supporting women scientists through intentional mentorship opportunities is not an extra step. It’s a missed step.

Meet some of the women scientists at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in the video below; read about others from DEES, IRI and CIESIN; and learn how Columbia University is promoting women in science.

Andrew Kruczkiewicz has spent much of his career trying to get ahead of the weather. As a meteorologist and senior staff researcher at Columbia Climate School’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society, Kruczkiewicz’s current research focuses on extreme weather events and the application of climate and weather data and forecasting to reduce disaster risk and facilitate humanitarian action.

Kruczkiewicz, who also has over 10 years of experience working with humanitarian agencies like the Red Cross, says it’s essential for such agencies to start using the forecast data that institutions like the Climate School provide. “Why can’t we get ahead of disasters?” he asks. How can the humanitarian sector “anticipate and prepare” for disaster, as opposed to merely responding to it?

In the following Q&A, Kruczkiewicz discusses his work with the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, why we need a new generation of climate science translators, and what humanitarian action might look like in a post 1.5C° world.

In January, the United States experienced extreme weather—blizzards, torrential rain, snow and high winds from coast to coast. Is there a connection here to climate change?

With these extreme weather events, other climate experts and I ask questions such as, to what extent can we detect these types of extremes in the historical record? And to what extent are we detecting the frequency of these events, at this level of extremeness more in recent years?  But the real question we need to be asking is, what’s the connection to increasing impacts on people? What are the socioeconomic impacts?

How much can people, especially vulnerable populations, prepare for these extreme weather events?

In many places, there are standard operating procedures. And often, actions written in the standard operating procedures are designed to support a certain band of the population. Like sending out an alert [regarding extreme weather] to everybody on their phones. But people who don’t have smartphones won’t get the alert. But let’s say most people have smartphones, and the alert tells you to go to the store and stock up on some food. What if you don’t have a car? Or it might say to pump the heat up a little bit more. But what about people who can’t afford to do that because they haven’t paid their bills? Many times, the problem is not whether the standard operating procedures or the recommendations exist; the issue is, can the most vulnerable populations take the recommended actions in a sufficient amount of time? We need to think about this more than we do.

For almost ten years, you’ve worked with the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, whose mission is to reduce the impacts of climate change and extreme weather events on vulnerable people. What does this work actually look like on the ground?

I have a variety of roles. One of them is translating complex climate science into useful formats for humanitarian applications. There’s accountability and trust that comes along with that.

The second role is integration. For example, integrating the appropriate types of climate and weather information at the right time for operational activities and for humanitarian action. Sometimes it’s quasi-real time, where there’ll be a tropical cyclone approaching Madagascar and the Red Cross needs a second opinion. Sometimes it’s more about developing a flood risk management strategy or early warning systems.

I also provide technical backstopping—offering technical support and expertise. If the hazard of interest to the humanitarian sector is heatwave, for example, they might bring in a few scientists just to make sure they’re using the right data sets or make sure they’re interpreting them appropriately, or make sure that the uncertainty is captured by the policymakers.

And sometimes there’s a need to work in country with the Red Cross Red Crescent national societies, or national societies like the American Red Cross or the Kenya Red Cross. Sometimes they need someone to support the design of a flood risk management program, or a new resilience program, or an early warning system. Sometimes I broker the relationship with the national weather service of a country and the Red Cross. I facilitate dialogue and while I’m going to have influence in the decision no matter what I do, I try to remove myself as much as possible from the final decisions so the decision maker is empowered to make them.

Can you give me an example of your work in a specific country and what impacts it had?

I was in Mongolia twice. And my role was on the technical backstopping side, but also to help with data integration within standard operating procedures for a dzud early warning system.

A dzud is a severe cold snap preceded by a hot and dry summer, which affects pasture and which in turn can jeopardize livestock. While Mongolia is always cold, every few years, they have a severe cold snap in the winter and the livestock die.

My job in the Mongolia case was not to tell them when to take action or to make decisions about which actions to take. It was to help design the triggers so that when a threshold [of risk] is reached down the road, the standard operating procedures will already be in place.

Are you involved in creating the standard operating procedures?

Yes, that’s one of my tasks at the Red Cross. What goes into the standard operating procedures? What forecasts should we use? What does extreme cold mean in a place that’s already pretty cold? In Mongolia, the question you had to ask the herdsmen was, if we told you that in three months, we’re going to have one of these extreme winters, what could you actually do to protect your livestock? The result was that a dzud risk map created by the National Agency for Meteorology and Environmental Monitoring triggered a forecast-based financing program, which provided the herds people with cash grants and animal care kits. My job was basically to determine, if they want cash transfers, how long does it take to get the cash transfer through?

Sometimes a small change can make a big difference. For example, when we were working in Ecuador, we realized that three-day lead time forecasts for floods were not going to be useful. We were thinking we should clean out the drainage system, but then we realized that takes five days. What’s the value of a three-day forecast when you need five days to do something? The value is zero.

These examples [Mongolia and Ecuador] represent a big shift in the humanitarian sector’s thinking about preparing and anticipating disasters. It is changing, but more work needs to be done.

Former NASA scientist James Hansen has said, “the 1.5C global warming ceiling has been passed for all practical purposes.” How does humanitarian action need to change as we enter a 1.5°C and post-1.5 world?

Humanitarian action is a broad term, and essentially refers to anything we’re doing to protect and save lives, prevent and alleviate human suffering, and protect the basic needs of the community. But there hasn’t been enough focus on what a post-1.5 C world looks like in terms of humanitarian impacts. There are certain levels of warming where we will see new types of impacts. And those new types of impacts will be disproportionately felt by the most underserved communities, the most deprioritized communities. In the next few months, we’ll be planning a workshop to both better identify what the priorities are and understand the socioeconomic risks from a science perspective. It’s going to essentially be about what needs to be done in the next couple of years so we have a better sense of what humanitarian action will evolve into.

Would you say that humanitarian action today—versus what it needs to be in the post-1.5 C world—is still very reactive and not predictive enough?

I think that’s fair to say, but I think things are changing. In the past 10 years, there’s been a big push for getting ahead [of disasters] and using forecasts, but we need to do more. And we need to focus on the most underserved. We need more scientists engaged in these translation and integration processes when it comes to global climate policy and humanitarian decision-making, because the more complex the situations get, the more you need someone who’s a translator versus just a communicator.

Why is the role of climate science translator increasingly important?

Many users of climate data tasked to make decisions on behalf of humanitarian or development organizations don’t have the necessary skills to understand the opportunities and constraints provided by the climate data. This is why we need thousands of climate science translators (CSTs)—a new generation of CSTs that specialize in the brokering, translating, and tailoring of climate science data for decision-makers.

For example, one of the key skills is being able to identify misinformation and disinformation. We need translators that are trusted enough to vet the data. If there are five flood maps emailed to the Red Cross from different sources, how do you know which ones are valid?

Some of the other skills needed to be a climate translator include knowledge of early warning systems and climate data and their limitations; an understanding of the standard operating procedures of humanitarian end users; the ability to describe the links between climate impacts, livelihood implications, political conflict and socioeconomic effects; an understanding of both the uncertainty and accuracy of climate and weather forecasts; and an ability to create trust between the relevant entities.

Is the Columbia Climate School well positioned to deal with the growing challenges to the humanitarian sector?

At Columbia, we have a lot of the elements we need when we’re talking about making these shifts in the humanitarian sector. For example, the Climate and Society Program at Columbia has been designed to provide space for a multidisciplinary graduate-level experience for facilitating connections between climate science and decision-making. We should be acting more as leaders in this area [training climate science translators]. It’s so important.

Also, our network within Columbia, within New York, and within the region allows us to look at the different layers of these complex questions. If we want to ensure that the impacts on people are decreasing over time—that is the future of climate science. There are few if any other academic institutions that really allow and facilitate that, so we need to do more. We need to enhance that type of work, figure out ways to acknowledge it and ways for it to grow. And then hopefully other universities will pick up on it as well.

The collaborative development of Climate Risk Management in Agricultural Extension (CRMAE) curricula is the first of its kind, building foundational knowledge and skills for extension workers to help farmers better plan for, manage, and respond to climate risk.

South-South learning and sharing has spurred the co-development of the curriculum in all six focus countries of the ‘Accelerating Impacts of CGIAR Climate Research for Africa (AICCRA)’ project, with adoption by 70 institutions representing a swathe of public and private extension and advisory service providers.

“This training has been very very very useful. If anything, it should have happened years ago!” declared Dawson Mwanyumba, an Agricultural Extension Officer of Kenya’s drought prone Taita Taveta County, after completing a training on a new Climate Risk Management in Agricultural Extension (CRMAE) curriculum.

The sentiment, reflective of a longstanding and unmet need for capacity development on climate information services across various institutions, is one that has underpinned and fueled the development of new competency- and skills-based curricula targeting public and private extension providers across all AICCRA focus countries over the past three years.

These curricula, which help to ensure that those who work most closely with farmers can take advantage of best-available and location-specific climate information products to better plan for, manage, and respond to a changing climate, are bringing to the spotlight the kinds of intentional capacity development and systems strengthening needed to move beyond enabling access to life-changing information, to actively promoting its uptake and use.

Ethiopia sparks innovation in the region and beyond

It all started in Ethiopia. Following intensive multi-stakeholder consultations, iterative and collaborative development (otherwise known as ‘co-development’) and capacity development with Ethiopia’s extension system that occurred throughout 2021, 2022, and 2023, it became apparent that a new kind of foundational and skills-based capacity development effort was needed to ensure climate information is, beyond just accessible, usable, and used by those it is intended to serve.

In Ethiopia, high-resolution climate information has been available for more than a decade. Despite this, decision-makers for the country’s agriculture sector (at the highest levels of government all the way down to local decision makers) do not use this information to its full potential. The demand for capacity and skills development is significant, as is the potential return and impact from it.

As Tolesa Dendoba Buli of Ethiopia’s Ministry of Agriculture explains:

“The problem of not using climate information to inform agriculture in Ethiopia is not an issue of not having quality climate information—The Ethiopian Meteorological Institute has very good, high-quality information. The issue is about the people who need this information most not being able to understand and use that climate information. This applies to the Ministry of Agriculture and its extensionists who work most closely with farmers, all the way up to the level of policymakers, who do not understand the importance of climate information and services very well.”

This is why the CRMAE curriculum has been so crucial.

Bringing together those who produce climate information—the national meteorological services—with those whom it is expected to serve in the agricultural sector to co-produce curricula has sparked a capacity development effort that meets the real (and not just perceived) needs of agricultural professionals in each country, integrating free, best-available climate information and tools to support digital agriculture.

Agricultural technical vocational education and training (ATVET) colleges are institutions which play a foundational role in training the workforce in the agricultural sector to meet the climate challenge. They provide competency-based training to transform and professionalize the agricultural sector through practical skills development to meet market needs. In Ethiopia, there are five federal and 21 subnational ATVET colleges which train the country’s extension workers. This development is timely and long-awaited.

Speaking after the curriculum launch in October 2023, Ethiopia’s State Minister for the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Sector, H.E. Meles Mekonen expounded:

“While both Ethiopia’s Climate Smart Agriculture Roadmap for 2020-2030 and the National Strategy for Ethiopia’s Agricultural Extension System have long-identified location-specific agro-ecology based interventions and climate-smart adaptation practices as one of the main systemic bottlenecks for effective adaptation, for example, Ethiopia’s more than 72,000 agricultural agents serving over 16 million farmers have not until this point been supported with practical training materials to on how to access and use historical, monitoring, or forecast climate information products available through the EMI that will enable them to tailor their recommendations more appropriately.”

He added: “I am therefore pleased to present to educators, trainers, development actors, and all of those working to support the resilience of Ethiopia’s farmers with this practical guide for managing climate risk in the agricultural sector.”

South-south collaboration catalyzes new initiatives

Building upon this compelling example, targeted knowledge sharing of the Ethiopian experience and multi-stakeholder consultations in Senegal in 2022 revealed a similar and strong demand for competency-based curricula to help Senegal’s diverse extension system manage climate risk.

From this demand emerged, over the course of a year, Senegal’s own CRMAE curriculum and teaching resources following iterative co-production and capacity development processes which were ultimately piloted in 2023, and which public training, education, and development institutions have taken steps to mainstream and institutionalize moving forward.

In terms of the impact on professionalizing the agricultural sector to meet the climate challenge, results from pilot activities of the curriculum in Senegal demonstrated that over 90% of extension staff found the curriculum strongly or very strongly relevant for supporting them in their professional capacities. Moreover, by way of strengthening farmers, 73% cited positive examples after the agricultural season of how the knowledge or skills gained were used to benefit farmers.

“This was really a big win and an important ‘Aha!’ moment for other countries when deciding whether or not to implement such a curriculum,” explains Tufa Dinku of the International Research Institute for Climate and Society, a key supporting partner and catalyzer of climate curriculum efforts in Africa. “Because in Ethiopia, which has more than 70,000 extension agents and arguably one of the strongest extension systems in Africa, anything seems possible. But when you look at Senegal, the extension system is largely fragmented, decentralized, and less robust in terms of human resourcing. So to see it succeeding [through CRMAE] is extremely encouraging.”

As testament to this fact, after participating in Senegal’s training of trainers on the CRMAE in March 2023 to gain a deeper understanding of its structure and components, Mali’s Institute of Rural Economy (IER) independently mobilized its own national curriculum consultative workshop with national extension providers in July 2023, resulting in a detailed plan of action and resolution to adapt, train upon, and pilot Mali’s own CRMAE curriculum in 2024.

Moving forward and with lessons learned from Ethiopia, Senegal, and Mali, curriculum consultations and co-production processes in Kenya, Zambia, Ghana also ensued, alongside trainings of trainers and validations of newly adapted, country specific CRMAE curricula, with resolutions for locally led implementation in each respective country in 2024.

So far, more than 70 institutions across all six AICCRA focus countries have collaborated within their respective countries to co-produce competency- and skills-based curricula targeting public and private extension providers to help farmers manage climate risk.

Harnessing e-learning platforms for sharing

Beyond the curricula themselves, dialogues have spurred the sharing of digital innovations that were co-developed within the curricula —such as the Climate Crop Suitability Maproom between Ethiopia, and Kenya— between countries and catalyzed resolutions to leverage complementary initiatives such as Kenya’s national KilimoBora Mobile Learning Centre, and the Regional Universities Forum for Capacity Building in Agriculture’s (RUFORUM) e-learning platform to strengthen access and use of learning content beyond AICCRA target countries.

RUFORUM, a consortium of 163 universities in 40 countries in Africa aimed at strengthening the capacities of universities to foster innovations responsive to demands of smallholder farmers, is an important player in making sure educational resources are shared with other African countries facing similar challenges.

A new kind of extension

Going forward, the curricula are expected to help pragmatically improve the use of climate information in decision-making at the farm-level. They are not just making resources more accessible, they are turning extension staff themselves into robust and resilient resources for farmers, helping them make decisions in the face of an increasingly erratic climate.

“Farmers will no longer be receiving information just from a delivery person, but from a clarifying person, to explain exactly how the climate is going to affect them, these are the measures we are going to take, and these are the impacts,” attested Steven Ondimu, an Agricultural Extension Officer in Kenya’s Laikipia County. “With this training, I feel more empowered, more knowledgeable, and more wise to make decisions—more informed and having a higher likelihood of succeeding in everything that we’re going to do in farming.”

For further reading

AICCRA’s Climate Risk Management in Agricultural Extension Curricula

Africa already experiences some of the gravest impacts of climate change, with recurring and persistent drought, extreme heat and extreme rainfall experienced throughout the continent. Recent flooding throughout West and Central Africa has displaced over 8.5 million people, pushing vulnerable populations further into poverty and conflict. Last year, severe drought in Somalia killed an estimated 43,000 people, half of them children under 5 years of age. 

Advanced weather- and climate-forecasting tools and techniques, like those developed at Columbia Climate School’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI), can help key stakeholders prepare for the worst. This past September, 22 meteorologists from eight African countries spent three weeks at Columbia’s Lamont campus, where IRI is based, to learn about these advanced forecasting approaches.

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The visitors, who hailed from Zambia, Kenya, Senegal, Ghana and Mali, among other countries, practiced the latest techniques for generating seasonal forecasts for their countries, using their own national climate data as well as the hundreds of data sets available at IRI. They also learned how to produce forecasts at subseasonal scales (2-4 weeks out) using methods IRI has pioneered over the past two decades. These forecasts are in high demand because they allow for time to warn communities about events that can develop rapidly, such as heat waves, cyclones, severe storms and floods.

“These aren’t just any training participants—they are leaders who are spearheading the use of best-available forecasting approaches across Africa,” says IRI’s Amanda Grossi, who helped organize the training. “They are the frontline heroes working to predict climate extremes plaguing the continent, and who are ultimately enabling the early warning, planning and actions that save lives and help farmers to improve their livelihoods.”

IRI’s Sylwia Trzaska (left) works with forecasters Diabate Fatoumata Sangho (center), from Mali’s national meteorological agency, and Masilin Gudoshava (right), from the Kenya-based ICPAC regional climate center. Photo: Francesco Fiondella

For Frankline Komolkori, of the Kenya Meteorological Department, forecasting is a science that touches the lives of people both directly and indirectly. “We’re all affected by weather and climate issues,” he said. “[But when you] give accurate forecasts and are able to save life and property, you are touching the real citizen, the poor person on the ground.”

The national meteorological agencies of seven other countries were also represented in the training cohort, as well as two large regional institutions: East Africa’s IGAD Climate Prediction and Applications Centre (ICPAC) and West Africa’s Regional Center for Training and Application in Agrometeorology and Operational Hydrology (Agrhymet). By designing the training with team-based exercises and activities, the IRI organizers hope to foster South-South learning—informal and formal networking and collaborations initiated by the participants that would continue once they returned to their jobs back home.

Francisca Martey, the deputy director of the Ghana Meteorological Agency, took part in the training along with two of her department heads. “When we go back to Ghana, we’ll teach our new recruits and give them the responsibility of generating these newer forecasts every month,” she says.

The visit also fostered connections between the participating institutions and the United States’ first-ever climate school.

“One of Columbia University’s central tenets is the Fourth Purpose, and the Fourth Purpose is about taking research to action,” says Jeffrey Shaman, the interim dean of the Columbia Climate School. 

“The IRI has been dedicated to this idea for more than 25 years, delivering climate services across the planet. Trainings such as these allow forecasters not just to learn from their own community, but make new connections with Columbia researchers, faculty and students. They’re very central to the kind of services, action, and practice that the Climate School is focusing on.”

The above training was supported by the Accelerating Impact of CGIAR Climate Research for Africa (AICCRA) project, based on funds provided by the International Development Association (IDA) of the World Bank.

This story is adapted from one originally published by Accelerating Impacts of CGIAR Climate Research for Africa (AICCRA).

New state-of-the-art forecasting systems developed at IRI are enabling regional and national meteorological agencies to generate timely and decision-relevant climate information for their agricultural sectors.

East Africa is experiencing some of the worst drought conditions in decades, while on the other side of the continent, Nigeria, Cameroon and other West African countries have faced devastating floods that have displaced more than a million people. The demand for accurate and actionable forecasting to protect life and property has never before been more urgent.

Forecasters from 10 national meteorological services in East and Southern Africa (left) and seven national meteorologist services in West Africa (right) were trained alongside their regional climate centers to produce best-available seasonal forecasts for their countries.

Recognizing this, the International Research Institute for Climate and Society and its partners recently organized two regional-scale trainings on the use of a state-of-the art seasonal forecasting system known as “NextGen”, which has already been adopted by more than a dozen countries in Central and South America.

The trainings–one in Zanzibar, Tanzania and one in Lomé, Togo–were part of a key push of the Accelerating Impacts of CGIAR Climate Research for Africa (AICCRA) project to make climate-information services and climate-smart agriculture more accessible to millions of smallholder farmers across Africa. They brought together staff from the national meteorological services of 17 countries as well as those working in two regional climate centers: East Africa’s IGAD Climate Prediction and Applications Centre (ICPAC), and West Africa’s Regional Center for Training and Application in Agrometeorology and Operational Hydrology (Agrhymet).

As a result, both ICPAC and Agrhymet have begun using NextGen-based forecasting in their operations. This is a significant development because the climate forecasts produced by these regional centers are incorporated by the national meteorological services into their own forecasting processes. Such an outcome directly aligns with AICCRA’s goal of giving farmers access to tailored advisory services based on high-quality climate information so that they anticipate climate-related events and take preventative action to safeguard their livelihoods and communities.

A longstanding need for objective climate forecasts for decision makers

The “NextGen” forecasting system, based on more than 25 years of IRI research, helps countries quickly generate high-resolution, location-specific forecasts that can be easily communicated to agricultural decision makers and planners (NextGen factsheet). Much of the agriculture in East and West Africa is still rainfed, meaning farmers rarely have access to irrigation during times of low or no rain. And this makes reliable and understandable weather and climate forecasts critical to the lives and livelihoods of millions of people who depend on the rainy season for food, income, and the well-being of their families.

When time is of the essence

By late 2022, devastating floods in Nigeria affected more than 90% of the country’s districts and displaced more than 1.4 million people.

“NextGen allows you to assemble the forecast very quickly and easily, and also assess its skill easily. With that, we can produce better forecasts,” said Nigeria Meteorological Agency’s Bello Ahmed, who attended the Lomé training. “It’s so important to have good information and early warning so that we can act before [extreme flooding] comes.”

The time-savings aspect of NextGen has another benefit for forecasters such as Ahmed. They have more time to focus on research and other activities that are critical for improving Nigeria’s forecasting capabilities in the long-run.

Communication is key

The two AICCRA trainings emphasized the relevance of forecasts to decision making, and the importance of various communication channels, approaches, and formats for ensuring this.

In doing so, the training organizers underscored the role that national meteorological services can have in supporting and tailoring the use of forecasts—not just its generation—and even helped changed the mindset of some meteorological service staff toward this end.

Participants learned about a new way of communicating and visualizing forecasts with NextGen. Historically, seasonal forecasts show the likelihood of a location receiving “above-normal” or “below-normal” rainfall amounts. But these categories are generally too vague to inform any meaningful agricultural planning. NextGen forecasts give the option of showing the probability of ‘exceeding’ or ‘not exceeding’ a certain amount of rainfall. This format is a game-changer for those in the agricultural space.

By communicating the forecast in this way, people can make decisions about what crop varieties to use for the coming season, based on their water requirements, for example. Decisions like this can make the difference between food security and insecurity.

Carrying it forward: Peer-to-peer learning and south-south collaboration

One of the goals of the training events was to create a strong network within the African meteorological community to help advance the generation of high-quality climate information and services.

Conducting each training as a region-wide event allowed for peer-to-peer exchanges that build a community of practice that will hopefully sustain, cultivate, and even expand on the capacities and relationships established in Lomé and Zanzibar.

“The regional approach to training is best because when you bring people with different levels of understanding, it’s a great opportunity to exchange and learn,” said ICPAC’s Eunice Koech. “If you have someone at a lower level, he or she can interact with someone above them without feeling shy. It’s a free environment and the best way for people to learn.”

There’s an additional dimension to the trainings’ success: they’ve fostered the kind of local ownership and intracontinental collaboration necessary to carry forward efforts to improve seasonal forecasting within and beyond the countries targeted in the trainings.

These exchanges are now continuing through the formation of a ‘South-South’ community of practice supported by digital resources and channels for communication both within and between East and West Africa.

This story is adapted from one originally published by Accelerating Impacts of CGIAR Climate Research for Africa (AICCRA).

A new data-management and visualization tool developed at IRI is helping national meteorological services and regional climate centers across Africa harness real-time weather data for decision-making in agriculture.

National meteorological services play a central role in their country’s efforts to anticipate and manage climate-related risks, and to develop effective policies for resilience and adaptation.

The real-time monitoring of floods, droughts and other climate hazards—as well the various climate and weather forecasts the national meteorological services provide—help agencies make critical decisions about agriculture, public health, energy, transportation, and other fundamental components of society.

However, these operations require vast amounts of reliable and timely climate and weather data. This is something that, historically, many African countries have lacked.

Recent initiatives backed by the UN Development Program, the World Bank and other international partners have worked to increase the availability and quality of climate data on the continent, particularly by investing in networks of automated weather stations (AWS). These stations demand far less human involvement than traditional ones, which require staff visits to collect data–multiple times a day in some cases. Automated stations can take measurements every fifteen minutes and automatically transmit the data to a meteorological office. They can also be set up in places where continuous weather data has been more difficult to collect, such as in remote rural communities.

This higher-resolution data creates more robust historical climate datasets that ultimately lead to improved climate predictions and forecasts for a country.

When it comes to responding to—and mitigating—climate emergencies, having these real-time data networks can make all the difference.

A new data challenge

The rapid expansion of automated weather-monitoring networks is addressing critical data gaps across Africa. But they’ve also created a new problem, one caused by a lack of coordination among the various initiatives, programs, and donors who have funded the building of these networks.

The result is that a given country may have many types of automated networks, each built by a different company, and each requiring different parts and processes to maintain and repair.

Also, these companies don’t format and store their AWS data in the same way–some use proprietary formats. So while automated stations do provide national meteorological services with a lot of critical weather data (good), the different AWS networks can’t ‘talk’ to each other (not good). If a national meteorological service cannot efficiently combine, synchronize, and analyze its datasets, then a significant amount of data will be left out of decision making.

Scaling a transformative solution

Scientists at Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) saw this challenge and the frustration it was causing among its many national met service partners. In response, they developed the Automatic Weather Station Data Tool (ADT). And thanks to support from the Accelerating Impact of CGIAR Climate Research for Africa (AICCRA) and Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today, for Tomorrow (ACToday) projects to hold technical trainings and workshops, use of the new tool has increased significantly among African national meteorological services.

ADT is a free web-based application with an easy-to-use graphic interface that enables users from national meteorological services to access, process, perform quality control, and visualize data from different automated networks in one place. It also enables real-time monitoring of stations to see which ones are working and which ones are offline to more easily understand where the data is coming from and address any interruptions in transmission sooner. ADT emerged from the broader climate services delivered under the Enhancing National Climate Services (ENACTS) initiative, which recognized that the availability of high-quality climate data does not automatically translate to ease of access or effective use.

In less than a year, IRI has trained dozens of staff from the national meteorological services in Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Senegal, and Zambia to use ADT to help synchronize their data streams. Mali’s meteorological service is hoping to receive similar trainings in the near future.

In Kenya, where the national meteorological department has faced considerable challenges trying to manage seven different automatic weather station networks, the tool has greatly simplified the analysis and viewing of weather data.

“The data visualization capabilities of ADT will go a long way in supporting our mandate of providing quality and timely climate information to the users. Its ability to aggregate different data types is a game changer,” said Onesmus Ruirie, Principal Meteorologist at the Kenya Meteorological Department.

The functionality to aggregate data at hourly, daily, 10-daily, and monthly intervals has many meteorological staff excited, especially when complemented by the ability to display and download maps, graphs, and tables of this data for reports or advisories for decision makers.

IRI is a key partner in the AICCRA project, whose theory of change states that if national meteorological agencies can efficiently aggregate, analyze, and visualize climate data using state-of-the-art practices and tools, then relevant national institutions and stakeholders can better monitor, prepare and respond to climate-driven disasters in more timely and effective fashion. These same stakeholders can also inform long-term national strategies for adapting to climate change with more robust evidence.

Regional climate centers such as East Africa’s IGAD Climate Prediction and Applications Centre (ICPAC) have also recognized the role ADT can play in helping the met services develop improved climate services. ICPAC is enthusiastic about raising awareness about the tool and building capacity for its use in the region. In addition to Ethiopia and Kenya, IGAD member states include Djibouti, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, and Uganda.

“[ADT’s] capability to process data from automatic weather stations, its visualization functionalities, and its provision of a unified database for the different networks makes it a powerful tool for managing data for East Africa,” said Herbert Misiani, a data management expert at ICPAC.

ICPAC, another important AICCRA partner, has also helped the project scale other critical and in-demand IRI innovations in climate services to support the agricultural sector.

This story is adapted from one originally published by Accelerating Impacts of CGIAR Climate Research for Africa (AICCRA).

‘Maprooms’ are freely accessible, online analytical and visualization tools to make climate data more usable. Developed at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society, they are now being tailored and scaled to support adaptation in African agriculture as part of the Accelerating Impacts of CGIAR Climate Research for Africa project.

“I feel like I’m sitting on a pot of gold—there is such a wealth of information in the maprooms,” said Kabenuka Munthali, Senior Agricultural Research Officer for the Zambia Agriculture Research Institute.

Munthali was one of more than thirty people who participated in maproom training events in November 2022 in Zambia and Kenya. Like Munthali, the other participants were from national-level institutions that play a key role in promoting the tailoring and use of climate information and services for the agricultural sector.

‘Maprooms’ are freely accessible, online analytical and visualization tools to make climate data more usable. Developed at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society, they are now being tailored and scaled to support adaptation in African agriculture as part of the Accelerating Impacts of CGIAR Climate Research for Africa (AICCRA) project.

Because they were developed through interaction between those who produce climate information—the national meteorological services—and those who ultimately use it, IRI’s maprooms are demand-driven products designed to turn shapeless climate data into actionable information for decision making.

These tools are being used not just in Zambia and Kenya, but in more than 20 other countries, primarily in Africa. They represent a big advance in efforts to support locally led climate adaptation. There are a couple of reasons for this.

Firstly, the maprooms are linked to rich sets of nationally-owned data at very high, 4-kilometer spatial resolution. Think of a net stretching around the entire globe, with each square in the net measuring four by four kilometers. Such fine resolution makes location-specific analysis of past, current, and future climate information finally possible in parts of Africa.

This is game-changing for millions of farmers who are dependent on rain-fed agriculture, because it enables the network of organizations that support them–such as national research institutions, ministries of agriculture, and agricultural extension systems–to provide locally relevant information that facilitates agricultural planning. This includes important information such as when the rainy season is likely to start, how much rainfall can be expected, and other key parameters that can make the difference between food security and insecurity for a family.

“For a long time, accessing climate information and data for us to assist users had been a challenge,” said John Kisangau from the Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organization. “Before, we could only get information up to a resolution of nine kilometers. Maprooms [give us] more granular information and data. These datasets are already translated, tailored, and put in one portal where any user, technical or not, can get that information.”

While other tools that offer local climate information services do exist, the high-resolution products made available in the IRI’s maprooms are the only ones that recognize and leverage local, on-the-ground station data provided by national meteorological services themselves. This is because they were developed as part of IRI’s Enhancing National Climate Services (ENACTS) initiative, which combines local data with satellite rainfall estimates and climate model reanalysis products to generate decades’ worth of high-quality datasets that cover an entire country. These datasets are owned by the countries themselves.

“Not all information is created equal. Even when researchers and meteorological agencies strive to produce information that users need, significant barriers may remain which inhibit theoretically useful information from actually being usable,” said Tufa Dinku, who leads the ENACTS initiative. “We need to ensure those who generate climate information and those who use it come together regularly to make sure this information is transformed into sector-relevant and decision-relevant products.”

Bringing together all the partners

AICCRA-hosted workshops in Kenya and Zambia have scaled the ENACTS approach to ensure that is exactly what happens on a consistent and sustained basis.

This means bringing together all parties that play a role in promoting the use of climate information and services and broader resilience and building their capacity to extend these tools and knowledge to those in the agricultural sector who need it most.

In Kenya, an October ‘training of trainers’ on maprooms brought together the Kenya Meteorological Department alongside the main institutions responsible for tailoring, communicating, and otherwise building capacity to understand climate information for its use in the agricultural sector, especially at the most local levels interfacing with farmers. The Zambia ‘training of trainers’ event in November brought together key national institutions for this same purpose.

“For a farmer, the changing climate is not just about carrying an umbrella on a rainy day. It influences every aspect of a farmer’s decision-making process and planning,” said Dominic Namanyungu, from Zambia’s agriculture ministry. “So this information, not just data, needs to come to them in a way they can actually utilize and make a decision with.”

The Zambia Meteorological Department’s own ‘Climate and Agriculture Maproom’ for example, help to do just this.

By allowing users to explore things like when the rains have historically started and stopped, how long the rainy season has tended to be, or how much rainfall has fallen for any given area where those supporting farmers can be better able to tailor their inputs advice to them. This is now possible at even the district level, where many governments agricultural planning decisions related to seed and fertilizer distribution are made.

Similarly, met department’s ‘Seasonal Forecast Maproom’ allows users to see the full probability distribution that rainfall will exceed or not exceed certain rainfall amounts for the upcoming season at any location, supporting more evidence-based decisions critical to livelihoods, such as crops or varieties to promote, when to plant, and more.

Maprooms analyses are presented as maps and graphs, and are freely downloadable in a variety of common formats. They’re automated, allowing for easy integration in reports and other documents and enabling even non-technical users to access robust information critical for agricultural planning and even emergency response with just a click.

Responding to longstanding demand, AICCRA is developing curricula for targeting the agricultural extension systems of Kenya and Zambia to be deployed from 2023, so they are equipped with critical knowledge and skills to assess climate risk and how to use and interpret maprooms.

Integrating best-available climate information and products like maprooms into agricultural extension systems helps to ensure they are a sustainable innovation in the hands of colleagues from across private and public institutions with the mandate to scale climate information services and climate-smart agriculture in these countries.

To promote a better enabling environment for developing such services, both countries are also developing their own National Framework for Climate Services (NFCS).

These frameworks will systematize the coordination between all stakeholders, (especially those present at the workshops) to improve the production, tailoring, and delivery of climate information that truly meets real needs, and not just perceived needs of farmers and the network of actors that support them.

“The National Framework for Climate Services will help our institutions to better collaborate on the co-production of climate information products,” said Kenneth Sinachikupo of Zambia’s Meteorological Department, who is at the forefront of developing his country’s NFCS. “And it will enhance their ownership and development. It is important to take forward these initiatives to have a positive impact on the Zambian community.”

Download the report:

ACToday’s activities advance four strategies to meet the project’s goal:

• Increase food production
• Mitigate the impact of climate shocks
• Inform national strategic planning and policies
• Advance knowledge of the connections between climate and food systems

We are pleased to share the latest report from Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today, for Tomorrow (ACToday), the first of the Columbia World Projects. Since 2017, ACToday has been actively working in Bangladesh, Colombia, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Senegal and Vietnam. In that time, we’ve not only worked to create innovative climate information, methods and tools tailored for agriculture, but we’ve also helped decision makers understand how to use these products to ensure safe and stable supplies of food.

Global challenges such as food security require the scientific community to stop working in silos and create meaningful partnerships outside academia. At the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI), we’ve embodied this thinking as part of our mission since our founding 25 years ago. It is aligned with what Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger calls the “Fourth Purpose” of universities, using university research to advance human welfare. Achieving the Fourth Purpose is also a central part of the mission of the newly established Columbia Climate School, of which IRI is now a part, and at the core of Columbia World Projects’ work.

The work we’ve pioneered through four years of ACToday is taking hold on a global scale. Large development institutions such as the World Bank and World Food Programme are increasingly employing our approach as part of their climate and food security projects.

This comes directly out of our experiences and successes from ACToday and because of the strategic support we have received from Columbia World Projects. IRI is a now key partner in a new $60 million climate resilience project for agriculture in Africa, funded by the World Bank and led by CGIAR, one of our most important and strategic partners. We will be playing an important role in defining and developing climate services activities for the new project.

Our new report highlights some of the pathways we’ve created to ensure ACToday’s efforts and investments continue serving the health and well-being of the people in all six countries for many years to come.

Walter Baethgen

Project Lead of ACToday

REMEMBERING LISA GODDARD

The ACToday project could not have been possible without the leadership and expertise of Lisa Goddard, who served as IRI’s director from 2012-2020, and as a co-lead on ACToday. Lisa passed away in January of 2022.

Even though Lisa could not co-lead ACToday in its final year, every aspect of this project bears the mark of her intelligence, her dedication, and her passion to make sure that advances in climate science benefit the world’s most climate-vulnerable communities.

ACToday’s work with country partners to develop sophisticated forecasting systems and new climate services tailored for agriculture has also enabled the World Bank and World Food Programme to significantly scale their provision of affordable index insurance to more than a million farmers in multiple countries.

In order to offer protective insurance to even greater numbers of smallholder farmers, in 2021 ACToday began testing mobile crowdsourcing apps that tap into the experiences and memories of farmers themselves.

“We know from our decades of work that index insurance programs can’t scale up successfully if they don’t include farmers in the design process,” said Daniel Osgood, who leads ACToday’s work on insurance.

Farmers help improve the index that underlies the insurance they’re buying. If a poorly designed index doesn’t capture the reality on the ground accurately enough, farmers may not get insurance payouts when they deserve to. Not only would this cause unnecessary hardship, it also damages the credibility of the insurance program.

“We ask farmers what they’ve experienced in past years and what they’re experiencing in the current season, and see how that matches with the climate data we have from weather stations, satellites and forecasts,” said Osgood.

“If they’re in agreement, we know we can safely use our insurance models to help farmers in times of drought. If they don’t agree, we work to figure out why and solve that problem if we can.”

Ultimately, this process leads to a more reliable index, which leads to more trust and community buy-in for the insurance.

ACToday’s insurance team knew that obtaining information from tens of thousands of farmers in the six project countries could never be done through traditional in-person community visits, even in the absence of a global pandemic.

As a result, they developed a phone-based game to do it instead, and conducted a pilot run in 2021 with around 200 Colombian coffee farmers. The participating farmers were asked questions such as [translated from Spanish]:

“Guess which year was worse, according to most of your neighbors and satellite and rain gauge datasets: [Year 1] or [Year 2]?”

Once they picked, the game would then tell them the answer, and then ask the same question for a different pair of years. The game is designed in such a way that farmers can learn which years were the worst according to official records, and the researchers learned which years showed significant disagreements between farmers and historical records.

While the results won’t be fully analyzed until later in 2022, preliminary indications are very encouraging. For example, the game was shared widely among the farmers, who played an average of 200 rounds(comparing 200 pairs of years) over the four days the pilot lasted. The team is expanding the game into Guatemala and other ACToday countries in 2022.

The phone game is part of a suite of new ACToday crowdsourcing technologies that have been successfully piloted recently around the world for projects that reach millions of people.

“The exciting thing is that this kind of bottom-up approach has never worked before at a massive scale, Osgood said. “We’ve never had a framework that would allow millions of local people to drive decision making on a project designed to benefit them–and it’s still completely based on science. It’s like artificial intelligence, but it’s actually human intelligence or community intelligence.”

An important part of ACToday’s goal of increasing food security has been to help develop new climate services that lead to better agricultural decision making. National frameworks for climate services serve this strategy in two important ways – by getting national meteorological services the recognition and support they need from national budgets and international donors, and by placing climate services at the center of adaptation efforts.

“The technical support, knowledge-sharing and collaboration provided by IRI through the ACToday project has enabled us to develop a robust national framework for climate services,” said Fetene Teshome, the director-general of Ethiopia’s National Meteorological Agency. “This will serve as a strong foundation for our country’s efforts to adapt and prosper in a varying and changing climate.”

“We understood from the start that any long lasting impacts we would have on reducing climate threats to food security in these countries depended on empowering and supporting the national meteorological services,” said ACToday’s Walter Baethgen. “Akin to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, they are government institutions mandated to understand and communicate to their users what the climate is doing now, what it did in the past and what it is likely to do over the coming days, weeks, years and decades.”

The close partnerships between ACToday and the national meteorological services in each of the six countries where ACToday is active have led to significant leaps forward in capacity, capabilities and forecasting, such as:

• Adding millions of new data points to the countries’ historical climate records;
• Using these data points to build powerful maps and platforms targeted to those working in agricultural ministries, national development and humanitarian agencies;
• Deploying advanced forecasting systems that have led to significant upgrades to countries’ climate seasonal prediction capabilities, and to the development of experimental short-term forecasts that are of keen interest to food security agencies.

All of this work was done collaboratively with the national meteorological services, said Baethgen. ACToday provides whatever expertise they need as well as resources to support training courses and skills-building events. “The data we help generate belongs to the country, the platforms we help build are served locally,” he said.

These investments have helped bolster the reputation and credibility of meteorological agencies in the six ACToday countries among other parts of government.

“ACToday’s biggest impact is fostering direct and ongoing collaborations among meteorological agencies and other sectors of government, including agriculture, insurance and disaster response,” said Baethgen. “These communities now understand each other in ways they didn’t four years ago. As a result, we’re seeing the creation of many new useful tools and services that directly support decision making to help achieve food security.”

In 2021, ACToday’s Senegal team formalized a partnership with the Human Food and Nutrition Research Laboratory at Cheikh Anta Diop University – Senegal’s most prestigious higher education institution and home to the country’s largest graduate training programs. The partnership aims to address one of the most under-researched topics in development – the links between climate and nutrition.

“We’re seeing a growing concern in the agricultural development and humanitarian communities that ignoring the nutritional aspects of food security can have long-term consequences on people’s health, which in turn can impact their future livelihoods,” said James Hansen, the ACToday country lead for Senegal.

The issue is particularly salient for West Africa, which already has one of the highest rates of malnutrition in the world. Climate change could make the nutritional situation worse for the region, and not just by decreasing crop and livestock productivity and eroding agricultural incomes that rural communities need to purchase diverse, nutrient-rich foods. It could also lead to more frequent flooding and heavy rainfall events that cause outbreaks of diarrheal diseases, which affect the body’s capacity to absorb nutrients.

In early 2021, ACToday, Cheikh Anta Diop University and Senegal’s national meteorological service, the Agence Nationale de l’Aviation Civile et de la Météorologie(ANACIM), organized a three-hour webinar for the academic, policy, climate and nutrition communities to launch discussions about connections between climate and nutrition.

“We wanted participants to explore the fundamentals of climate and climate-nutrition pathways on a conceptual level, as well as allow Senegal’s meteorological service to present examples of existing climate tools that could be tailored for the nutrition community,” said Amanda Grossi, ACToday Senegal’s country manager. The webinar’s success exceeded every-one’s expectations, Grossi said.

“More than 110 attended, and not just from Senegal but from across West Africa. This was clearly a conversation people were waiting to have, and it highlighted a demand for including nutritional outcomes when discussing climate impacts on food security.”

Informed by the webinar discussions, ACToday and Cheikh Anta Diop University quickly produced a six-module, 15-hour ‘short course’, which they piloted with 15 graduate students. The course was designed to provide foundational knowledge on climate and climate-nutrition pathways, as well as an overview of existing tools and resources that can be used to both analyze climate risks and support nutrition interventions.

The two partners also identified a number of opportunities for students to work with Columbia’s Center for Climate Systems Research and the Rutgers School of Public Health on potential master’s thesis topics related to climate and nutrition. This research is now underway at both universities.

Building on this momentum, in November 2021, ACToday Senegal organized a first-of-its-kind workshop with the national meteorological service, Cheikh Anta Diop University and the National Council for Nutrition Development – the governing body responsible for all nutrition interventions in Senegal – to develop climate services specifically tailored to the nutrition community. The workshop’s participants came from a broad range of academic, government, UN and nonprofit organizations working in nutrition. They identified a number of priority areas where relevant climate information could improve nutrition. One was to use forecasts to predict off-season rains and prevent post-harvest loss due to aflatoxin – toxic substances produced by fungus that thrives in warm and humid conditions that devastate harvests across Africa. Another was to develop seasonal forecasts and monitoring systems that could help anticipate outbreaks of diarrheal diseases.

Previously, these institutions only met occasionally, if at all, said Grossi, so getting them together is a big deal for future nutrition-related policy and planning in Senegal. “We cannot overstate the convening power of ACToday.”

“By the end of ACToday, we will have trained a professional cohort of thousands who work at all levels of government and within every part of the climate services landscape. These are the experts who will continue the work of helping ensure their countries have safe, nutritious and stable supplies of food despite what climate conditions may bring.”

-Ashley Curtis, ACToday

One of the key objectives of ACToday is to strengthen the capacity of local governments and stakeholders to effectively interpret and use climate data to infom policy and planning. In the last year, the project’s six country teams conducted 52 trainings for more than 1,600 government, private-sector and nonprofit professionals as well as graduate students.

The subject matter covered in these trainings has spanned the range of information that profes- sionals need to truly understand and integrate climate knowledge into food planning and policy: climate-science basics, advanced forecasting methodologies, using mapping tools for piloting and planning agriculture projects, and more. The graphic below gives a snapshot of some of the participants in ACToday-supported trainings.

The number and scale of ACToday’s trainings are noteworthy–especially considering the efforts needed to develop course materials and teaching modules for both online and hybrid environments during a global pandemic–but it’s ACToday’s approach to training that deserves special attention.

“We’re mindful that all projects eventually come to an end,” said ACToday’s training lead, Ashley Curtis. “And so we’ve framed our trainings around three principles to ensure what we hope will be a sustained impact.”

The first principle is to work with academic partners to integrate climate services curricula directly into existing graduate programs, as ACToday has done at Independent University, Bangladesh, Senegal’s Cheikh Anta Diop University, and Ethiopia’s Bahir Dar University, along with three other universities in Ethiopia. In this way, the next generation of leaders come out with a solid understanding of the connections between climate and food security.

ACToday helped train more than 1,600 professionals working at the intersection of climate and food security last year. Here’s what some of them had to share about their experiences:

The second principle is to develop training courses that meet the immediate professional needs of decision makers who work at climate, agriculture and humanitarian institutions inside and outside of government. The knowledge about climate science, forecasting, insurance design and other topics that these decision makers receive though these courses are quickly incorporated into day-to-day operations.

The third principle is to foster connections and working relationships among the critical stake- holders and partners needed to adequately address climate threats to a country’s food systems. These include national meteorological agencies, ministries of agriculture, research institutions and development agencies.

“By the end of ACToday, we will have trained a professional cohort of thousands who work at all levels of government and within every part of the climate services landscape,” said Curtis. “These are the experts who will continue the work of helping ensure their countries have safe, nutritious and stable supplies of food despite what climate conditions may bring.”

One of the important applications of climate knowledge is in the area of disasters. Being able to predict the scale of a potential disaster and the risks a disaster could impose on a community in the future is valuable and crucial information for not just government agencies and aid organizations, but also to support individuals and communities to both build strategies to become more resilient, and to anticipate when a disaster is likely to occur. 

Disasters can differ widely based on region, climate, time of year, socioeconomic context, and other factors. However, while we have seen significant advances in understanding risk for some disaster types, such as drought and hurricanes, progress has lagged behind for other types – such as floods and particularly flash floods. While floods differ based on the water source and land area, it is generally recognized that flash floods can be especially dangerous.

Andrew Kruczkiewicz, Agathe Bucherie, Simon Mason, and their colleagues have delved into these definitions for a recent paper titled “Development of a Flash Flood Confidence Index from Disaster Reports and Geophysical Susceptibility.” We asked Agathe and Andrew  for their insight into this intersection of climate data and application.

Some people might see dividing floods into different types as splitting hairs, but it’s true that a “coastal” flood is very different in many ways from a “flash” flood. Why do you think these distinctions are crucial? Why do we need to categorize disasters?

Agathe Bucherie: Not all floods are the same. They can have different root causes and behaviour, leading to very different impacts. Understanding and categorizing floods according to their triggers is key to improving disaster predictions. Indeed, techniques used for coastal flood forecasting (for instance based on storm surge models) differ significantly from riverine flood forecasting (commonly using large scale hydrological network monitoring) or flash flood forecasting (primarily based on local and extreme precipitation forecast). Furthermore, flood risk differs significantly in time and space from one flood type to another. Mapping accurately where and when populations are more likely to be affected by each type of flood is crucial to improve disaster risk perception. Unfortunately, some disasters like flash floods remain neglected, and some communities in highlands, far from commonly mapped flood prone areas such as coastal or floodplains, might feel safe and not be aware of the flash flood risk. Floods have very different behaviour, and knowing which type of flood communities are exposed to is crucial for disaster practitioners to anticipate what type of impact to expect. For instance, flash floods, characterized by localized and suddenly devastating events, are the most damaging and deadly flood type globally. Appropriate disaster preparedness and response actions might therefore differ from one flood type to the other.

What’s the history of this work at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society?

Andrew Kruczkiewicz: IRI has been one of the leaders in climate research generally for nearly three decades, and has applied that research to disasters for the past 20 years. For example, more than a decade ago the institute published a report on how advances in climate and weather forecasting should (and shouldn’t) be integrated into disaster-risk management policy and practice. Since then, various activities have evolved here at IRI, with key collaborations from our work with the Red Cross, World Food Programme, World Bank and Group on Earth Observations. Over the past five to ten years, the humanitarian and development communities have begun to develop more structured approaches to incorporate forecast and risk based strategies within their standard operating procedures. However, destructive, rapid-onset extreme events such as flash floods and mudflows have remained elusive in terms of moving beyond ‘once-off’ projects. 

Our work on flash floods was jump-started by a four-year NASA grant to work in collaboration with the IFRC Climate Centre and Ecuadorian Red Cross to co-develop a new impact-based forecast for flash flood.  That project also supported the design of an ‘early action protocol’ so that the Red Cross could align the forecast with a replenishable source of funding for early action to be taken. 

Recently, IRI’s disaster work has led to collaboration across Columbia University, including with a new disasters and resilience network through which the Climate School will be developing additional activities related to the science, policy and practice of disasters.

Additional collaborations with Ecuador’s National Meteorological Institute (INAMHI), the NOAA Cooperative Institute for Severe and High-Impact Weather Research, and the Climate School’s Center for International Earth Science Information Network has supported IRI’s work in this interdisciplinary space.

How has the inclusion of remote sensing data improved our understanding of floods and flood risk?

Agathe: Remote sensing techniques are increasingly used to analyze the spatial and temporal distribution of flood risk globally, especially to characterize flood hazard and exposure. One of the most common applications is the use of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery to monitor current and detect past inundated areas, and assess structural flood impacts. However, the detection of flash flood events remains a challenge using Earth Observation. While remote sensing is useful to map areas exposed to flood risk based on historical flood frequency, we are particularly interested in integrating remote sensing to analyze the flash flood susceptibility of a watershed, in case of heavy rain. We use Digital Elevation Model, Land Use Land Cover and Sand content product derived from remote sensing techniques to extract catchment geomorphology and surface characteristics, indicating increased flash flood potential. In addition, we explore the benefit of using remote sensing for the assessment of structural vulnerability, with a pilot project in the urban area of Quito, Ecuador. Using Google Street View, we designed a process that allows us to build training datasets to automate the mapping of flood vulnerability for urban areas in geographic regions. This was developed in collaboration with Lehman College City University of New York led by graduate students Raychell Velez, Diana Calderon and Lauren Carey and Carolynne Hultquist at CIESIN, published here.

How do you hope policymakers use this study?

Andrew: The overarching goal is to produce an Early Action Protocol (EAP) for flash floods by integrating this study with static and dynamic information on flash flood hazard, exposure and social vulnerability in Ecuador. However, doing so is a process that necessitates engagement with decision makers from the earliest stages of the project. One of the most promising elements of this project is that from the earliest design stages, policy development has been an equal, if not greater, motivating factor. While there are various early warning systems for disasters, including for floods and flash floods, there are few systems that integrate early action within the warning. There are even fewer that align structured, replenishable funding sources with the action. While it is challenging to balance the pursuit of rigorous science with the urgent need to produce a ‘usable output’, we strive to ensure that expectations are matched across each partner organizations, donors, and collaborating scientists, so that the constraints and opportunities–as well as the timeline for various types of outputs (not limited to data outputs)–are communicated. 

Given that our work is focused on developing anticipatory action plans specifically for the humanitarian sector, we need to keep in mind the ethical considerations and tradeoffs between developing rapid, project-based outputs that may be short-lived, and spending additional resources to develop policy responses and standard operating procedures that will take longer to do but will likely last beyond any project’s lifecycle. This balance is difficult and asks for scientists to step outside of their comfort zone. However, at IRI we understand the importance of being clear about the privilege and responsibility that comes with working in the disaster community, especially within the humanitarian sector. In many cases, challenges in anticipating disasters may seem to be a ‘data’ problem. But even if that is the case, data is not necessarily the solution, and many times data is not the primary issue. The more significant challenges are in getting existing data integrated within policy and community action.

^{Story by Kevin Krajick for the State of the Planet blog.}

Over the course of more than 25 years, atmospheric and ocean scientist Lisa Goddard was at the forefront of developing methods to forecast regional climate trends from several weeks to several years out. She worked at understanding the interplay of short-term natural variability with long-term climate change. During  decades at Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI), which she eventually directed, she worked with governments and nonprofits in dozens of developing countries to apply these increasingly sophisticated forecasts to practical decisions in agriculture, public health, emergency planning and energy production. Her work extended to bolstering the climate expertise of scientists in many countries, and their ability to advise government authorities.

Goddard died on Jan. 13 in Mt. Kisco, N.Y. The cause was metastatic breast cancer, said her family. She was 55.

“Her contributions to our understanding of climate were important, but her commitment to ensuring that climate information was accessible and meaningful to decision makers across the globe was game-changing,” said Alex Halliday, dean of the Columbia Climate School, of which IRI is a part.

Lisa Goddard in her office at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society, 2013. (Francesco Fiondella/IRI)

Lisa Marie Goddard was born Sept. 23, 1966, in Sacramento, Calif., the eldest of two children. Her father, Glenn Goddard, was a manager for the state of California’s labor department. Her mother, the former Marie Strickland, was a grade-school teacher.

The family moved several times in northern California, and Goddard ended up going to high school in the small city of Davis. Deeply into cooking, she considered going to culinary school. However, she was also an avid puzzle solver, and this interest won out; she decided to pursue the puzzles of physics, said her husband, David Cooperberg.

She was admitted to the University of California, Berkeley in 1984, and received her undergraduate degree in 1988. In pondering her next steps, she decided not to pursue abstract theoretical work. “At that time, in the late 1980s, there were just starting to be stories in the news about the ozone hole and global warming,” she later said. “I thought: This is an exciting way to apply my physics knowledge. This is something I want to learn more about, and maybe help people.”

She went on to Ph.D studies under Princeton University climate scientist George Philander, who at the time was leading studies aimed at studying the then poorly understood weather pattern known as El Niño. Philander found that it had an opposite state, which he dubbed La Niña. The combined phenomena are now known to be an irregular 2- to 7-year repeating oscillation that alternately warms and cools the surface of the tropical Pacific Ocean. This in turn powerfully affects rainfall patterns over much of Asia and the Americas, along with crop yields and the risks of floods, droughts and heat waves. Goddard became part of the effort to disentangle its workings. She wrote her thesis on the interdependent ocean and air dynamics driving the El Niño-La Niña cycles, and went on to become a widely recognized expert on the subject.

When Goddard started out, women in the earth sciences were vanishingly rare; she was the only female in her year’s cohort at Princeton. She later said that she embraced the difference; being a rarity bestowed an advantage, because as long as she asserted herself, professors and others tended to remember her more than they did her average male colleagues.

In 1995, after receiving her doctorate, she took up a series of positions at California’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography as part of the newly created IRI. Initially a collaboration between the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Columbia with an outpost at Scripps, it became the world’s first international institute to try filling the yawning gap between daily weather predictions and long-term climate-change research. The aim was to create near- and medium-term climate forecasts that could be applied to social and economic issues.

At Scripps, Goddard and the handful of others she worked with were based in a little white cottage overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Having a keen sense of fun and love of the outdoors, she got the side benefit there of spending occasional lunch breaks surfing.

In 2000, Goddard moved to IRI’s main headquarters on the suburban campus of Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y. There, colleagues Stephen Zebiak and Mark Cane had already come up with a successful working model for predicting the comings and goings of El Niño and La Niña. Goddard worked on refining the model, and on developing models to project other regional weather trends on scales of weeks, months or years. Scientists at Lamont-Doherty itself mostly investigated longer-term climate change over centuries and millennia, and Goddard was able to cooperate with them to incorporate the larger picture into her work. In all, she authored or coauthored about 100 published scientific papers.

Goddard in 2008, speaking to Columbia University students. (Alan S. Orling)

The institute focused on providing information and training mainly to developing countries that had scant resources in meteorology and climate. Goddard traveled widely in Africa, Asia and South America to do research and help set up programs to train and otherwise aid scientists. The forecasts were then applied to questions like what crops to plant next season; whether relief agencies should pre-position funding to deal with potential floods, droughts or heat waves; and the prospects that a proposed dam would get enough water supply to provide hydroelectricity or irrigation.

In the early 2000s, Goddard helped design Columbia’s MA in Climate and Society program. Now offered by the Columbia Climate School, the interdisciplinary degree is aimed at turning out graduates who can apply training in both physical and social sciences to real-world problems. For many years, she taught the foundational course in the dynamics of climate variability and change. Many of the program’s hundreds of graduates have gone on to influential positions in journalism, government, nonprofits and private industry. In 2007, she founded the Postdocs Applying Climate Expertise (PACE) program, a national effort to link early-career climate scientists to positions within decision-making institutions worldwide. She continued to chair the program in recent years.

In 2012, Goddard was appointed director of IRI. She faced an immediate crisis: the institute’s sole financial supporter, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, had withdrawn its funding to focus on other priorities. With the help of colleagues, Goddard quickly rallied the staff, created an alternate plan and rescued the institute by building up a diverse set of backers, including the World Bank, the World Food Program, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the governments of various countries, from Uruguay to India.

Goddard’s Month of May page in the 2014 ‘Climate Models’ calendar. In background, northern Chile’s desiccated Puclaro Reservoir. (Portrait: Charlie Naebeck. Background: Francesco Fiondella/IRI)

Under Goddard’s leadership, IRI went on to collaborate with many global and regional institutions, including the World Health Organization and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. Its scientists worked on diverse issues, including ways for coffee growers to adapt to varying climate; rising malaria risk in Ethiopia’s highlands due to long-term climbing temperatures; rain forecasts aimed at judging the risk of mudslides following a volcanic eruption in Guatemala; and affordable ways to insure the crops of small farmers using climate data instead of traditional individual claims.

In 2017, Goddard and colleagues led the launch of a major effort with the newly formed Columbia World Projects to bolster food security in six populous countries that are particularly vulnerable to both natural climate variability and long-term climate change: Ethiopia, Senegal, Colombia, Guatemala, Bangladesh and Vietnam. Together, those nations comprise nearly 500 million people who face recurring climate-related threats to their food security and economies. The program, Adapting Agriculture Today, for Tomorrow, is still in progress.

Goddard served on a number of influential national and international advisory bodies. From 2009 to 2017, she was a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences Board of Atmospheric Science and Climate. From 2013 to 2015, she co-chaired the scientific steering group of the international Climate and Ocean Variability, Predictability and Change organization.

Given the technical nature of her climate-modeling work, Goddard looked for ways to communicate with the wider public. One year, some of her staff came up with the idea of a pictorial “Climate Models” calendar, which instead of featuring scientific charts or maps, would picture individual climate scientists modeling high fashions and striking bold poses. Goddard readily agreed to be “Dr. May 2014,” wearing an elegant floor-length gown in front of a photo-shopped image of a Chilean reservoir ravaged by drought.

With the effects of human-influenced climate change becoming evident in recent years, Goddard spoke often of the need to help affected communities adapt to increasingly extreme weather. “We have variability in the climate system naturally. We’ve had it since the climate system has existed, and it will continue to go on,” she said in a 2018 video. “But now we have manmade climate change, and so that’s changing some of the thresholds.”

Goddard stepped down as IRI director in late 2020 to resume her role as a senior research scientist. She retired in September 2021.

She is survived by her mother; her sister, Kristina Zimmerman; her husband; and her sons Samuel and Matthew Cooperberg.

Read the family’s obituary for Lisa Goddard and comments by friends

See a detailed tribute from the Climate & Society Class of 2020

Megafires, extreme weather, locust swarms, pandemics: These are just some of the many natural disasters that have devastated farmers in recent years, destroying livelihoods and leaving hunger in their wake. Between 2008 and 2018, disasters cost the agricultural sectors of developing countries over $108 billion in damaged or lost crop and livestock production, according to a recent report from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

To manage the risks of disasters, developing world farmers increasingly purchase index insurance, which pays out benefits according to a predetermined “index” or model, such as seasonal rainfall volume. When rainfall hits the preset level, it triggers a payout. But often, the index insurance models are at odds with the reality on the ground. The smallest errors in choice of satellite data can skew outputs and throw the payout system out of synch with the farmers’ actual needs. Ultimately, poorly designed index insurance can lead entire communities and countries into a false sense of security and result in both grave financial shortfalls and food shortages when climate disasters strike. It’s a problem that desperately needs a fix, especially as the frequency, extremity, and complexity of climate disasters grow due to climate change.

A National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to Columbia researchers Daniel Osgood, Eugene Wu and Lydia Chilton, announced September 1, comes just in time. The NSF allocated $600,000 to Osgood, of Columbia Climate School’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society, and Wu and Chilton, from Columbia’s Computer Science department, to help them design a set of scalable customizable open-source tools that can collect agricultural disaster risk data from millions of individual farmers living in some remote parts of the world. During the pandemic, Osgood, Wu and Chilton had already begun using their limited coding knowledge to cobble together small-scale web-based tools to collect data directly from thousands of farmers about the climate disaster risks they face. Until now, most index insurance products relied on informed guesswork and satellite data, but did not have the capacity to tap the wisdom of crowds of farmers themselves. The NSF’s financial support will allow them to respond to that demand with population-scale tools that are built to last.

State of the Planet spoke with Osgood about the NSF-funded project as well as his career path. The following interview had been edited for length and clarity.

How did you come to work at the intersection of financial instrument design, agricultural risk, and climate disaster?

It’s kind of a crazy journey in hindsight, how I gathered this odd mix of skills. As an undergraduate, I studied economics and engineering in a dual degree program and began working as a scientist on satellite telescope projects that look at the beginning of the universe. But it felt like I was just playing and having fun. I wanted to do something that was more connected to my roots.

I was born on a reservation in Arizona—I’m not Native American but my parents worked in healthcare on the reservation—and grew up in New Mexico, so I was always interested in things like climate and water and land. My professors at UC Berkeley said, “Try agricultural economics,” so I started my PhD in agricultural economics while I was still working in the labs building telescopes. Then as a PhD student, I supported the building of a lot of the early water markets in the American West, as well as climate and water market information systems for farmers that could help them plan water use.

You developed a talent for talking to farmers about what they need and how they make decisions, which has become a really critical part of your work. How did you pick up this skill? 

So, I had a faculty position at the University of Arizona, where I did cooperative research. The research goal was not designed to support the research community, but to help on cooperative extension projects—to help the farmers. I worked in a NOAA-funded program called CLIMAS where my job was to talk with farmers about climate and science. Some of these farmers owned some of the biggest farms in the world, some of them were from Native American nations, and some of them were very low-income farm workers.

Early in your career, you played a big role in the creation of index insurance products for farmers. How did this come about?

In the early 2000s, the World Bank started supporting new index insurance projects. The staff thought they needed more data to design these products, but they discovered that what they really needed was someone who could talk with farmers and local decision-makers about science. At the end of the day, they needed to reconcile the experience of farmers with their remote-sensing and crop models and climate forecasts. That’s when the Bank approached Columbia’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) for help, and as the climate economist at IRI, I was brought in to lead the work.

So, the index insurance models diverged pretty substantially from the farmers’ direct experience?

Yeah. I mean, it’s very easy to get it wrong. It’s very easy for farmers to be forced to buy something they don’t understand, or to have products not reflect the beneficiaries that they’re intended for.

Can you offer an example?

Well, for instance, in 2015 in Malawi there was this scandal. It was a very bad year for agriculture, so people in Malawi were expecting a major food security payout. The drought overwhelmed the government’s capacity to respond, because rather than set aside reserves, they had enrolled in an insurance plan, the Africa Risk Capacity project, to provide the government with resources for supporting food insecure people during a drought and it failed to come through. The index model used by the Africa Risk Capacity project wasn’t registering enough hardship for a payout. We had a very small project with about five villages in Malawi and we did have a payout, so the project commissioned us to write a report to help unpack what went wrong.

What we found in Malawi was that the timing of the rainy season matters most, not total rainfall. So, we tried to match satellite data from the beginning and end of the rainy season with the recollections of the farmers to see if there was agreement. We also cross-checked different satellite data streams: one that looks at the cloud temperature to estimate the rainfall, for instance, and another that uses radar to look through the clouds and tell if the soil is wet. And we had different kinds of farmers in different situations cross-check with each other. What we found was that different years and parts of the season were important to different sets of farmers even within one village, because they were using different varieties of crop. The different losses from these different sets of farmers needed to be thought through for the insurance to work. The timing was off in the model they were using.

What are the consequences of getting the model wrong? 

The consequences can be huge. If we get it wrong, the farmers don’t get payouts when they need them. If overall the country is having big droughts, these are going to overwhelm the national capacity for response. When you go from having a couple hundred farmers in an experiment to tens of thousands of farmers, the stakes go up, too. We’re trying to support these farmers to make smart and informed choices about their livelihoods, their ability to feed their kids and to plan their futures. The insurance products are intended for them, so we’re not comfortable unless they’re closely involved in the design process.

How do you ensure that you get good information from the farmers?

We have been using games. One way of gamifying a process is to use what’s called intrinsic motivation, where we’re not paying someone money, we’re giving them badges on their phone or some element of fun. But at the same time, we’re getting information, for example, about the satellites or historical climate or the forecasts; we’re getting information about what farmers’ needs are; and then we’re actually using this information to design something new together.

We used an application called IKON which turns a simple question into a game. So instead of just asking farmers directly how good or bad a particular season was, it asks them to try to guess better than their neighbors or the satellites how well their farms did in such and such a period. There is a series of these and farmers get badges based on how well they guess. It’s fun enough that people play it. So, the strategy now is to have researchers go to a few villages where things are most complicated or most representative of a region, and then use these games to go to a much broader place set of places.

We can also ask them to guess which past years the insurance product that they purchased would have given them payouts. In this way, we can find out if the farmers actually understand what’s been sold to them, which has been a problem with a lot of these projects.

Since you started this work, the popularity of index insurance for small farmers has grown quite substantially.

Yes, when I started working on index insurance, there were probably a couple thousand farmers covered by the instrument, and now there are many millions. It continues to grow. One project at Columbia under way now, called the ACToday Columbia World Project, is working to provide insurance to a million smallholder farmers. The benefits for farmers extend beyond just protection against climate risk—index insurance also gives them the financial security to take productive business risks.

So how did you build something that could collect information from these farmers at a large scale?

Right, so first we started prototyping tools to see if we could automate some of our surveys to work with larger numbers of farmers. During COVID, the number of these prototypes exploded because people couldn’t go into the field. So, there was this Wizard of Oz thing happening, where people collecting the data thought they were using software, but really, they were typing something into a web interface at the end of their work day, and thousands of miles away in New York, our team was programming it and analyzing it overnight so that it would appear in the interface a day or two later. So we were frantically hard coding this workflow.

The next step was to program web interfaces that would allow someone within Malawi or Ethiopia or Senegal to complete the analysis themselves through the web just as well as or better than we were able to do it in New York. And then the government of Zambia said, “Look, we have a national insurance product for millions of farmers across all of Zambia, but it was designed independently by a consultant and it isn’t tuned to the local reality. Could you set up design tools so we can create something that will work all across Zambia?” We realized we were in way over our heads with the technology, and that is where the NSF grant comes in.

How will the NSF grant help you move this work forward?

Basically, we were using tools that we had coded ourselves, but we’re not coders. These tools, designed for small-scale use, were already crashing often and we couldn’t fix them because our capacity was overwhelmed. And now, in the past year and a half, the projects have gone to a much bigger scale. They require a proper and adaptable software framework developed by computer scientists, not economists and climate scientists who dabble in coding. So it’s perfect timing with the NSF grant, because we have a much higher demand for our tools than we had expected.

What is especially novel about the technology that you’re building right now?

The exciting thing is that this kind of bottom-up approach has never worked before at a massive scale. There’s never been a framework that would allow millions of locals to drive decision-making on a project designed to benefit them, and it’s still completely based on science. It’s like artificial intelligence, but it’s actually human intelligence or community intelligence. In some ways, it’s a new kind of democracy. The local government can say yes and no, and make their decisions, but the citizens for whom the programs are designed are intimately involved in driving the process.

Is there a single core question that animates all your work?

I think the biggest question I have is how can the wisdom of each individual help solve a community-wide problem? I’m trying to coin this term “crowd core,” that refers to crowd-based cooperative research solutions to individual problems. I’m hoping crowd core is a door to a more cooperative future.

Designing financial tools and processes that help farmers bounce back from droughts and other extreme weather events is a crucial part of their strategy to adapt to longer-term climate change. The Financial Instruments Sector Team (FISTeam) of the International Research Institute for Climate and Society has been an innovator in this field, designing and helping implement index insurance and index-based disaster risk management projects for more than a decade. 

Developing a reliable index requires good historical climate data based on a variety of sources, including rainfall estimates from satellites. A fundamental challenge is to make sure to reconcile data from satellites and models with the farmer’s on-the-ground experience, to make sure the insurance products that are developed actually meet the needs of those who are utilizing them. The FISTeam has learned that many projects fail because they don’t involve farmers and local experts in the design and governance process. Through partners, collaborators, and educational activities, the IRI team has focused on engaging the players necessary to represent the wide array of expertise and perspectives to build truly community-driven solutions.

The most recent rendition of this played out with the Adaptation of Agriculture Value Chains to Climate Change (PrAda) project in Madagascar, where the FISTeam partnered with the German Society for International Cooperation (GiZ) to provide support in the development of climate risk insurance. Madagascar is an island country that is heavily reliant on agriculture and especially vulnerable to climate variability and change.

The PrAda team and Madagascar’s Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock (MINAE),  National Department of Meteorology (DGM) and other partners conducted a detailed climate-risk analysis for selected agricultural value chains, which demonstrated how droughts and other forecasted climate hazards could impact the revenues of smallholder farmers and threaten the livelihoods of rural communities.

In the Androy region, for example, the partners identified the peanut value chain as having the clearest and strongest vulnerability to drought, thereby allowing the design of a climate risk insurance product. For the 2020-2021 season, a pilot was set up to serve groundnut farmers in the Androy, Bekily and Ambovombe districts.

Due to COVID-19 travel restrictions, the IRI team had to quickly adapt its  capacity building, training, field visit methodology to be communicated remotely and to ensure all the necessary information and infrastructure was available for the local partners to carry out the necessary scoping and data collection process. The team improved its data collection forms and conducted virtual workshops for partners and stakeholders. 

Even with these new restrictions, the FISTeam was able to go through all of the index insurance conceptualization process with the partners. Preliminary feasibility assessments such as mapping index design potential, gathering site-specific information and working with experts to help better understand the need for an insurance product on the ground all took place. This process includes visits to the locations in question to obtain the farmer’s agricultural practices and recollected bad years experienced on the ground. Once the initial phase was completed, a pilot index design was co-developed by local experts, consulting a variety of rainfall datasets identified in the initial step along with vulnerability data such as farmers’ bad years and expert reporting.

Throughout the pilot season, the partners conducted a series of seasonal rainfall monitoring processes to assess the relative historical ranking of the current rainfall distribution and compare it to the farmers’ reported cropping cycle for groundnuts. The monitoring process informs the stakeholders about the performance of the index and provides insight on ways to improve the design.

The 2020-2021 rainy season started late, and the pilot project helped partners understand how farmers experienced the season and how index insurance would be useful for their decision making in a late-onset scenario. Although the pilot index did not trigger insurance payouts, the stakeholders held a number of discussion sessions on what kind of index is better suited for Androy and the type of data that would be valuable for the design and validation of the index insurance.

The PrAda pilot serves as an example of the ways in which an approach that values co-development and is inclusive of community voices is able to provide valuable insight on concrete next steps of index insurance refinement and improvement.

On September 24, during Climate Week NYC, the International Research Institute for Climate and Society and Columbia World Projects hosted an event to showcase the successes of its Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today, for Tomorrow (ACToday) project, which is working to reduce climate threats to food systems in Bangladesh, Colombia, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Senegal and Vietnam.

The event, “Reducing Climate Threats to Food Systems: Highlights from the First Columbia World Project,” explored how ACToday has strengthened the capacities and capabilities of national climate institutions in each of the six countries and highlighted ways in which ACToday teams are training staff at national ministries, agriculture extension services and research institutions to become more sophisticated users of climate information for decision making.

Wafaa El-Sadr, Director of Columbia World Projects and Alex Halliday, Founding Dean of the Columbia Climate School took part in the conversation, which was moderated by Walter Baethgen, Senior Research Scientist at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society. IRI’s Tufa Dinku, Ángel G. Muñoz, and Mélody Braun each presented on different innovations of ACToday.

Torrential rainfall quickly transformed New York City’s streets and expressways into rivers and lakes on Wednesday night September 2, 2021, shutting down the entire metro system (the first time since Hurricane Sandy) and forcing traffic throughout the city to come to a halt. Air traffic was interrupted, and businesses had to close, causing an estimated 16 billion to 24 billion dollars in flood damage to the Northeast. At least 13 people died that night in New York, and at least 44 throughout the Northeast—more than the total in the southern US from Ida’s initial landfall as a strong Category 4 storm. With a total damage of approximately 98 billion dollars, Ida might become the seventh most expensive hurricane in recent US history. In a nonstationary climate due to ongoing anthropogenic climate change, we will see more events like this. Mitigation measures must be prioritized to address the rising risk from ever increasing frequency and magnitude of rainfall extremes.

Similar to past extreme flooding events, the rainfall was brought by the remains of a tropical storm, Ida, which prior caused widespread flooding and devastation to Louisiana. Next to the record-breaking precipitation levels witnessed in New York it is remarkable, however, that the past NYC record was set just two weeks before when Hurricane Henri brought hourly rainfall of more than two inches, leading to widespread floods and disruption of daily life. The events constitute the third major flooding event in NYC within just a few months, after remnants of tropical storm Elsa brought strong winds and unusual rainfall to the city in early July. What used to be rare occurrences in the city—subway flooding, for example—occurred regularly this summer. 

From a global perspective these citywide disasters didn’t happen in isolation, but were part of a series of high impact flood events that made ‘record-breaking’ the norm of 2021. Just after Elsa brought anomalous rain to NYC, a major storm system stalled over Western Europe on July 14-15, causing record-setting rainfall over the Low countries, Germany, Switzerland, and France. Some parts of Germany received two months of rain in one to two days, which caused rivers to overtop their banks and flash flooding through communities. This extreme event resulted in severe insured losses of around 4.7 to 5.9 billion euros from the floods in Western Germany alone. 

Just a week later, on July 19 and 20, severe flooding occurred in the central Chinese Province Henan after record breaking rainfall of more than seven inches was measured in the provincial capital Zhengzhou. The floods that affected large parts of central China caused at least 300 casualties and forced more than 800,000 people to evacuate. 

Then in August, a series of thunderstorms caused severe rainfall in Turkey that resulted in several floods and landslides. During the course of the week that featured unprecedented local water rises by four meters, at least 81 people lost their lives, and more than 1,800 were evacuated.

Extreme Rainfall and Stagnating Weather in a Changing Climate

Record breaking rainfall extremes in general and short duration rainfall events in particular are increasing in frequency in a warming climate as the rate of evaporation and the atmosphere’s capacity to hold water both increase. Physically, these relationships are well understood and an increase in regional rainfall extremes can be found in observations globally and at a local scale leading to an increase in flood damages within the historic datasets and under future high emission projections. To express the Germany flooding event from a climate change perspective, the rapid attribution study from the World Weather Attribution Project found that the event was made 1.9 – 9 times more likely by climate change.

In addition to thermodynamic factors that increase the likelihood of record-breaking rainfall extremes, atmospheric dynamics often contribute in making an extreme weather event more severe. For example, when slow moving weather systems cause associated rainfall to occur over the same region for a longer duration, local flood risk can amplify. One of the most prominent examples of recent years is Hurricane Harvey, which remained stationary over Texas, guided by a persistent meander in the jetstream, thereby leading to extreme flooding in Houston mid-August 2017. Similarly, the low-pressure system associated with the German flood in 2021 remained stationary. Evidence suggests that climate change is one of various factors in shifts in atmospheric dynamics, such as the weakening of the mid-latitude circulation over the past four decades, leading to slower storms and intense precipitation events more frequently. Although the 2021 record rainfall events in New York were not due to a particular slow moving weather system, the large-scale circulation played a critical role by providing additional moisture to Tropical Cyclone Ida through the interaction with an extratropical front when it made its way to the northeast. 

Mitigating Flood Risks in a Changing Climate

Impacts from climate extremes don’t occur in isolation to other non-climate related societal challenges and often act as an amplifying force. COVID-19 hospitalizations in Louisiana were close to their all-time high just before Ida struck, making evacuations and potential health support more challenging. Many of those that died in NYC drowned in illegal subterranean apartments, a last refuge to avoid displacement from the city’s high rents. The record-setting hourly rainfall rates of three inches or more made the waters rise at speeds impossible to escape. 

In addition, urbanization as a result of population growth and economic development adds more impervious surfaces to the region resulting in increasing runoff and changing the characteristics of floodplains, flood depth, and flood extent. Urban growth and informal development leads to not only increased exposure, but increased exposure to already underserved populations with lower coping capacities.

For protection of current and future generations, and to decrease the chances of future events leading to devastating consequences, two types of mitigation measures can be adopted. These can be categorized as structural and nonstructural measures. Structural measures typically involve engineered​​ systems, such as dams, levees and floodwalls aimed at controlling the hazard. A practical example of such measures is the new levee system in New Orleans that was constructed after Hurricane Katrina. Ida tested the reliability of the system, and reports demonstrated that it performed adequately, reducing the destructive consequences of the hurricane considerably. However, every storm is different and while a success for Ida, questions remain: are these measures enough considering the changing nature of the hazard?

As the frequency and intensity of flood events are increasing due to climate change, protective structures—known as structural mitigation measures—that are designed based on contemporary flood threats, may experience future extreme events that cause overtopping or failure of the structure. Such strategies may also create an illusion of safety, further promoting growth in or near ‘flood-protected’ areas, as well as promoting a lack of proper risk perception at the individual, institutional and government levels.

Nonstructural flood mitigation measures rely on public policy planning, such as zoning, acquisition and land-use regulation, and socioeconomic incentives that focus on controlling the exposure. These policies are most effective in urbanizing communities, however, they are not as successful as expected in reversing the tendency of people to choose to live in flood-prone areas.

Important questions in that context are: what level and combination of structural and nonstructural measures should be implemented to help future communities be more resilient to devastating floods and extreme events like the one that happened September 2, 2021 in NYC? And further, to what extent are these measures supporting one group of people more than others? Is this disproportionate benefit leading to the disadvantaged populations becoming relatively more disadvantaged? 

In some regions, the amplified frequency of extreme weather events makes it increasingly difficult to recover, let alone to adequately prepare for the next extreme, making retreat the only viable option. But this is easier said than done as many questions around which communities are prioritized, and around mandatory vs. optional retreat must be addressed. And lastly, we must know not only what we are retreating from, but what hazards (current and future) may be encountered there when we arrive. 

Moving inland to a certain degree will mitigate coastal storm surge and sea level rise risks. Flash flood risk is much more complex to delineate, and we must communicate if, and to what extent, people are retreating from one hazard into another one. This tension, both with flash floods, other individual hazards, and compound risks, will be one of the elements that must be addressed. The opportunity now is that we have the privilege to assess and manage options in a structured approach, rather than waiting and being forced to address them under immense cognitive, emotional, and technical strain. 

With Climate Week happening in New York City at the moment, we have an opportunity and the responsibility to ensure a connection is re-established with the most vulnerable populations, especially in urban areas such as NYC where gradients of wealth and privilege exist. This week is an opportunity to ensure the activities/discussions/policies are developed at an appropriate granularity that address disproportionate impacts, such as what we saw in NYC only a short couple of weeks ago.

Developing effective index-based insurance products requires good data as well as input and feedback from farming communities (see video). For more than a decade, the International Research Institute for Climate and Society’s Financial Instruments Sector Team has been developing tools to help in the design, implementation and support of index insurance projects in more than a dozen countries around the world. The ACToday project has accelerated this work by supporting the further refinement of these tools to better serve farmers on the ground, and working with the World Food Programme (WFP) and World Bank to significantly scale their insurance projects in Ethiopia, Senegal and other countries in Africa.

We interviewed Rahel Diro, a senior staff associate and ACToday insurance expert to give more details about these recent developments.

Can you describe some of the tools you’ve developed with partners and agriculture communities over the years, especially under ACToday?

IRI has been working with WFP and other major partners in Ethiopia for many years to develop reliable methodologies for designing and validating insurance indexes, which are based on weather/climate data (see sidebar). We’ve learned that one of the challenges to overcome is the potential mismatch between what farmers need and the timing of payouts triggered using climate information. In other words, sometimes the index doesn’t “see” the reality on the ground and doesn’t trigger a payout, even though crops might be suffering and farmers could greatly benefit from the payout. We’ve done a great deal of research over the years on this issue specifically, and one of the things we have learned is that the risk farmers face in some regions stems more from the agricultural suitability of the land rather than the accuracy of the index. We want to avoid those kinds of situations and offer index insurance only for those areas where it makes sense and can be useful to farmers in times of drought and other weather and climate-related risks.

Under ACToday, we have developed an online mapping and analysis platform to help WFP, World Bank and other partners easily evaluate the viability of growing a particular crop in a particular location, using crop models and other data. This platform, or “maproom” as we call it, helps experts visualize rainfall patterns over wide areas, among other things. They use it to filter out areas considered marginal for the crops being insured and exclude those areas from insurance programs. Now that such a tool exists, the partners can tailor it to any of the countries where they support index insurance.

What role have farmers played in the development of the maproom, and how does the tool evolve as more information is incorporated?

All of our research and experience in this field has shown that co-designing insurance with farmers is key if we’re to develop a product that truly addresses their needs. This begins from understanding farmers’ historical exposure to drought, and is why we go through intensive exercises where we ask farmers to tell us the drought years they remember from the past 30-40 years.

In the past, IRI would produce indexes and share drafts for review by experts, but the new ACToday platform allows for true co-design. This tool has enabled local partners to make the design choices themselves, and to understand the tradeoffs between selecting different parameters. They have been able to design the drought indexes themselves. The main criterion is how much the designed index captures the historical drought experiences of farmers. This means looking back and asking, “could we have predicted the past droughts with this data?” If the history is right, then the tool is far more likely to correctly predict the future. That’s why one of the main metrics for evaluating the index is how much historical payouts from the satellite-based index are matching with the historical drought experiences of farmers.

How do comparisons between satellite observations and farmer reporting help improve index insurance tools? What does a good fit or a bad fit look like?

This is imperfect information. We work predominantly in rural areas, where data is difficult to acquire. Context is key, and we rely on the local experience of agricultural extension agents. Farmers have their own biases, and they may not remember the details very well. For instance, they may remember they had food shortages 30 years ago, but they may not recall whether it was caused by pests, droughts or floods. But for index insurance, we need to be specific. That’s why ACToday has also worked with government experts in Ethiopia’s agriculture ministry and food security offices, to create a tool that helps them review the farmer-reported drought years and conduct data-quality assessments. The output from this tool is then used as a comparison dataset for assessing the accuracy of the drought index.

The efforts involved not just IRI and farmers but a team made up of individuals from governments, universities and development agencies. Why is it important to have buy-in from all these different groups in the interest of long term sustainability?

Having buy-in from stakeholders at all levels is crucial. We want farmers to have these resources, like index insurance, even after projects like ACToday end. Making sure these tools meet the needs and are useful to farmers, getting commitments from government officials to write in these programs in future climate plans, and convincing academics to invest in the continuing improvement of the data sets all help ensure not just that these programs persist, but that they continue to adapt as needs—and the climate—continue to change.

Where does this research go next? How do you think methods might have to adapt in the next country where this process is implemented?

In index insurance, there is always some margin of error, even if it is small. A very good index might have an 85% match on droughts and payouts; another area might only have a 67% but for that market and farmer business model, it may be acceptable. The design choices are being made at the local level though, and so decisions about how to improve the margins can be made within these communities. This has huge implications for developing products that meet the needs of the clients and puts the ownership of the products in the hands of local stakeholders. Both of these traits have important implications for sustainability of these products.

The approach outlined here has been adopted in other countries. In Zambia, we’re implementing a similar process throughout the country for a government-funded program. Farmers were consulted in every seventh village, and the co-design is currently under implementation. It’s our hope that we can continue to refine the process with local stakeholders.

A new study indicates that the number of people affected by floods is growing much faster than scientists previously had thought, due both to increased inundation and migration of people into flood-prone areas. Using direct satellite observations rather than standard model estimates, the authors showed that from 2000–2018, populations in flood-prone regions grew 24 percent faster than elsewhere—more than 10 times previous estimates. The research was just published in the leading journal Nature.

The study “will help policymakers understand where flood impacts are changing and how best to adapt,“ said lead author Beth Tellman, a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society. It should “deepen our understanding of how land cover change, climate, and floods interact,” she said. Tellman developed most of the research as a PhD. student at Arizona State University and as chief science officer of the global flood-tracking company Cloud to Street.

Today, most flood maps rely on modeling that simulates floods based on ground data such as elevation and rainfall records. That includes those used by the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency. But these models have severe limitations, say the study authors; in fact, those maps often leave out recent incidents in areas not historically subject to flooding.

On the other hand, the new Global Flood Database used in the study allows researchers to directly observe the actual scope, impacts and trends of 21st-century flooding. Powered by twice-daily global satellite imaging, the database has information on 913 flood events in 169 countries since 2000.

The new study says that as many as 86 million people moved into observed flood regions from 2000-2015, resulting in a 24 percent increase in the proportion of populations exposed to floods. Some 2.23 million square kilometers (about 86,100 square miles) were flooded between 2000-2018, affecting between 255 million and 290 million people. Nearly 90 percent of the mapped flood events occurred in South and Southeast Asia, with the biggest basins—the Indus, Ganges-Brahmaputra, and Mekong—holding the largest numbers of people exposed. The satellite data uncovered previously unidentified increases in flood exposure in South Asia, southern Latin America, and the Middle East.

Most floods in the database were caused by heavy rainfall, followed by tropical storms or surges, followed by snow or ice melt, and then dam breaks. Despite representing less than 2 percent of floods, dam breaks had the highest increased incidence, 177 percent, in proportion of population exposed.

For example, in August 2008 the collapse of Nepal’s Koshi Barrage dam left over 3 million people homeless in the Indian state of Bihar. Repeated spillages of excess water in the last few years from Burkina Faso’s Bagre Dam have flooded thousands of hectares of agricultural land in neighboring Ghana, damaging or wiping out crops.

The researchers estimate that by 2030, climate and demographic changes will add 25 new countries to the 32 already experiencing increasing floods in the 21st century.

“We found that economic development and people moving into flood-prone areas is significantly increasing the number of people exposed to floods in those regions,” said study coauthor Jonathan Sullivan, a postdoctoral scientist at the University of Arizona. “Furthermore, increasing flood exposure is rooted in underlying conditions that give vulnerable populations no choice but to settle in flood zones.”

The authors say that information in the Global Flood Database can lead to immediately actionable lessons. For example, tracking population growth in flood-prone areas can help governments form adaptation strategies, and lead to speedier help for survivors of floods.

Other coauthors of the study are based at NASA, Google Earth Outreach, the University of Michigan, University of Colorado, University of Texas Austin, Dartmouth Flood Observatory, and the University of Washington. Funding was provided by Google and NASA.

New recommendations by the World Resources Institute, International Research Institute for Climate and Society, World Business Council for Sustainable Development, World Food Programme and the Global Center on Adaptation outline path to maximize impact of investments in digital climate services for small-scale farmers.

Acute food insecurity is on the rise. Nearly 750 million people globally were food-insecure in 2019, and at least 121 million people are estimated to have been pushed into similar levels of risk due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

This is expected to increase due to the impacts of climate change on global food systems and crop production: Smallholder farmers are increasingly facing cumulative impacts of droughts, floods, heatwaves and wildfires, as well as crop pests and diseases. Without adaptation, climate change could depress crop yields globally by 5-30% by 2050, and if dwindling supplies lead to price hikes, at least 50 million more people could face food insecurity.

Digital Climate-informed Advisory Services (DCAS) — such as mobile apps and radio — could play a key role in helping smallholder farmers adapt to and mitigate some of these impacts, enabling them to make informed decisions and adapt traditional practices to minimize losses.

“This blueprint stems from decades of real world experience working directly with stakeholders to build useful, sustainable and scalable climate services for agriculture.”

Stephen Zebiak, IRI

One such solution comes from Malawi, where vulnerable communities are using weather forecasts and agricultural advice to inform decisions around livestock, nutrition and health. Information provided through radio programs and mobile messaging to communities helped farmers navigate rainfall variability and make better decisions on different livelihoods strategies. The content for the messaging is created by an inter-ministerial National Agriculture Content Development Committee, bringing together expertise from different national agencies.

By providing information to be integrated into agricultural decision-making, Digital Climate-informed Advisory Services are already aiming to help millions of small-scale agricultural producers better adapt to a more variable and changing climate. Digitally enabled services like bulletins and alerts from extension services can also help support agricultural producers who may not be digitally literate or may not yet have access to digital technologies.

But while current efforts to provide such services to farmers — the backbone of our global food system — are promising, they are insufficient. New Global Commission on Adaptation research suggests that increasing international commitments and investments is critical to scale up efforts, safeguard smallholder producers, and promote global food security.

300 Million Small-scale Producers Still Lack Access to Services

As of 2018, Africa had 33 million farms registered for agricultural climate services — around 13% of all Sub-Saharan African smallholders. By 2022, that number is expected to expand to 47 million registered farms.

Despite the rapid increase in registration for these critical services, an estimated 300 million small-scale agricultural producers globally still lack access.

The WRI paper, A Blueprint for Digital Climate-informed Advisory Services, finds that expanding the reach and quality of these digital services will require governments and the private sector to invest approximately $7 billion over the next decade. Given that approximately $1 billion has been invested in DCAS in the last five years, this means an exponential push in collective investment from both public and private sector actors is needed in the years to come.

This would help fill critical gaps. Though more people are signing up to receive advisories every year, farmers’ engagement with these tools is not as high as it could be because service provision is still fragmented, is unsustainable beyond traditional project cycles, and is not reaching the last mile — such as communities where access is difficult.

Return on Investment and Productivity Gains Among Benefits

Digital Climate-informed Advisory Services don’t just improve yields — they offer a range of benefits for smallholder producers, including reducing risk, raising incomes, increasing efficiency, and providing actionable information that promotes the agency of farmers as decisionmakers in the face of climate change.

WRI, along with the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) at Columbia University, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, the World Food Programme and the Global Center on Adaptation, among others, have found that on average such services deliver a 1:24 return on investment, and smallholder producers may see average productivity gains of 30%. For African countries with many smallholder farms, these services can also boost the economy, increasing GDP where services are employed.

The following six core principles, developed by over 150 stakeholders as part of the working paper, will help guide investors looking to support effective implementation of such services — both in scale and in good practices — while highlighting case studies of successful implementation:

1. Ensure Data Quality and Assurance

Digital Climate-informed Advisory Services data should meet the needs of users, including accuracy and tailoring for specific uses. A lack of data quality or sufficient governance decreases the ability of DCAS to support farmers and erodes farmers’ trust and use of advisory services. For example, in Rwanda, the IRI Columbia’s Enhancing National Climate Services approach used interactive maps to model past and future high-quality climate data. Farmers are then trained to interpret map data to analyze and forecast climate conditions for themselves.

2. Promote Equity

Designers and implementers should ensure that these services address differentiated needs from different people within communities and do not reinforce existing inequalities, nor leave those most vulnerable behind. Livestock holders in Mongolia, for example, are using non-digital means such as SMS technology to receive and respond to weather information that helps herders prepare and reduce the risk of livestock losses from extreme winters. Because of limited internet coverage and ownership of smart phones, SMS technology was considered the most equitable and effective way to share information with herders living in remote rural areas.

3. Co-create with Stakeholders

Creating Digital Climate-informed Advisory Services should bring together the producers of weather and climate information and those who use the information to make decisions. Co-creation builds trust, aligns services to farmers’ real needs, and strengthens farmers’ capacities to use services. In Malawi, as mentioned above, the National Agriculture Content Development Committee incorporated planning and review days into its agriculture-related radio programs. Extension officers used farmer feedback, co-producing seasonal forecasts and tailoring farming advice.

4. Establish Accountability and Transparency

Services should be accountable, meaning that they can be evaluated according to roles and responsibilities as well as evaluation metrics. They should also be transparent, with information regarding service design, implementation and finance being openly accessible and understandable. In India, global development organization Digital Green has reached nearly 2 million small-scale, predominantly women farmers by continually testing, monitoring and evaluating the services it provides. Transparent monitoring and evaluation help drive demand, with local partners seeing clear evidence of positive results, as well as ways to correct and improve services.

5. Build for Financial Sustainability

Digital Climate-informed Advisory Services are financially sustainable when they can generate sufficient value to continue operation without relying on donor funding. In several countries across Africa, messaging service Esoko provides farmers with climate-informed agricultural advisories along with a range of other services, including market intelligence, a farmer helpline, and access to finance and insurance. Financial sustainability is achieved through a farmer subscriber model and a multi-tiered revenue model, where data collected by Esoko (such as market price data) is provided to farmers and resold to business clients.

6. Design for Scale

Reaching “scale” for these services does not mean just increasing access. What’s more important is the scale of impact in terms of resilience built and risk mitigated. This will require innovative solutions, building on existing platforms and integration into national and sub-national policies and plans. To scale DCAS, it’s also important to fill knowledge gaps, including the lack of common definitions, clear guidelines and standards, and monitoring and evaluation frameworks. Doing so creates a deeper understanding of these services returns on investment, especially with respect to resilience benefits, such as avoiding losses.

Toward a More Food Secure and Resilient Future

As the world faces increasing climate change impacts, it is critical to scale up Digital Climate-informed Advisory Services efforts to help millions of small-scale producers adapt to a changing world. These services have the potential to bring about transformational change, but only if essential investments are made to leave no one behind.

We urge policy makers, investors, and agricultural information service providers, to join us in endorsing and applying the above principles to raise the ambition and impact of digital climate-informed advisory services. With these principles in place, we can take one step closer to a food secure and resilient future.

When COVID-19 halted most international travel, the ACToday teams quickly pivoted, adapting their trainings for a virtual environment. 

“We knew we had to act fast, to keep up the momentum, the trust, the interdisciplinary networks, and the knowledge building we had diligently built with our partners,” said Mélody Braun, the country lead for ACToday Bangladesh. 

In both 2018 and 2019, Braun and her team conducted an intensive, two-week training in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The one for 2020 had to occur online. Transitioning from in-person to all-online interactions was not easy, she said, but the shift was made possible by years of foundational relationship-building with the Bangladesh Meteorological Department (BMD), the International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD), the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), and other key partners in the country. These partners are also the backbone of the Bangladesh Academy for Climate Services (BACS), which serves as a platform and interdisciplinary network for climate information stakeholders, including users and providers, with the goal of improving the quality and dissemination of that information.

The Bangladesh Academy for Climate Services has proven so successful that several other ACToday countries are using it as a model to build and sustain their own climate information networks.

For their most recent training the ACToday partners in Bangladesh organized a three-part, online series training both novices and experts on the use of index insurance as an adaptation strategy for climate risks (see sidebar). The first installment drew 43 participants. The second and third components targeted more advanced practitioners already involved in active insurance projects and had 13 participants each (attendance to previous training sessions was a prerequisite). 

“I am currently leading several risk management projects and this course not only helped me to understand insurance but also think about what solid compensation means for people at risk,” said Kazi Amdadul Hoque of Friendship Bangladesh after the last training session. “Today is the beginning, rather than the end of the program,” he added.

Indeed, a consistent comment from participants was that while the information in the trainings was immensely valuable, the inter-agency and inter-disciplinary conversations surrounding these topics inspired by the trainings were critical to continuing the work of transforming Bangladesh’s climate-response strategy and planning. 

“In this training, you have been able to bring all of us in the same virtual room and we have started discussing the problems and risks, and this kind of conversation is building our capacity and leading us to a point where we can jointly decide whether we will go for insurance or not,” said Ashraful Haque, from Forewarn Bangladesh. Discussion was so active, now we need to find a mechanism to keep these types of platforms active and keep this discussion going.” 

Braun points out that while the enthusiasm for these trainings has been really encouraging, sustaining these conversations will require coordination from local stakeholders and partners. Future discussions are already being planned.

In March, ACToday-Senegal hosted an online event that brought together more than 100 students, academics, policy makers, and development practitioners from Senegal and West Africa to discuss the topic and identify opportunities for research, training and collaborations. 

The issue is particularly salient for West Africa, which already has one of the highest burdens of malnutrition in the world. Climate change is expected to make the situation worse, leading not only to decreased crop yields and livestock productivity, but also to changes in food quality–diversity, nutrient density and safety–as well as spikes in food prices.  

One of the people crucial to connecting the ACToday project in Senegal with nutrition experts has been Misbath Daouda, a doctoral student at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health who studies energy and public health and completed an ACToday internship in 2020. Daouda set out to investigate how climate information and services are currently being used to inform nutrition-specific and sensitive interventions (see aside) in Senegal and how they could inform the delivery of such interventions in the future. In doing so, she interviewed stakeholders in the nutrition sector about their use and needs relating to climate information. Among them was UCAD’s Human Food and Nutrition Laboratory (LARNAH), which has now become a key partner and champion for ACToday-Senegal’s strategy to improve research, capacity building, and tools to address these issues.

“What became clear to me over the course of these interviews was the gap that exists between the research that was being done on nutrition in Senegal and those doing climate work who might want to use that research,” Daouda says. “Although the respondents could point to changes in agricultural production that they attributed to climate change, they were unfamiliar with the potential use of forecasts, environmental monitoring, and other types of climate services. Some of them could envision the relevance and potential benefit of climate services to their organization’s work, but were so eager to learn more.”

In other words, while many people knew or believed that climate was impacting nutrition and their work, exactly how it was doing so wasn’t clear. Part of the problem is due to the reality that Senegal-specific research on this topic is limited. One such study to document and elucidate such pathways was recently completed by the ACToday Senegal team. And another issue relates to a need to build foundational knowledge on what climate is, and tools to help understand and analyze it. 

This was the motivation behind the three-hour online event in March, says Amanda Grossi, ACToday-Senegal’s country manager. Her team worked closely with UCAD-LARNAH’s director, Nicole Dossou, to organize an event that not only fostered discussion about climate-nutrition linkages, but also helped participants understand the fundamentals of climate and climate-nutrition pathways on a conceptual level, and presented concrete examples of tools already available through Senegal’s national meteorological service, ANACIM, that might be tailored for the nutrition community.

“The webinar was an important call to action on this issue,” says Grossi.“We expected 40 people, but more than 110 showed up for the event, and not just from Senegal but from across West Africa. This is clearly a conversation people are ready to have and shows it’s high time to move beyond discussing climate impacts on food security to including nutritional outcomes.”

The ACToday-Senegal team is starting an official collaboration with UCAD-LARNAH to 1) ensure the integration of climate-related topics into UCAD’s Masters in Human Nutrition curriculum and doctoral seminar series, 2) promote joint tool development and tailoring of climate information and services for the nutrition community with ANACIM, UCAD, and the National Committee for the Development of Nutrition (CNDN), and 3) foster joint research between students of Columbia University, Rutgers University, and UCAD on climate-nutrition related topics.

“The webinar was just a first step to open up many other doors and avenues of collaboration between those working in climate and nutrition, including and especially project managers. Addressing these issues is critical for our future,” says Dossou. 

Involving the UCAD community in Senegal, especially through the design of new curricula, lays the foundation for long-term progress, even after the ACToday project ends, says Grossi.

Ethiopia’s National Meteorological Agency (NMA) unveiled the new plan, which it developed in consultation with agriculture and other climate-sensitive sectors, during a high-level event on May 25 in Addis Ababa. 

The plan, officially known as a National Framework for Climate Services (NFCS), is a mechanism supported by the World Meteorological Organization to enable the development and delivery of climate services across government agencies to improve risk management in planning, policy and practice. ACToday has been working with Ethiopia’s NMA and other stakeholders to finalize the plan since the project’s start.

“The national frameworks have been a key component of WMO’s strategy to support countries adapting to climate change,” said IRI Director John Furlow. “They are a way of getting the meteorological services the recognition and support they need from both national budgets and international donors, and to place climate services at the center of adaptation strategies.”

The existence of such services will be critical to the food security of Ethiopia, where more than 90% of total agricultural output comes from smallholder farmers with little-to-no access to irrigation. As a result, climate variability is the single greatest threat to Ethiopia’s food system.

“We’re helping the government provide farmers better access to location-specific climate monitoring, prediction and other services that reduce the uncertainty of weather, which means they’ll be able to plan accordingly for each season no matter what is expected.”

Tufa Dinku, country lead for ACToday Ethiopia

Dinku and his team provided critical inputs to the meteorological agency as it developed the NFCS, including its final Strategic Plan for 2020-2030. Most notably, ACToday began supporting the ENACTS climate services initiative in Ethiopia in March 2018, which significantly improved the quantity and quality of climate data available to the NMA and its partners as they developed the action plan. 

“We helped redirect the focus of the strategic  plan from a “supply side” framing of climate information to a “demand side” one,” said Dinku. “In other words, we helped ensure that users such as staff from the Ministries of Agriculture and other decision makers were central to the process.”

Typically, most of the institutions involved in delivering and using climate services are working without much coordination, added Dinku. “The national framework brings all of the main stakeholders together, defines their roles and creates communication guidelines to maximize efficiency in climate-service development and distribution.”

By Jacquelyn Turner with contributions from Joseph Conway and Francesco Fiondella

21 June 2021

NAIROBI, Kenya – The future of our morning brew is at risk. Rising global temperatures and weather patterns that are increasingly extreme and unpredictable are threatening the livelihoods of coffee farmers around the world, warn researchers at the Earth Institute’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) and Fairtrade.

The two organizations will raise the alarm at Empty Cups: Climate Change and a Future without Coffee – a virtual panel event scheduled for 8 am EDT (14:00 CEST) on June 25 and to be held on the side-lines of the African Fairtrade Convention. The event–featuring leading researchers from IRI, experts from Fairtrade and Fairtrade Africa, and a coffee farmer from Kenya’s Fairtrade-certified Kipkelion Union–will explore the nexus of climate change and social justice in the world’s coffee industry, and what consumers, industry and legislators can do to affect change.

“Coffee is a demanding and highly sensitive commodity. And coffee crops respond dramatically to weather variations,” explained Dr. Nyagoy Nyong’o, Fairtrade’s Global CEO. “Pair the economic and trade impact of the coffee market with the unpredictable effects of climate change and we have an issue of concern for both coffee growers and coffee consumers. The future of coffee is at risk.”

From the local café to your personal pantry, the effortlessness with which we obtain our daily cup of coffee is deceiving. In fact, nothing about coffee is particularly easy, especially in the face of climate variability and change. In Mexico, for instance, changing weather patterns and rising temperatures have exposed coffee to leaf rust. In a 2012 outbreak, the fungus destroyed around 40% of the coffee crop of affected producers. Nearly ten years later, leaf rust continues to pose a serious challenge to farmers’ livelihoods. In Africa, rising temperatures means coffee growers have to increasingly contend with pest outbreaks, long dry spells or sudden torrential rains – all of which can destroy or reduce their harvests.

“International prices do not reflect the full economic, social and environmental costs of climate change on coffee production, failing to provide fair incomes to farmers and compromising their quality of life and that of their communities,” said Juan Pablo Solís, Senior Advisor for Climate at Fairtrade. “In recent years, the coffee price has been so far below Fairtrade’s minimum price that it would not even cover the cost of production.”

However, Solís added, the future of coffee “isn’t entirely bleak.”

In June 2021, Fairtrade unveiled a new climate guide drawn from the experiences of 8,500 farmers who attended Fairtrade’s Climate Academy in Kenya and aimed at communicating key insights on climate change adaptation and mitigation for the world’s coffee farmers. The Climate Academy Guide provides information that can be adapted to suit coffee farmers in diverse geographical locations, including best farm practices such as soil and water management, waste management, energy use, coffee-tree management and on-farm forestry.

“From the work Fairtrade is accomplishing through its Climate Leadership Academies to the recently released Climate Academy Guide, we can work with coffee farmers as they adapt to climate change and mitigate its effects,” concluded Solís.

Researchers at the Columbia University-based IRI understand that boosting the climate resilience of smallholder coffee production around the world can be an important food security strategy.

“Although coffee is not a food crop, the income from its production plays a significant role in the food security of many communities,” said IRI Director John Furlow. “That’s why we’re working with national partners in Colombia, Guatemala, Ethiopia and Vietnam to empower smallholder coffee growers with better and useful climate information and services, integrating the economics, conservation and demographic aspects of coffee production.”

For example, as part of the Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today, for Tomorrow (ACToday) Columbia World Project, IRI researchers are working on a digital advisory tool that delivers location-specific climate information and the economic consequences of adopting specific practices.

“Models and predictions based on global warming pathways and scenarios provide the long-term picture,” said IRI Research Scientist J. Nicolas Hernandez-Aguilera, who will be a panelist on the June 25th event. “However, it is not clear how these models relate to farmers’ decisions. Our digital advisory tool allows us to translate and communicate information in a context understandable and relevant for farmers, including how climate affects their pockets.”

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Press contacts:

Andrew Zaganelli Giacalone, Senior Advisor, Media Relations, Fairtrade
a.giacalone@fairtrade.net

Francesco Fiondella, Director of Communications, IRI
francesco@iri.columbia.edu

About Fairtrade International

Fairtrade changes the way trade works through better prices, decent working conditions and a fairer deal for farmers and workers in developing countries.

Fairtrade International is an independent non-profit organization representing 1.7 million small-scale farmers and workers worldwide. It owns the FAIRTRADE Mark, a registered trademark of Fairtrade that appears on more than 30,000 products. Beyond certification, Fairtrade International and its member organizations empower producers, partner with businesses, engage consumers and advocate for a fair and sustainable future.

About International Research Institute for Climate and Society

The International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI), part of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, aims to enhance society’s ability to understand, anticipate and manage the impacts of climate in order to improve human welfare and the environment, especially in developing countries. From environmental monitoring and forecasting to the development of climate services for agriculture, public health and water resources, IRI and its partners focus on opportunities to build capacity for bringing climate information into regional planning and decision making.

Columbia Climate School’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) is a major partner in a new $60 million climate resilience project for agriculture in Africa, funded by the World Bank and led by the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS).

The Accelerating the Impact of CGIAR Climate Research for Africa (AICCRA) project will help farmers better anticipate destructive climate-related events and take preventative actions, as well as improve their access to climate advisories and recommendations on effective response measures. The project will work with key regional and national institutions across Africa, but will focus its activities in six countries—Senegal, Ghana, Mali, Ethiopia, Kenya and Zambia.

“This funding will support IRI’s groundbreaking work in providing the world’s best climate services,” said Alex Halliday, director of the Earth Institute and founding dean of the Columbia Climate School. “It links climate forecasting, agricultural sciences and economics with critical development efforts across Africa. This is a terrific opportunity and an example of the type of impact-oriented work that will be done within the Climate School.”

“The impactful work of research institutions such as IRI and the CGIAR supported by the World Bank and other development institutions can be a model for how we can foster essential climate solutions,” added Ruth DeFries, a co-founding dean of the new school.

The project also builds on the work accomplished to date by Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today, for Tomorrow (ACToday), the first Columbia World Project (CWP). CWP is a university-wide initiative aimed at transforming knowledge to action, garnering the wealth of expertise at Columbia in partnership with other stakeholders to address global challenges. Since 2017, ACToday has developed tools to ensure individuals and institutions in the agricultural sector have access to the most accurate and relevant climate information — and can use it to grow more food to sustain more people.

“ACToday has focused on combating hunger by increasing climate knowledge in six countries in Africa, Asia and South America that are particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate variability on their food systems. Consistent with CWP’s mission, our efforts have helped build a strong foundation for larger resilience projects such as AICCRA to take the work to scale,” said Columbia World Projects Director Wafaa El-Sadr.

“These experiences enabled us to play an important role in defining and developing AICCRA’s climate-services activities,” said Walter Baethgen, a senior research scientist at IRI and co-lead of ACToday. “For us to be recognized as being on par with the CGIAR is a major achievement.”

On May 17, the World Bank and CGIAR held a virtual event to launch AICCRA. A recording of the event is available here.

As the world faces multiple, concurrent risks — a rapidly warming climate, megadroughts in the American West, new variants and new waves of COVID-19 infections in India, Brazil, and elsewhere — local communities, policy makers, frontline responders, and researchers all face the rising challenges of compound disasters and complex emergencies. These are situations in which multiple hazards are all simultaneously active in the same geographic location or across interconnected regions and populations. The coincidence and interconnectivity of affected people, supply chains, and ecosystems produce compounding effects that heighten the adverse impacts of the hazard while also dividing already limited resources across a wider array of issues and social needs. That compounding of impacts can produce a complex emergency response setting where different actors are all facing a variety of risks, and various response organizations have to navigate the same operating environment, albeit with different missions and goals.

For example, the damage from a tropical cyclone could devastate property, livelihoods and local culture, with dangerous and costly response operations. But when a tropical cyclone impacts an area already disrupted by longer-term stressors such as civil conflict, economic shocks, crop failure from drought, and a pandemic, the risks and costs rise exponentially. While a year ago this hypothetical example may have sounded implausible, this is exactly the sort of situation that many communities around the world have faced or are facing in both wealthy and poorer countries. Unfortunately, over the past year the pandemic has once again shown that underserved and marginalized communities often bear the greatest costs of compound risks and complex emergencies. Often, race and gender are determining factors of who bears the brunt of these emergencies and who are the last to recover.

Because of the urgency of these issues, we worked with an interdisciplinary group of co-authors to publish an opinion piece in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that calls for the development of new approaches to risk preparedness and response. We and our co-authors combined our collective experience in responding to compound disasters or providing support services in disaster preparedness and response to identify key functions and focal areas that need to be developed to prevent environmental and social shocks from evolving into compound disasters.

Among these recommendations, we call for the development of agile, rapidly deployable analytical capabilities that can inform policy planning with a more complete view of the risks, both social and environmental. In recent years, the increased availability of climatic and social data presents opportunities to make progress in addressing disproportionate impact from disasters. However, while availability of these data increases, we see impact from disasters increasing, not decreasing. We must rethink the mechanisms for integrating the right data into disaster risk decision-making at the right time, by those trusted by marginalized communities.

We also highlight the need to enhance communication across disciplines and policy spheres in order to more effectively incorporate multiple types of data and information. This requires that community-based knowledge and stakeholder perspectives be included in the planning and response processes so that we can more effectively anticipate where compound disasters and complex emergencies may emerge, and quickly divert resources to mitigate the compounding effect of concurrent hazards. Importantly, and perhaps most crucially, we call for race- and gender- focused social justice to be built into the entire cycle of early warning, response and resilience planning, stating, “We believe we are at a critical juncture, faced with a need and responsibility to redesign institutions to be proactive, agile, and socially just when confronted with increasingly likely compound risks.”

In our paper, we identify several focal areas for collaborative work. Existing institutions need to be redesigned, and new institutions need to be created to enable diverse stakeholders to work together toward better, more comprehensive disaster preparation. This requires a new sort of flexibility in institutions that have traditionally been rigid or slow to change, such as governmental agencies, large non-governmental organizations, and academic institutions. This requires both an organizational culture shift as well as development of new financing models. In addition to institution and financing redesign, we suggest three focal areas that can enhance planning and response efforts. These include: 1) combined natural and social scientific research on the dynamics of compound disasters and complex emergencies; 2) short-term and rapid deployment support for governments and frontline response actors; and 3) longer-term job exchange programs that place researchers into operational settings and policy makers/responders into research settings, to cross-pollinate research and practice.

While these are important focal areas, we acknowledge that redesigning institutions, financing, and disciplinary divides is a daunting task. However, our paper urges governments, academic institutions, and financiers to take up the gauntlet. Importantly though, this has to be done through the lens of social justice. As COVID-19 has made abundantly clear, social disparities linked to racism and exclusion heighten the risk and magnitude of compound disasters, severely impacting the very communities that are least equipped to handle them, and making society as a whole more vulnerable.

The creation of the Climate School at Columbia University offers an opportunity for one of the leading academic institutions in the world to take up this charge — leading by example, convening relevant stakeholders who typically address one kind of risk and incentivizing a more integrated approach that looks at how these risks intersect and collide in practice. This is exactly the type of holistic and systems approach that the school is striving to advance by building pathways and connectivity across and beyond disciplines and networking with policy organizations. The aim is to work together to co-create approaches that will help lead to more resilient, just and prepared societies in the face of compounding threats.

Jackie Klopp is co-director of Columbia University’s Center for Sustainable Urban Development. Andrew Kruczkiewicz is a senior staff associate at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society. Joshua Fisher is the director of the Advanced Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict and Complexity.

Since 2014, ENACTS has helped countries facilitate the integration of climate knowledge into national-level decision making by improving the availability, access to, and use of climate information. Many developing countries often have significant gaps in their historical climate records, which are compiled from ground-based weather observations. Funding and resource constraints and military conflict are two reasons for these gaps. Furthermore, operational weather stations may not be evenly distributed throughout a country, leaving significant areas without local weather and climate data. ENACTS helps address this problem by combining the ground-based records with satellite weather data, as well as data from climate models. The result is a richer, higher quality climate dataset that can be used to improve climate analysis and forecasting for an entire country.

The national meteorological services of Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guyana, Kenya, Madagascar, Mali, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania, and Zambia have benefited from the climate mapping and analysis tools they have co-developed with IRI’s ENACTS team. In the last few years, these efforts have been accelerated by the Columbia World Projects’ Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today, for Tomorrow (ACToday), which has focused on building models for the use of the next generation of forecasting (NextGen) in the countries where it operates.

Recently, Colombia and Guatemala joined the ranks of countries using ENACTS-based data, guided by IRI data scientist Xandre Chourio. To better understand how ENACTS development unfolded in both Latin American countries, we asked Chourio to answer a few questions about this work.

Tell us a bit about the products that have been produced in this initial stage. How will they be used by the national meteorological services of Colombia and Guatemala (IDEAM and INSIVUMEH, respectively)? What do you think the benefits will be?

At the moment, we have gridded data for 30 years of precipitation and temperatures (maximum, mean, and minimum) for Guatemala and Colombia. The precipitation product is ready to use, and temperatures are now in the final verification process by local experts of INSIVUMEH and IDEAM. The implementation of the ENACTS methodology has increased the capacity of those institutions to improve other existing products in their countries. For example,  they are now in the process of linking their NextGen forecast systems to ENACTS, which will help provide quality climate information and services to other important sectors, as agriculture, water resources, energy, and risk management.

IRI has been working with IDEAM and INSIVUMEH for many years now. How has that long term relationship played a role in producing ENACTS-based data with these institutions?

There are several factors that are key to the success of any product, and probably by far the most important one is trust between the involved partners and agreement on how the methodology will be implemented. Because of their now decades-long relationship with the IRI, we were able to work together with IDEAM and INSIVUMEH in a more expeditious way to produce the ENACTS data, even during the present COVID pandemic. These two agencies have been crucial and enthusiastic partners in the IRI-led ACToday project on climate and food security.

How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected this implementation?

The best way to implement the ENACTS methodology (from software installation to training and operationalization efforts) is to work in a face-to-face synchronous way with the team of each institution. However, the restrictions applied by COVID-19 made this option impossible. It has been an extremely difficult challenge to complete ENACTS through teleworking, especially considering the extra workload activities of each participant due to COVID19, along with additional issues related to access to the original in-paper data, which was physically at the national meteorological services while people were working from their homes. A key element for the success of the ENACTS implementation has been the adapting capacity and the level of engagement of each participant in both institutes, which allows for the local capacity enhancement of INSIVUMEH and IDEAM.

What do you see as the next steps with this process, especially regarding how ENACTS helps with the embedding of climate services?

As we mentioned, the first immediate step will be to use ENACTS as input for the NextGen climate forecast system co-developed with INSIVUMEH and IDEAM. Additionally, these data sets will be available at the IRI’s and INSIVUMEH’s Data Libraries to be available for the public use. A benefit of ENACTS is that it is a dynamic: both institutions will continue using the ENACTS process to provide new versions of the products with new stations and increasing the data time period available for it, guaranteeing the sustainability of ENACTS in these countries.

Bangladesh is the fifth largest inland producer of fish, and it is an industry that employs an estimated 17.8 million people. Rainfall can affect the water levels in fisheries and influence salinity, so giving farmers access to tools that offer advance warning can help them implement management strategies that protect their fish and other crops.

This documentary follows a handful of farmers from the training back to their farms in Bagerhat, in southwestern Bangladesh. The 2019 training was organized with partners including WorldFish, the Bangladesh Meteorological Department (BMD), the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), the International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD) and the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), as part of the Bangladesh Academy for Climate Services (BACS) and the Capacitating Farmers and Fishers to Manage Climate Risks in South Asia (CaFFSA) project.

Check out the full length version of the documentary here (runtime 15 minutes):

And for a summary version of the documentary (runtime 4 minutes), click play here:

We are excited to share our latest highlights from the Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today, for Tomorrow (ACToday) Columbia World Project. During a period marked by global upheaval and tragedy caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, we have been especially inspired to keep our work on track. We are proud of how quickly our country teams were able to adapt to the realities of the day and make outstanding progress.

ACToday remains focused on its goal of combating hunger by increasing climate knowledge in six countries that are particularly dependent on agriculture and vulnerable to the effects of climate change and fluctuations: Bangladesh, Colombia, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Senegal and Vietnam.

But the stories featured in this report underscore something larger: that the successes of our work are now leading to opportunities for us to go beyond the six project countries, and scale at regional levels and draw in new partners.

This is not an accident.

Through trainings and co-development of scientific and technical tools, our country teams have strengthened the capacities and capabilities of national meteorological services, enabling them to better meet the needs of the public and private sector institutions they serve. This in turn has bolstered their reputations and has led to increased demand for their services, not only in the food-security community but also in energy, public health and other sectors. In a similar fashion, ACToday teams are training staff within national ministries, agriculture extension services and research institutions to become more sophisticated users of climate information for decision making. These are foundational changes, ones that will continue to transform approaches to achieving food security in each country long after the ACToday project ends.

The climate services we’re building together bring decades of science and experience directly to bear on decisions the governments of each project country make when it comes to the wellbeing of their people.

University President Lee C. Bollinger launched Columbia World Projects in hopes of fulfilling a ‘Fourth Purpose’ of universities: supporting activities that focus the university’s research, expertise and resources to develop real and sustainable solutions for some of society’s most intractable problems.

A key word here is ‘sustainable’, which is why from the start, ACToday has focused on maintaining strong national and international partnerships based on trust and collaboration. The climate services we’re building together bring decades of science and experience directly to bear on decisions the governments of each project country make when it comes to the wellbeing of their people. Our efforts are leading to real change, and our successes have garnered the attention of neighboring countries and the international community.

As the COVID-19 pandemic reminds us: when good science is allowed to inform policy, all of society benefits.

The World Bank’s Disaster Risk Financing and Insurance Program (DRFIP) led the development of the NGDI platform in close partnership with the European Space Agency’s Center for Earth Observation (ESA/ESRIN). The International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) provided technical support, leading a consortium including partners from the finance analytics company AIR Worldwide and the International Water Management Institute (IMWI) to develop a participatory tool for cogeneration and evaluation of new satellite datasets and insurance solutions.

“The NGDI platform provides tailored climate information along with performance metrics against vulnerability information to enable users to understand and lead the design of risk financing products such as index insurance,” said Rahel Diro, a senior staff associate and member of the IRI’s Financial Instruments Sector team. 

The Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today, for Tomorrow (ACToday) Columbia World Project supported the development of NGDI and is using the new platform as part of its efforts in Senegal to build a new approach to for large scale, sustainable projects with local partners having ownership of using new satellite technologies to address farmers’ needs.

Read more about the Next Generation Drought Index project here.

Learn more about the training process for NGDI here.

Check out the tool here. (Access the tool with the username WB and password IRI.)

Goddard is internationally recognized for her work in climate science, and has held several leadership positions in the field, including a seat on the Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate at the U.S. National Academies of Science and a chair position at the World Climate Research Programme’s Climate and Ocean: Variability, Predictability and Change (CLIVAR) organization. She has pioneered key research on El Niño and La Niña and is also an adjunct associate professor in Columbia’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences.

For International Women’s Day, we reached out to her to hear more about her experiences and her thoughts on the world of climate science.

You’re the Climate Lead for the Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today, for Tomorrow (ACToday) project. At its start in 2017, ACToday represented an excellent opportunity to apply the knowledge IRI has gained since its founding. What do you think we’ve learned from ACToday and how do you think that could shape IRI going forward?

That is a huge question. IRI and our Columbia colleagues who have worked on ACToday have accomplished so much in the six countries where the project is being implemented. A major premise of ACToday is that the types of hazards we worry most about with respect to climate change projections—such as droughts, heat waves, inundation events—are happening right now, and we can predict them with weeks to months of lead time, rather than merely projecting how their statistics may change in 50-100 years. This is of tremendous value to vulnerable populations. The problem is that most of the national meteorological services around the world deal with weather forecasting, while a different government agency, such as the ministry of the environment, might deal with climate change. And few government agencies in the developing world are able to provide forecasts for the next couple weeks to months in the future – what is referred to as subseasonal-to-seasonal forecasts (S2S). These are critical for decision making about food security, water management, energy production and more.

As a result, a big emphasis of ACToday has been to train our national partners on S2S prediction and to transfer the technology and approach to produce that information in a skillful and meaningful way. From them, we have learned what kinds of forecasts matter most. It might not be rainfall totals, for example, but rather the frequency of wet days, or days above certain temperature thresholds.

In order for a meteorological service to understand what it needs to provide, it must connect with the stakeholders it serves. We have learned a great deal by helping bring the information provider and user communities together. In particular, building capacity and/or collaborating with just meteorologists is not enough. The meteorologists need to be able to talk effectively to agriculture extension workers and communicate near-term climate threats clearly to the government. And those people will need to understand what types of information are available, what climate-related risks their sectors face, and what can be done about it. That’s the only way the right information can be produced, translated into relevant terms, transferred to those that can act on it, and then used.  All of this work has built on the strong foundation of trust and credibility that has been developed by IRI over decades.

From the start of ACToday, we knew that some structured capacity building would be needed to sustain the interventions from the project. As a result, one of the most exciting innovations has been the development of what we’re calling the Climate Services Academies. These are being realized slightly differently in each of the six countries, but our country partners are active collaborators in setting them up while we guide the design based on the ACToday science, application, and practice. International agencies such as the World Food Programme, the CGIAR, and the World Bank have expressed a desire for their staff to engage in similar types of continuing education. So we have proposed to keep the content alive and evolving, with a home at Columbia University. Our hope is that these types of educational offerings will contribute to the success of the Climate School at Columbia University.

The unique opportunity afforded by the Columbia World Projects was to bring the breadth of our work to bear in specific regions at the same time. With this coherent foundation established in six countries under ACToday, we can build out our successes into other sectors in those countries and to other countries in those regions. We can also make a case to development and humanitarian agencies of the value of addressing a problem wholly, rather than through one specific intervention at a time.

You’ve recently taken over the role of overseeing IRI’s important monthly climate and ENSO briefings from Tony Barnston, who retired last year. What has it been like to step into this role? How do you expect these briefings to evolve in coming years?

I have really enjoyed taking over this responsibility from Tony. His were big shoes to fill. Tony was well known for his open and approachable style. Occasionally, we would all tense up at his sometimes extreme honesty to questions about  forecasts that were wildly off or other things that went wrong –issues that most academics like to smooth over. I learned so much from him, because his transparency was key to the trust that he engendered. I have tried to abide by that willingness to admit when things go wrong, or when I simply don’t know the answer. I have also tried to add my own style to our live  briefings and to the ENSO updates that I coordinate with other scientists in the US and worldwide. For example, I like to talk about the dynamics of a climate phenomenon in the current context, and provide explanations for the complex graphics we use to understand what is happening. Since my Ph.D. research was about El Niño and La Niña, it has been a joy to reconnect with my colleagues on a regular basis, and scratch our heads over a challenging prediction.

A 2015 study found that women make up only 17% of tenure-track and tenured faculty in the field of atmospheric science. As a woman leader in an international climate organization, how have you seen trends and demographics shift during your career? How do you hope they continue to shift?

As a woman in the physical sciences, I have definitely seen the field shift. As an undergraduate studying physics, I had a few classes in which I was the only woman in the room. Unfortunately, I had a couple of professors who expressed attitudes that would not be acceptable today. In graduate school, I was the only woman in my year’s cohort. There was an advantage to being a rarity: I found that if I asserted myself, and reached out to my professors and other scientists, I was more memorable than my average male colleagues because I was different. So, I really embraced that difference. Early on, I found a similar advantage as a young scientist at meetings, and even later, when I first took over the IRI Director role. The number of amazing women in the field has really increased, especially over the last decade. This has its own wonderful benefits. While I may just be ‘another woman’ in the field now, I see more of a female sensitivity and approach to problem solving that the sciences really needed. By this I am not referring to any count of gender, but rather a more cooperative and solution-seeking mindset than I used to see in the early part of my career, and which is so needed for the complex and multi-disciplinary problems that academia increasingly takes on. I believe the momentum is there, as is the evidence of value, for this trend to continue.

I cannot emphasize enough the value of acting confidently, even if you do not feel that way. There are so many opportunities waiting for us to just step up. That applies to a lot more than just your profession, by the way. To give a little example of that, I had the great privilege to be part of a meeting around the Columbia World Projects that President Bollinger had convened when Hillary Clinton visited Colombia a few years ago. It was maybe a dozen of us sitting around a table, including a few Columbia professors. I said to the others that I would ask if she would take a picture with me at the end. The others were excited by this, and said they would do the same, but when the time came, I was the only one who asked! I got that picture, and had a little personal chat with her. All that took was deciding to do something I wanted to do, and doing it. Women need to, and thankfully are, doing more of that, and the benefits to themselves and to us all are palpable. 

It’s important to note, however, that even after 20+ years at Columbia, serving on national and international advisories, helping develop the MA Program in Climate and Society and then teaching in it (as an adjunct), raising millions of dollars in research grants, co-leading the first and largest Columbia World Project, and directing one of the larger centers under the Earth Institute, I have not been granted Faculty status at the University. I stay at Columbia because of the excellence of my colleagues at the IRI and across the Earth Institute and because of the fantastic students I have had the privilege to advise and to teach. I value all that, and would not give it up. I mention this to highlight the challenges that officers of research face at Columbia. It is challenging for anyone to endure on 100% soft money, and especially women, who often  also have primary responsibilities for children at home. I believe this is one reason why we have lost several talented women scientists to faculty positions at other universities over the years.

As a professor in Columbia’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, you’ve had a hand in shaping the careers of many Columbia students, including many who now work at IRI. You’ve also dedicated a lot of time to develop and run the Post-docs Applying Climate Expertise Program (PACE). What is the importance of mentorship in the atmospheric sciences and what are the particular challenges facing students and young researchers in this field?

Mentorship brings more rewards than any other area of my work. I enjoy it more and more as time goes by, probably because I have slowly learned that it involves more than just the subject matter of the class or of a student’s research project. I have learned this from my Columbia colleagues as well as from the students themselves. By trying to set a positive example, I have had to examine my own values and priorities that I bring to the workplace. What I enjoy most about mentoring, or the times that I most value, are when these young scientists start to stand behind their own ideas and style. It is completely amazing to watch their light emerge and then shine brightly. This is related to the issue of confidence that I mentioned earlier. To imagine that I have been able to contribute to that in even the slightest way is a true miracle.

Characteristic of the Regional Rainy Season Onset over Vietnam: Tailoring to Agricultural Application by Nachiketa Acharya & Elva Bennett

Researchers at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society have found a significant relationship between the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the start of the rainy seasons in two agriculturally important regions of Vietnam: the Central Highlands, where most of the country’s coffee crop is grown, and the Mekong River Delta, which produces the majority of the country’s rice. The findings are part of an analysis of Vietnam’s rainy season, for which the researchers were able to do something new: define the onset dates for the country’s seven distinct growing zones based specifically on variables important to agriculture.

Their results could lead to the production of skillful forecasts of the rainy season onset date, tailored specifically to the needs of farmers, said IRI’s Nachiketa Acharya and Elva Bennett. They published their findings in the journal Atmosphere.

The timing of the rainy season is of crucial importance for farmers everywhere because it influences land preparation, the sowing and transplanting dates of major crops, and the mobilization of agricultural materials, manpower and equipment.

“Irregularities in the rainfall can have major impacts on agricultural decision making, yield and farmer livelihoods,” said Acharya, a climate scientist at IRI. “That’s why we focus so much on trying to understand the local, regional and global climate patterns that can influence the start and duration of the rainy season.”

The study was supported by Columbia World Projects’ Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today, for Tomorrow (ACToday), which uses climate knowledge to improve food security and combat hunger in Vietnam as well as in Bangladesh, Colombia, Ethiopia, Guatemala and Senegal.

The researchers first created an ‘agronomic’ definition of the rainy season onset based on the water-needs of regional crops. Then they tailored this definition for each of Vietnam’s seven distinct agroclimatic zones. This made it possible to identify the onset dates for each zone from 1980 to 2010 and look for any patterns that emerged.

In their research, Acharya and Bennett analyzed high-resolution historical rainfall data to determine how much the beginning of Vietnam’s rainy season varies from year to year, and if and how El Niño and La Niña events play a role.

For their analysis, they first created an ‘agronomic’ definition of the rainy season onset based on the water-needs of regional crops. Then they tailored this definition for each of Vietnam’s seven distinct agroclimatic zones. This made it possible to identify the onset dates for each zone from 1980 to 2010 and look for any patterns that emerged. Their results showed three key findings:

• The rainy season start date is different across the seven agroclimatic zones in any given year.
• From one year to the next, the start date can vary by approximately two weeks in each of the agroclimatic zones.
• There was a relationship between ENSO and the rainy season onset in two of the agroclimatic zones.

The results are highly relevant to local farmers and decision makers in Vietnam where the productivity and profitability of the agricultural sector is highly dependent on rainfall and the timing of the rainy season, the authors write.

“Knowing of a pending El Niño or La Niña event might allow for skillful prediction of the onset dates in two crucial growing regions of Vietnam–information that could be critical to farmers when making agricultural decisions in atypical years,” said IRI’s Bennett, a member ACToday Vietnam’s country team.

As the seasonal prediction of rainy season onset would be very useful to many Vietnamese farmers in those agroclimatic zones, Acharya and Bennett are now working to develop a seasonal forecast system of rainy season onset for these zones, based on the outcomes of this research.

Since 1970, bird populations in North America have declined by approximately 2.9 billion birds, a loss of more than one in four birds. Factors in this decline include habitat loss and ecosystem degradation from human actions on the landscape.

At the same time, enthusiasm for bird-watching has grown, with more than 45 million recreational participants in the United States alone. Now, researchers are looking into how to mobilize these bird enthusiasts to help limit bird population declines.

Enter bird-friendly coffee.

Bird-friendly coffee is certified organic, but its impact on the environment goes further than that: it is cultivated specifically to maintain bird habitats instead of clearing vegetation that birds and other animals rely on.

Researchers from Virginia Tech, Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society, and Cornell University, explored whether bird-friendly coffee is on the radar of bird watchers: are they drinking it and, if not, why not? The study results are published in the journal People and Nature.

“We know bird watchers benefit from having healthy, diverse populations of birds, and they tend to be conservation-minded folks,” explained Ashley Dayer of Virginia Tech’s Department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation. “My colleagues and I wanted to dig into this key audience to determine their interest in bird-friendly coffee.”

Bird-friendly coffee is shade-grown, meaning that it is grown and harvested under the canopy of mature trees, a process that parallels how coffee was historically grown. But with most farms in Central and South America and the Caribbean converting to full-sun operations, crucial bird habitats for migrating and resident bird species are being lost.

“Over recent decades, most of the shade coffee in Latin America has been converted to intensively managed row monocultures devoid of trees or other vegetation,” explained Amanda Rodewald, from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. “As a result, many birds cannot find suitable habitats and are left with poor prospects of surviving migration and successfully breeding.”

There are also other implications of land-use transformation, said IRI’s J. Nicolas Hernandez-Aguilera, one of the study’s authors. “The benefits of shade-grown coffee go beyond bird habitat and biodiversity. The use of canopy is one of the main adaptation strategies to face increasing climate variability, and it affects other sustainability dimensions, such as food security and pest control.”

Purchasing shade-grown coffee is one of seven simple actions that people can take as a step toward returning bird populations to their previous numbers. “But even simple actions are sometimes not taken by people who you would expect to be on board. Human behavior is complex — driven by knowledge, attitudes, skills, and many other factors,” explained Dayer.

The research team surveyed more than 900 coffee-drinking bird-watchers to understand bird-friendly coffee behavior among birdwatchers.

“One of the most significant constraints to purchasing bird-friendly coffee among those surveyed was a lack of awareness,” said Alicia Williams, lead author and former research assistant at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Virginia Tech. “This includes limits on understanding what certifications exist, where to buy bird-friendly coffee, and how coffee production impacts bird habitat.”

“I was surprised to see that only 9 percent of those surveyed purchased bird-friendly coffee and less than 40 percent were familiar with it,” Williams added. “It was also interesting, though not surprising, that a large number of our respondents reported that the flavor or aroma of coffee was an important consideration in their coffee purchases, which could be a useful attribute of bird-friendly coffee to stress going forward.”

The next step to increasing awareness about shade-grown coffee and its potential impact on bird populations may include increased advertising for bird-friendly coffee, more availability of bird-friendly coffee, and collaborations between public-facing conservation organizations and coffee distributors.

“Finally, it is also essential to recognize additional benefits of shade, and the minimum profitability conditions required by farmers,” said Hernandez-Aguilera. “Our work revealed that supporting the livelihood of growers is equally desirable by birdwatchers. Unfortunately, farmers do not necessarily benefit economically from preserving the forest. We need innovative ways to approach the problem.”

In Ethiopia, where coffee is traditionally grown on plantations shaded by native trees, Hernandez-Aguilera and others working on the Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today, for Tomorrow (ACToday) Columbia World Project are making efforts to bring and translate climate information to the farm level.

“The goal is to provide customizable tools that allow farmers, industry and policy makers to quantify the benefits and costs of specific climate adaptation strategies such as shade-grown coffee systems and improve market and policy instruments’ design,” Hernandez-Aguilera said. “Novel strategies, and better information and communication channels will benefit birds, people and coffee.”

This video, featuring ACToday Project Lead Lisa Goddard and Former Deputy Director of Columbia World Projects Avril Haines summarizes the project:

Today is International Day of Women and Girls in Science. In the past, we’ve recognized the incredible women at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society with a video feature.

This year, we’ve asked Gloriose Nsengiyumva, a staff associate who started at IRI in 2019 and who works on the Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today, for Tomorrow (ACToday) Columbia World Project to share some of her experiences training extension agents and other agriculture professionals in a number of African countries to better understand and use climate information to help farmers adapt to changing climate conditions.

Tell us a little bit about your background and how you came to work at IRI.

I am a climate adaptation practitioner currently focused on climate services for agriculture.  Before joining IRI, I worked on a four-year project with the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) in Rwanda that aimed to reach over 1 million farmers with climate services. My main role was to coordinate the roll-out and evaluation of the University of Reading’s PICSA programme in Rwanda, as well as lead the creation, development and implementation of climate services training courses and field surveys for agricultural extension agents and other intermediaries. Among many roles, another bigger role that I played on the project was to work closely with the IRI Data Library and the Enhancing National Climate Services (ENACTS) team to create maprooms specifically tailored to the needs of Rwandan farmers and to the Participatory Integrated Climate Services for Agriculture (PICSA) process. The latter bit gave me experience in the IRI’s ENACTS initiative, which opened the doors for me coming to IRI.

At IRI, I have been providing capacity building and technical support on adaptation and risk management in a varying/changing climate in vulnerable areas. The capacity development and technical support that I provide include trainings on climate services application in the agriculture sector using participatory approaches such as the PICSA approach, and supporting the implementation and strengthening of IRI’s ENACTS projects focusing on climate services for decision-making. 

One of IRI’s most important projects is the Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today, for Tomorrow (ACToday) Columbia World Project. You’ve been contributing to some of the efforts in Ethiopia in particular. Can you tell us about what you’ve been working on? How has working on ACToday been similar or different to other projects you’ve worked on?

One of the focus areas of ACToday includes supporting the implementation of the PICSA method in Ethiopia. PICSA is an approach designed to help agricultural extension agents  work with farmers to make climate-informed decisions in their crop  planning. This is accomplished by combining the use of timely, accurate and locally-specific historical climate information and forecasts with participatory decision making. ACToday has been supporting its partners in Ethiopia who are interested in implementing PICSA. I have been leading this process by bringing together the University of Reading (where PICSA was founded), the Ethiopian Institution for Agricultural Research (EIAR), the Ministry of Agriculture (MoA), and the National Meteorological Agency (NMA). In this respect, I recently facilitated the first remote “training of trainers” for national experts from the above institutions. 

I have also been supporting PICSA implementation in Ethiopia by coordinating the integration of high-quality climate products into a  newly developed PICSA_maproom, which is a collection of already existing NMA ENACTS maprooms products, but tailored specifically for use in participatory decision making. 

In ACToday Ethiopia, I have also been leading the development of a training curriculum, which aims at training users to navigate, understand and use climate information products in the ENACTS maprooms.

There is a similarity with my very previous project, since I was the lead of those two ends (PICSA and ENACTS) in my previous project work in Rwanda.

With PICSA and with ACToday, there is a lot of emphasis on participatory methodologies. Why are participatory approaches so important?

Participatory approaches are excellent in that they allow farmers and other users of climate information to visualize and to participate in the resolution of their own problems. Participatory approaches in agriculture empower and at the same time open farmers’ eyes to see the often-unseen opportunities that they have; and it helps them to make use of those opportunities. I hope that future projects will emphasize the use of participatory methodologies, especially from the design of the programs to the implementation parts. Additionally, replicating these approaches to different or new locations should always receive attention at the very start, to make sure that beneficiaries’ problems are going to be tackled in the end. I think working with beneficiaries (or those who are affected by the problem needing to be solved) to understand details such as a location’s cultural norms and behavior, in addition to factors like climate, soil, markets, etc. should always be very key before adopting any approach, which is part of what participatory approaches are supposed to do.

ACToday, PICSA and ENACTS involve a fair amount of collaboration among several different research groups and organizations. Do you think these interdisciplinary relationships provide extra substance to these programs?

I find the cross-institution collaboration very key for these programs especially for a smooth and successful implementation. For example, getting national meteorological agencies (or climate related programs) involved in agricultural (or any other sector) development programs helps them understand different sectors’ needs. Therefore, you get insights on relevant products to provide for users of the information, rather than building on a one-size-fits-all, where the information would be the same whether you are an agricultural practitioner or a construction engineer.

DCAS refer to the provision of climate-related information to farmers via digital tools and platforms. They can include online portals, mobile applications as well as more traditional, digitally-enabled services like radio and interactive voice response systems, according to the World Business Council on Sustainable Development.

Throughout 2020, the Global Commission on Adaptation and its partners worked on an assessment of the investment needed to scale up such services in order to reach 300 million small-scale agricultural producers globally, as well as outline the principles that should govern these investments to ensure equity, scalability and positive impact.

The International Research Institute for Climate and Society is a co-author of the assessment, called a Blueprint, along with the World Food Program, the World Resources Institute, the Global Center on Adaptation, and the World Business Council on Sustainable Development.

The Blueprint, to be published in Spring 2021, will be discussed in an anchor event on agriculture and food security during the Climate Adaptation Summit on January 25 and 26. The event, hosted by the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, brings together key leaders to commit to new actions and drive forward global efforts in agriculture, food security and climate change. To register for the summit and this event, please see here:

https://www.cas2021.com

The information graphic below gives more details about the Blueprint for Investment in Digital Climate Advisory Services.

A new platform aims to use digital technology to help farmers lower costs, boost yields and increase profits.

Coffee is a big business in Vietnam, accounting for 3% of its gross domestic product and about 15% of its agricultural exports.

But climate variability and change are threatening the country’s coffee crops. Rising temperatures and extreme weather have subjected Vietnamese coffee farmers to increasing uncertainties: longer droughts, more frequent floods, and severe outbreaks of pests and diseases that result in reduced productivity.

To help farmers adapt to these climate-driven changes, the Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today, for Tomorrow (ACToday) Columbia World Project is developing a new platform that will deliver location-specific climate information and growing-season advisories to help Vietnam’s coffee farmers increase yields and reduce operating costs.

The service, called ACToday Coffee, is being developed in collaboration with Vietnam’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD) and the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT. The work in Vietnam stems from ongoing efforts by ACToday and the International Research Institute for Climate and Society to support the coffee industries in Ethiopia as well as countries in Central and South America. The ACToday team hopes to pilot the new initiative in Vietnam in the middle of next year.

“The collaboration builds on ACToday’s partnership with MARD, which is strongly interested in providing improved climate services and economic support to Vietnam’s coffee farmers,” said the International Research Institute for Climate and Society’s John Furlow, who is the country lead for ACToday in Vietnam.

“The new service comes at an important time, because it will allow the government to safely provide farmers with critical information when traditional agricultural extension work is being hindered by the COVID19 pandemic.”

Vietnam is the world’s largest producer by far of Robusta coffee, and the second largest producer of coffee overall. According to the World Bank, the coffee sector in Vietnam employs 550,000 small holder farmers.

The highest costs Vietnamese coffee farmers incur are for fertilizers, fuel to run irrigation pumps, and labor. Climate uncertainty can drive these costs even higher. For example, as a strategy to protect their yields against unpredictable extreme weather events or droughts, farmers will end up using much more water and fertilizer than is necessary, wasting precious resources, labor and money.

“Our goal was to customize, translate, and connect climate information to profitability and costs at the farm level,” said J. Nicolas Hernandez-Aguilera, an economist at IRI who helped develop ACToday Coffee.

For example, farmers will be able to calculate the lowest amount of fertilizer and water they need to apply in order to maximize coffee yields for their specific growing region, said Hernandez-Aguilera.

New drought and weather forecasting capabilities developed by ACToday and the Vietnamese National Center for Hydro-Meteorological Forecasting (NCHMF) will also be integrated into the coffee platform, he said.

Sustainable Coffee and Food Security

Eighty percent of Vietnam’s coffee is grown in the Central Highlands region, home to 47 out of 54 of the country’s ethnic minority groups. Coffee is one of the main sources of income for many of these groups.

Although coffee is not an edible crop, its production is a large factor in the food security of communities whose livelihoods depend on it.

“Coffee revenues contribute about 30% of the region’s gross domestic product,” said Tran Cong Thang, Director General of Vietnam’s Institute of Policy and Strategy for Agriculture and Rural Development. “Coffee production has helped to raise incomes and reduce poverty within the ethnic minority communities, which face many difficulties.”

Hernandez thinks that innovative services like ACToday Coffee will help make that production more sustainable and predictable in the face of climate uncertainty. “It will help reduce costs, improve yields, and allow growers to conserve fertilizer and water for more sustainable harvests.

“As a result, profitability will improve for these smallholder farmers, so that they can earn enough to cover the costs of buying food and other necessities for their families.”

Vietnam has been deemed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as one of the most vulnerable countries in the world to the impacts of climate change. Increasingly frequent extreme weather events, saltwater intrusion into the country’s river deltas, and more climate variability threaten the country’s progress towards attaining the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Progress on food production and nutrition face particularly high risks. Vietnam’s continued progress on reducing malnutrition, improving public health and developing its economy will be tied to its ability to create a resilient food system as it contends with future climate uncertainty.

One strategy to reduce the risk of climate variability on agricultural production and nutrition is the use of climate services. The International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) has championed the application of climate services to increase the adaptive capacity of food system actors to cope with shocks and achieve SDG 2: Zero Hunger. IRI is a key partner of CCAFS, hosting the Flagship on Climate Services and Safety Nets at Columbia University.

Efficient collaboration across the fields of agriculture, nutrition, and health requires a strong understanding of the interdependence of these sectors. For Vietnam, this collaboration will become increasingly necessary to improve nutrition, food security, and public health as climate-related hazards worsen.

In order to better discern this complex web of stakeholders in Vietnam, IRI, through the  “Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today, for Tomorrow” (ACToday) Columbia World Project, conducted a landscape analysis of Vietnam’s nutrition sector to discover potential entry points for climate services. This analysis was done in collaboration with the CGIAR program onAgriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH). This research will contribute to the progress of ACToday as the program works alongside the Alliance of Bioversity International and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT)’s DeRISK Southeast Asia initiative to build the institutional capacity of the government to generate, tailor, and communicate climate services to improve climate risk management in Vietnam.

The analysis and research process followed the structure outlined below:

Key Findings

The analysis focused largely on the systemic issues affecting Vietnam, which can be broadly classified into informational and institutional constraints. Due to the correlation between these constraints, efforts to improve upon the status quo need to be comprehensive in strategy, and simultaneous in execution.

Informational Constraints: Inclusion of climate information into nutrition programs and policy suffers from a series of data-related constraints hampering accessibility of data, affecting the quality of data, and the analytical capacity available within institutions. Ultimately, this limits the utility and effectiveness of the country’s climate services.

Institutional Constraints: While correlated, institutional constraints may have an even greater role—arguably serving as the underlying cause of the other systemic issues. In our analysis, we found:

• Insufficient evidence of the utility of climate services making high-level policy makers reluctant to enact institutional changes,
• Inadequate infrastructure for both collection and dissemination of information, and
• A need for improved coordination within and across government and development partners alike.

On the other hand, the above institutional constraints have the potential to serve as levers of change, offering clear priority areas to concentrate our efforts.

From our interactions with experts across the nutrition landscape, we identified some of the critical gaps, associated with the above constraints:

1. Current data sharing mechanisms between data collecting agencies and downstream users are cumbersome. Data is shared through reports, rather than as raw data, which limits users’ ability to analyze the data.
2. Access to information, particularly in poor and mountainous provinces, is severely limited. This prevents precise predictions and differentiated responses across Vietnam’s numerous geo-climatic zones.
3. The analytical capability to use climate services for dietary assessment, by measuring food production and availability, needs to be improved. This is particularly acute at the local level where resources, capacities and expertise is limited.

The most important (challenge) is the little amount of research conducted and evidence created in the country to highlight the linkages between various food system sectors and climate change with regards to policy making. The capacity of local governments to understand the linkages between various sectors and with climate is still limited.

Tuyen Huynh, Country Head of Agriculture for Nutrition and Health, Vietnam

Potential entry points

In order to improve and integrate usage of climate information into nutrition interventions, a common framework—both in terms of inter-agency coordination as well as data interoperability—is needed among nutrition landscape stakeholders. In addition, with the upcoming National Nutrition Strategy (2021-30), there is an unprecedented opportunity to integrate climate information into program design and evaluation. This would require capacity building within key government institutions (such as the General Statistics Office, the National Institute for Nutrition, and the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development), and increased investment into upgrading the current infrastructure.

Development partners in Vietnam, such as CIAT, USAID, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), CCAFS, and IRI, can play an important role in building this capacity. Not only can they offer ready-made platforms to launch initiatives, but they can work within and across key institutions to build technical knowledge and foster partnerships that encourage long-term coordination to improve climate service integration into nutrition interventions. IRI/ACToday exemplifies this approach through their work training officials and hosting collaborative workshops with prominent ministries and NGOs, facilitating the development of relationships and technical knowledge that will be central to the adaptation of Vietnam’s food system. Development partners can also open up government funding by demonstrating the empirically-based benefits of integrating climate services into nutrition interventions.

Integrating climate services into nutrition policy to combat food insecurity and malnutrition in Vietnam will require a great deal of coordination. With some support, Vietnam and the highly skilled professionals working across nutrition, agriculture, and climate services can address this challenge.

Joseph Conway is a graduate student at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs studying rural development, social inclusion, and sustainable agriculture. Joseph serves as a research intern for the Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today, for Tomorrow (ACToday) project in Vietnam. 

Pranav Singh has recently completed his Master of Public Administration program from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, where he focused on understanding the challenges at the intersection of nutrition, agriculture and climate change.

Climate models are often applied to future predictions, but one of the most reliable ways to improve and test the capabilities of these models is to look to the past. In a new study published in GeoHealth, researchers revisited a large dengue outbreak on the island of Réunion and determined it would have been possible to predict the event using available climate data. In particular, they integrated forecasts of rainfall and temperature generated up to four weeks ahead of the start of the outbreak into a mosquito population model. Their success has implications for the use of climate data in future public health efforts.

Réunion, a French overseas island between Madagascar and Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, faced an unprecedented outbreak of dengue in 2018. Dengue fever is a viral tropical disease spread by mosquitoes; in Réunion, the disease is carried by the local species Aedes albopictus. Mosquito populations are influenced by a complicated web of environmental factors that are difficult to monitor on a local scale. However, the study by researchers at Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society, Umeä University, New York University and the European Center for Disease Control and Prevention shows that there is great potential for using climate information to predict how suitable an environment will be for vector-borne diseases.

Mosquito species such as A. albopictus thrive only within a unique temperature range. Rainfall events also have distinctive effects on their survival. These factors and others can be identified among climate data, and the researchers recognized that an ideal confluence of these environmental factors could bring on an increase in the abundance of mosquitoes, which could lead to an outbreak.

“Tropical-cyclone-related rainfall events and higher-than-average temperatures played a role in the 2018 dengue outbreak,” said Laurel DiSera, a senior research staff associate at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society and the study’s lead author. “Since we can forecast such conditions up to four weeks in advance, we thought it would be possible that the outbreak itself could be predicted weeks ahead.” (See map below)

To test the idea, DiSera and her colleagues incorporated subseasonal climate forecasts from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) model, available via the Subseasonal-to-seasonal Prediction Project Database, into a vector model that generated predictions of mosquito populations; they found that the methodology was reasonably predictive of the outbreak event in 2018.

“Our results strongly suggest that we can use subseasonal data to better understand suitability for mosquito populations and the potential for resulting outbreak events,” DiSera said.

“The routine way to prevent and manage dengue outbreaks is through mosquito control,” said coauthor Joacim Rocklöv for Sweden’s Umeå University. “Having more time to act makes a difference, not in the least operationally.”

DiSera added that in a time when many public-health systems are already under strain, new methodologies like the one proposed may help public health agencies save resources and time and allow them to be more flexible in dealing with urgent and unexpected threats such as COVID-19.

This research was supported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (grant NA18OAR4310339), the ARBOPREVENT project (Swedish Research Council Formas grant 2018-01754), and Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today, for Tomorrow (ACToday), a Columbia World Project.

Researchers led by Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society and the Pan-American Health Organization have developed a system to monitor and forecast the environmental suitability of transmission of Zika, dengue fever, chikungunya and other diseases carried by species of Aedes mosquitos in the U.S. and neighboring regions.

Their results show that the forecasting skill of the new system is very good, with ‘hotspots’ of higher skill in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Cuba, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Jamaica and Puerto Rico.

The team published its findings in Nature Scientific Reports.

The new system, called AeDES (https://aedes.iri.columbia.edu), is expected to help public-health authorities identify at-risk areas at least a month ahead of time, improving response and planning operations.

As a demonstration, the researchers used AeDES to predict that the current dengue outbreak in Central America will continue during the rest of 2020 and most likely will worsen. The compound effect of dengue and the ongoing COVID pandemic is expected to increase the number of coinfections in the region, the authors write.

Aedes-transmitted diseases cause more than 50 million infections every year worldwide, including in the United States, and cases have increased by 30-fold in the last 50 years because of changes in climate, land use and population.

These diseases, as with all mosquito-borne disease, are climate-sensitive–the risk of outbreaks goes up or down in part based on temperature, rainfall and humidity, which affect the life and reproductive cycle of the insects.

Supercharged climate-epidemiological modeling

“This is the first system for the region that monitors and forecasts the conditions needed for transmission of Aedes-borne diseases,” said Ángel Muñoz, a climate scientist at IRI and lead author of the paper.

“We’ve combined multiple R₀ epidemiological models with multiple climate models, as well as seven decades of historical climate data,” Muñoz said. (Epidemiologists use R₀ to describe how contagious an infectious disease is. A value of 2, for example, means that a person who has the disease will infect an average of two other people.)

When climate centers make probabilistic forecasts of weather and climate, they use multimodel ensembles–which generate many simulations from many models so as to give a range of possible outcomes.

Muñoz and his colleagues adapted this approach for AeDES, combining four well-known R₀ models with the 96 members (or total executions per month) currently in the North American Multi-Model Ensemble (NMME). As a result, the team generates 384 simulations each time it runs AeDES.

“Because we have such a huge sample to draw from, the probabilistic forecasts generated from these runs are really robust,” said Muñoz.

Public-health specialists can also use AeDES, which is powered by the IRI’s Data Library, to calculate and visualize the environmental suitability of disease transmission month-by-month going back to 1948, enabling them to better understand how climatic changes have been impacting different regions.

“The advantage of AeDES is that health ministry staff working at the country and subnational level will be able to adapt forecasts to their specific localities, allowing field actions to be much more targeted and tailored to their local conditions,” said co-author Ana Rivière-Cinnamond, from the Pan-American Health Organization. “Also, international and national health organizations could use the system to help identify future at-risk areas for vector-borne diseases–at border areas, for example, so as to alert authorities in advance to take action.”

In 2015, faced with a potential multi-country public-health emergency caused by the Zika virus, PAHO asked IRI to develop a system that used climate variables to try to stay a step ahead of future outbreaks. Based on the promising results of this initial collaboration (for more, read here, here and here), both PAHO and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Program Office lent further support to IRI to develop and expand the system into what is now AeDES.

Muñoz and his team were also able to integrate the NextGen forecasting system and methodology (factsheet) developed as part of the Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today, for Tomorrow (ACToday) Columbia World Project.

“It’s a great example of how advances we were able to make because of Columbia’s commitment to ACToday–a project focused on food security–led to advances for the public health community,” said Muñoz.

The two are not unrelated, Muñoz added. “Covid-19 has created a serious food-security crisis in Central America, and this is exacerbating the present dengue outbreak there. It is not only important to join forces between these two projects, it’s our duty to do so.”

This research was partially supported by ACToday, the first Columbia World Project, as well as by grants from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the Swedish Research Council.

We are outraged about these events, and stand with the people and communities suffering from the violence and racism. We also understand that simply expressing these sentiments is not sufficient. We also need to make real and meaningful commitments to institute change in our workplace. We spent much of last week meeting as a staff, listening to and challenging each other. The statement and set of actions expressed below are the result of these meetings: only a first step in a long process we are committed to maintaining.

The IRI is an academic institution with a staff from both the US and around the globe. Our mission is to enhance society’s capability to understand, anticipate and manage the impacts of climate in order to improve human welfare and the environment. As an organization working at the intersection of climate and society, we have a responsibility to see what is happening around us as something inseparable from this mission. We have started on a deep reflection and examination of how and where we may have failed in this regard, and how we might grow.

Racial injustice is an obstacle to our mission in that it makes Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) systematically more vulnerable to climate impacts and limits the precious contributions of BIPOC researchers and scientists. While racism affects all BIPOC, it is important to note that the events of the last two weeks have centered on pervasive and systemic anti-Blackness in the United States.

While we’re proud of the staff diversity at the IRI, we can do better, and we will do better. We must more closely reflect on the nature of our diversity and recognize our racial blindspots in order to embrace and promote true diversity as well as maintaining a safe, supportive environment for our colleagues. Black people are integral to the IRI, but they have been underrepresented, and their systemic burdens have not been adequately considered. We at the IRI have a responsibility to establish a participatory culture of feedback and structural change without creating additional emotional labor for our Black staff.

The IRI publicly commits to examining our internal structure and strengthening our efforts to have a more diverse staff. This effort includes evaluating the ways that our institute has been complicit in the lack of racial diversity in the earth sciences. We commit to using our voice and influence as a Columbia institution to help ensure that racial diversity, equity, and inclusion be a cornerstone of the new Climate School being proposed.

Anti-racism is not a box to be checked. Reading books and attending seminars is only the beginning of a long process. We all must learn to unlearn, and this work must be ongoing. Our commitments are listed below, and we expect to add more as we investigate, reflect, and listen. Black lives matter.

–The International Research Institute for Climate and Society*

*This statement was drafted by IRI staff through a deliberative process and approved and published by IRI management.

IRI commits to improving the work environment for our staff. IRI leadership will:

Recognize that events that stem from systemic racism/racist acts impact our BIPOC staff members disproportionately. As such, it will take measures to reach out in a timely way to accommodate staff needs for more time on work deliverables, and time to reflect on or participate in societal activities such as volunteering, donating, protesting
Create channels for anonymous feedback related to workplace bias
Mandate attendance for racial (and other) bias awareness training
Develop materials on the culture and history of the countries where IRI works to help staff have a greater, nuanced awareness of the context in which we are working

In order to build a stronger IRI for the future, we will:

Assess and improve career path guidance in the list of responsibilities of supervisors and managers
Review and improve our record on retention and promotion of BIPOC staff
Increase recruitment attention and outreach effort to networks and communities of prospective Black students and professionals
Engage college and highschool students about studies and careers associated with climate science in local underserved communities

Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today, for Tomorrow

Columbia World Projects’ first project, ACToday, aims to combat hunger and improve food security by increasing climate knowledge in six countries that are particularly dependent on agriculture and vulnerable to the effects of climate change and fluctuations—Ethiopia, Senegal, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Colombia, and Guatemala.

The Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today, for Tomorrow (ACToday) Columbia World Project has helped create advanced and sustainable climate services around the world tailored for agricultural decision making.

Countries are using these new services to manage many of the climate-related risks to their food systems. But even the best climate services by themselves cannot manage the entire range of climate risks that farmers confront. Farmers in the United States and other developed countries are able to cover some of the remaining risks through traditional insurance. If their crops are destroyed by a drought or a storm, they can file a damage claim with the insurance company, which would then send out an assessor to verify and quantify the damages.

However, in the six ACToday countries—and most other developing countries—such a system becomes prohibitively expensive for companies, and ultimately makes premiums unaffordable to the rural smallholder farmers who most need insurance.

To address this challenge, IRI has been one of the pioneers to develop a new type of insurance called index insurance. Index insurance payouts are based on an index of weather, such as rainfall measured by satellites or at a local weather station. If the amount of rainfall during critical stages of a crop’s growth cycle doesn’t reach a pre-specified threshold, farmers automatically get compensated without having to file any claims. This innovation has significantly lowered the transaction costs and risks for insurance companies, enabling them to keep premiums low and enabling millions of farmers access to coverage previously unavailable to them.

Index insurance is a key component of ACToday’s work in all six countries, and teams have been working with government and private sector partners to design products tailored to the needs of each country. One of our earliest and most committed partners has been Fedearroz, the rice producers’ federation of Colombia.

“The support of ACToday to our index-based insurance pilot is crucial to our plans to implement climate-smart rice production in Colombia, contributing to increased food security in our country,” said Patricia Guzman, the deputy director of technology at Fedearroz.

With ACToday technical and training support, Fedearroz is launching a pilot insurance project in May of 2020 for 100 farmers in the Meta region, which produces a sixth of all the rice in Colombia.

“Rice is an extremely important crop for Colombia’s food security, and farmers face constant climate risks, from drought to excessive rainfall, that can damage or destroy crops and reduce income,” said ACToday’s Manuel Brahm, part of the project’s Colombia team.

Brahm and others on the team have been training and supporting Fedearroz staff to design index insurance products that will protect their farmers against climate-related crop losses. ACToday and Fedearroz have held multiple workshops with rice farmers there to understand local perspectives and needs. 

“They’ve helped us understand which stages of the rice growing cycle they feel are most vulnerable to damage from too much or too little rainfall, which allows us to define a coverage window for the insurance product,” Brahm said. “We also asked them to rank years from best to worst in terms of yields, and we can compare this in real time to what the climate data says using IRI’s Data Library.”

This information feeds into the design of the insurance and helps ensure that companies will be able to provide an affordable product that covers as much risk as possible for the greatest number of farmers.

“Our experience shows that a top-down approach—where scientists or government agencies decide what insurance communities need—doesn’t work in the long term and doesn’t scale up as quickly,” said economist Daniel Osgood, who leads IRI’s Financial Instruments Sector Team. “ACToday is designing index insurance through a participatory process that has involved farmers from the very beginning—they’re the ones who will be deciding whether or not to buy coverage.”

ACToday’s approach has been to train and support the Fedearroz staff to develop the index insurance in-house. This leaves the association with the technical capacity and experience to scale up to more farmers over time. It can also serve as a model for other associations, such as coffee growers, to build on.

This story was adapted from the the 2019 ACToday report.

Scientists and other experts from the Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today, for Tomorrow (ACToday) Project, joined former New York Times journalist Andrew Revkin for an online web seminar on May 7 to discuss the intersection of food, climate and coronavirus.

The event – “Feeding Humanity as a Pandemic Disrupts a Heating Planet” – was produced and hosted by Revkin, who is founding director of the Earth Institute’s new Initiative on Communication and Sustainability.

In the discussion, members of the ACToday team at Columbia – Walter Baethgen and Michael Puma – offered updates on the project’s work, and discussed how both climate and the coronavirus will affect food supply chains, and people’s ability to feed themselves. They also discussed how university-led projects such as ACToday can help take on major challenges like those brought about by this pandemic.

They were joined by Ousmane Ndiaye–the director of Senegal’s national weather service–and the World Food Programme’s Lena Schubmann, who is based in Guatemala. Ndiaye and Schubmann gave an on-the-ground update of the COVID19 situation in their countries, as well as how their organizations are trying to address the added risks a pandemic brings to communities that face recurring bouts of food insecurity.

“It’s a profound moment of history that we’re living through right now,” Revkin said, opening the event. “Coronavirus is representative of the global biological connectedness that is matching our climatological connectedness and shaping risk in ways that are very hard for our current systems to deal with.”

Watch the full webcast here:

Beyond the partnerships in the agricultural and farming sector, ACToday is also developing relationships with other stakeholders that stand to benefit from NextGen and other climate service products.

“NextGen is allowing Colombia to now produce and provide state-of-the-art climate information for better planning and decision making,” Ángel G. Muñoz, country lead for Colombia and Guatemala, says. “It’s a crucial component of a strategy for ultimately anticipating and lessening the impact of climate variability and change on communities.”

For example, the ACToday team started working with the National Institute of Health (INS), the Ministry of Health (MINSALUD) and the Colombian Institute for the Family-Wellbeing (ICBF) to create early-warning, early-action systems that address the relationship between climate and undernutrition in children. This will give health authorities in Colombia the ability to predict and monitor malnutrition, and allow enough time to take action in affected communities. The ultimate aim of the NextGen system is to mitigate the impact of climate variability and climate change on local communities and for them to adapt to new climate scenarios.

“The interaction with the health sector in Colombia has also led to collaborations with other institutions like the National University of Columbia (UNAL), the Colombian Coastal Authority (DIMAR) and Red RAUS to start work on developing the Colombian Academy for Climate Services,” says Carmen Gonzalez Romero, country manager for ACToday in Colombia and Guatemala. “This will be the first one of its class in Latin America and will support Colombia to implement the National Framework for Climate Services and to guarantee the sustainability of ACToday beyond the scope of the project.” 

The ACToday project supported the development of a climate services academy in Bangladesh, which offers climate trainings and resources to professionals working in agriculture, food policy, disaster preparedness, public health and other fields.

In the video below, Steve Prager from the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT discusses the importance of partnerships and the unique relationship with ACToday.

Columbia World Projects is a presidential initiative that mobilizes the University’s researchers and scholars to work with governments, organizations, businesses and communities to tackle global challenges.

Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today, for Tomorrow, or ACToday, is the first Columbia World Project. ACToday aims to combat hunger and improve food security by increasing climate knowledge in six countries that are particularly dependent on agriculture and vulnerable to the effects of climate change and fluctuations—Ethiopia, Senegal, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Colombia and Guatemala.

For a number of our ACToday researchers, the work doesn’t just fulfill professional interests and career goals—it’s deeply personal, too. In the video profiles below, ACToday team members Dannie Dinh, Diego Pons and Tufa Dinku explain why the in-country work they’re doing has special meaning for them.

Dannie Dinh

“It’s really interesting to see how differently people respond to us…when I speak in the same language instead of having to go through translation. After a lot of these meetings, I have people coming up to me shaking my hand and saying, ‘This is a great project.'”

Diego Pons

“We expect to see the largest change in terms of temperature and precipitation. It’s also in [the] mountains, where people are the most vulnerable because they lack access to infrastructure. So [our existing] research is actually part of what allows us to embed Columbia University’s ACToday project, because we have been working in those communities for more than 10 years.”

Tufa Dinku

“I’ve lived two different lives in Ethiopia. The first one, I grew up in a village looking after goats and cows. My whole family are farmers. My focus is now on generating more data, more information…and part of ACToday is now that [more of this] information is available, how can we help different decision makers at different levels? How can we help the farmer use that information?”

ACToday has positive, measurable impacts on peoples’ lives. If you would like to support this work, please visit our Giving Page.

Michael Puma is the director of the Center for Climate Systems Research at Columbia’s Earth Institute.

According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, the COVID19 pandemic is impacting the world’s food systems and disrupting regional agricultural trade and value chains. The FAO has warned that food shortages are a real risk in the coming months.

The rapid global spread of the virus poses a worrisome add-on threat to millions of people living in countries already vulnerable to food insecurity, malnutrition and natural disasters, including climate-related disasters. This global health crisis will test our food and trade systems in ways never experienced before.

To help us understand this complex interplay of risks, we spoke with Michael Puma, who is the director of the Center for Climate Systems Research at Columbia University’s Earth Institute. Puma studies the susceptibility of the global food trade network to natural disturbances, including climate variability and change, and works on the food-security focused Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today, for Tomorrow (ACToday) Columbia World Project. He has focused on characterizing the food supply portfolio of the six project countries (see map below) to understand dependencies on trade of major crops and the implied, associated trade of key nutrients.

Q. What does the food supply portfolio of these six countries look like? How do they balance domestic production with import dependencies and how do these decisions affect their climate risk profiles?

Trade is a critical factor for understanding food supply and its vulnerability to climate. In some ACToday countries such as Senegal, imports are essential because they make up almost 60% of the country’s domestic supply. In contrast, in Ethiopia and Bangladesh, imports make up about 15-17% of domestic supply, a value closer to the global average.

Many factors affect how countries balance domestic production and imports as decisions about the agricultural sector are made relative to a country’s economic situation. Yet the massive impacts of globalization are poorly understood, which means that we also don’t fully understand the risks associated with global interconnectivity. With the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, we are now beginning to see just how vulnerable countries around the world truly are to global systemic disruptions. Multiple countries, including Russia, Ukraine, Vietnam and Cambodia, have imposed trade restrictions, while Egypt has accelerated purchase of grains. If these heavy-handed trade interventions continue, the crisis could intensify, triggering spikes in global prices as the world experienced in 2008.

Trade dependencies mean that most countries, including our partner countries under ACToday, are exposed to climate risks happening outside their borders, in addition to in-country climate risks. The ongoing COVID-19 crisis magnifies these pre-existing, climate-related risks and presents additional hurdles for mitigating them.

Clearly, unanticipated disruptions in the global food system can lead to cascading impacts that affect developing countries. Food supply and accessibility, both pillars of a country’s food security, can be negatively impacted. To this end, we have been working to understand where the food supply of each ACToday country comes from, both in terms of amount and nutritional content. We’re also working on an assessment of Senegal’s food system, in light of its relatively high dependencies on imports to understand what it means for food prices throughout the country.

Q. Food accessibility is a main concern for the ACToday countries. Help us understand how breaks in the food supply chain can translate into hardship for people in these countries.

As the COVID-19 pandemic is demonstrating, food supply chains are complex. They have numerous components, each of which can be vulnerable to climate-related disruptions. Disruptions in production, processing, transportation or even buying behavior can negatively influence food availability and prices. In fact, there is substantial concern at the moment about how the loss of migrant workers will impact food production. Supply chains are also at risk, as they represent pathways through which the virus can be spread. These risks, if not mitigated, can lead to hardships associated with food insecurity, including malnutrition and even famine. As part of ACToday, we are working to highlight such vulnerabilities and identify ways of de-risking food systems.

Q. Are there different or unique concerns between rural and urban poor households?

Generally, concerns on the food security of both rural and urban poor households are centered on food accessibility, which is affected by a range of factors–from declining household incomes to spikes in local food market prices. New efforts are needed to examine detailed interactions within the food supply chain. My colleagues and I are working to qualitatively characterize risks due to coronavirus in multiple sub-Saharan countries, including Senegal, from smallholder farmers and small shopkeepers all the way up to supermarkets and global retailers and traders. Our goal is to explore various scenarios associated with the current crisis and to then map vulnerabilities at multiple levels, from the global level down to the details of domestic supply chains.

Q.What are the implications for international and national trade and social protection policies and responses?

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the World Bank and many other institutions have recognized the need to ensure stability and confidence in global food systems. One of the keys is to develop and implement a set of best practices to avoid reactionary and overzealous protectionist measures that could disrupt global trade. To this end, the FAO is compiling past policy responses – including both their advantages and disadvantages – to better inform potential policy interventions in food systems. (See this analysis by the FAO)

Q. In the coming weeks and months, what are going to be some indicators you’ll be keeping an eye out for?

In the coming weeks, I will be watching key food price indicators, including the International Grain Council’s Grains and Oilseeds Index (GOI) and the FAO’s Food Price Index (FFPI)). To track local level concerns, the World Food Programme has developed a Hunger Analytics Hub which includes a monitor for local market food prices. For crop production, I will be watching GEOGLAM, the crop monitor for G20 Agricultural Market Information System.

The Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today, for Tomorrow Columbia World Project (ACToday) has been working with its Ethiopian partners to create new climate tools for decision makers working in agriculture and food security. These investments are now directly enabling the World Food Programme (WFP) to reach its 2022 target of providing a million smallholder farmers in Ethiopia with affordable insurance against droughts and other climate risks.

The new target is part of WFP’s goal to scale up its R4 Rural Resilience Initiative, which helps farming communities increase their food security and income by managing climate-related risks.

In 2009, Oxfam America, in collaboration with the International Research Institute for Climate and Society and other partners, launched the Horn of Africa Risk Transfer for Adaptation (HARITA) project in one village of 200 farms in Ethiopia.

HARITA transitioned to R4 when the World Food Programme became involved. Today, R4 reaches nearly 90,000 farms in Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Senegal, Zambia and Zimbabwe, supporting them to diversify their livelihoods, increase their savings and get access to microcredit and affordable index-based insurance. In 2018, participating farmers received nearly $1.5 million of insurance payouts to compensate for weather-related losses.

The Ethiopian government ultimately wants all of its vulnerable farmers to be covered by insurance. During times of drought, insurance helps farmers and their families keep food on the table. In non-drought years, insurance coverage helps farmers feel safe to take out loans to buy fertilizer and other inputs that can significantly increase their yields.

“If all of Ethiopia’s vulnerable farmers could be reached by insurance, this could totally change the landscape for food security,” said economist Dan Osgood, who leads ACToday’s insurance work. “R4 is a highly visible and successful project that has already helped large numbers of farmers improve their savings and wealth. We’re excited to help WFP reach hundreds of thousands more.”

Osgood said many index insurance projects have languished over the past decade primarily because they have a top-down approach that ineffectively uses technology and isn’t designed with enough farmer participation. “We’ve seen it happen time and time again.”

ACToday’s work in Ethiopia is making it possible to avoid these pitfalls, he said.

The project has worked with the country’s national meteorological service and agriculture sector to create new climate services for decision making, train staff to first learn how to use these new services and then be able to train their colleagues. With these new climate services in place, insurance projects such as R4 are now able to build tools specifically to help them scale.

For example, a new maproom (see image below) powered by IRI’s Data Library is enabling WFP to identify and prioritize which areas R4 should invest in as it expands within the country.

“Before, we would decide this by where the poorest farmers are living, but these aren’t necessarily the places where insurance would have the most benefit for the most people,” said IRI’s Rahel Diro, an index insurance expert working on R4. “The new maproom helps us instead to identify areas where a given crop has the potential to be viable, and therefore where providing insurance makes the most sense.”

The tool also helps partners visualize rainfall patterns and extremes over wide areas, allowing them to pool insurance contracts for multiple areas based on these patterns, as opposed to making different contracts for each area, said Diro. It also enables users to optimize insurance parameters through comparisons of climate datasets and datasets crowdsourced directly from thousands of farmers.

Farmers at the core of a participatory design process

“Farmers are the only ones who truly know their opportunities, and whether or not the meteorological data on which the index insurance is based is reflecting their crop losses,” Osgood said.

“They must have a solid understanding of what the insurance is good for, and where they’re left exposed, or else they will make unsafe choices. That’s why we’ve always kept farmers at the center of the insurance design system, to harness the collective intelligence of the system.”

Doing this is difficult enough for a project serving a few hundred farmers. At a scale of millions to tens of millions, it becomes impossible without help from technology-based, iterative design, with the farmer “crowd” at its core.

ACToday is enabling farmers to stay at the center of the design process by supporting the development of a platform that will allow farmers in each village to use phone technology to participate in the design and verification of the satellite-based insurance for their village. Farmers could provide information via text messages, forms, phone apps, or by pressing numbers in response to questions asked in local languages. All this takes place in structured village ‘town hall’ exercises where participants reconcile the satellite data with their collective experience.

“We’re also researching the strengths and weaknesses of this system, to avoid approaches that might be ineffective or that leave out the voices of women or marginalized farmers,” said Osgood.

Plans are now underway to adapt a similar approach in Senegal, where both R4 and ACToday are working to improve food security.

This work was implemented as part of the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS), which is carried out with support from CGIAR Trust Fund and through bilateral funding agreements. For details please visit https://ccafs.cgiar.org/donors. The views expressed in this document cannot be taken to reflect the official opinions of these organizations.

John Furlow has spent more than a decade working with developing countries on the frontlines of climate change, helping them to adapt to changing conditions.

Before he came to Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI), he saw firsthand how climate variability was affecting different aspects of society and the economy in the Great Lakes region while he worked for the Environmental Protection Agency. He has led climate adaptation programs for both the U.S. Department of State and USAID. He has advised the Jamaican government on national climate change policy, and supported scientists to develop seasonal forecasts that help to protect Jamaican farmers from droughts.

Today, as deputy director for international development and humanitarian assistance at IRI, Furlow continues to focus on climate risk and adaptation in agriculture. He leads the Vietnam portion of a Columbia World Project called “Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today, for Tomorrow” (ACToday). Through ACToday, Furlow and his team are helping to transfer IRI forecast tools to government institutions in Vietnam so they can develop seasonal climate forecasts to help farmers adapt to variable weather and to be food secure. The team is also helping the government implement a national mandate to introduce weather index insurance for farmers.  He tells us more about this process, and the challenges of climate adaptation, in the interview below.

Tell us about the work you’re doing for the ACToday project.

In 2015, most of the world signed on to the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goalsand the Paris climate agreement. Both agreements say that we should address climate risks, but there’s not much information in either about how to do that — how to take scientific information and use it to make better decisions to increase resilience.

With ACToday, we’re using climate information to enable better decision making in the developing world. ACToday was the first Columbia World Project, and works in six countries — Ethiopia, Senegal, Colombia, Guatemala, Bangladesh and Vietnam. Dannie Dinh helps me run the Vietnam part of the project. She grew up in Vietnam, and came to the U.S. in middle school. She graduated from Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs and is now taking classes in the MA in Climate and Society program.

The idea behind ACToday is this: if the countries trying to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals on food security, nutrition and agriculture, are not adequately dealing with climate variability, they’re likely to fail. In countries where agricultural productivity has been undermined by drought, tropical storms, unusually wet years, unusually hot years — if they’re not adequately dealing with those threats now, they’re never going to be able to do so.

Seasonal forecasts enable farmers to see how weather is likely to affect yields in the next growing season. In Jamaica, for example, my USAID team worked with IRI to help Jamaica produce its own drought forecasts; farmers who used the information cut their losses by a third to a half. Some farmers filled barrels with river water to irrigate; some changed what they planted; others were more conscientious about mulching to help keep moisture in the soil. And others took the year off and made money in another way, so they weren’t wasting resources planting seeds that might never grow.

For ACToday, IRI and its partners are working in these six countries to produce forecasts at different timescales and build relationships with meteorological and agricultural programs. Those programs can then use the information as a lever to try to change behavior and decision-making and practice, and help people working in these sectors to access information and make informed decisions.

What are the specific challenges for Vietnam?

Last March, in Hanoi, we brought together individuals from different government agencies, including the agriculture and health departments, to talk about national policies that have to do with food security and nutrition. We asked them to explain to their peers what they’re trying to achieve, and asked, ‘Where could unfavorable weather or climate undermine the achievements of these policies?’ It turns out a lot of people are worried about drought. Some are worried about flooding, and others are worried about access to information — without information, they’re not sure what to worry about. We used this feedback to design the scope of our team’s work in Vietnam.

Part of Vietnam’s economic growth strategy is to support smallholder coffee farmers. The thinking is that for people with small landholdings, if they plant a low-value crop, they’re not going to make a lot of money. If they plant high-value crops like cacao or coffee, they can sell that to buy food and make other investments.

If there’s a dry year, coffee productivity drops. So farmers can use seasonal forecasts to make decisions about whether and when to irrigate, for example. We’ve been training staff in  Vietnam’s meteorology office to produce seasonal forecasts that can tell coffee producers whether it will be drier-than-normal over the next three months. They’re interested in doing the same thing for other food products, too — probably starting with rice and fisheries.

We’re also working with the government on weather index insurance for farmers. They’ve asked for a training to understand how insurance works so they can be smarter consumers and regulators. They have a mandate to introduce this type of insurance, and they want to be able to advise farmers on policies. But this is new for Vietnam, and the government is very nervous that it will go badly if they don’t understand it well enough to provide sound advice.

Before you came to Columbia, you spent more than a decade working at USAID. How are things different here on the academic side?

USAID is biggest bilateral aid agency in world, with billions of dollars in funding to distribute. When you call someone in a country and say you’re from USAID and want to talk to them, they say, “Great, when can you be here?” It was very easy. Even though Columbia University is very well-known around the world, it isn’t as easy to get people to pay attention, because we’re coming in with ideas and capacity, rather than money. If you call a director and say “I want to take your staff away for a few days to train them,” there’s less of an incentive. But now people are starting to get excited as they see how well the project is working.

What are some of the challenges of climate adaptation in general?

I think the biggest challenge is getting people think about the changes that will affect them most. For years, the U.N. climate negotiations implied that adaptation actions should be in response to the long-term changes that we hear about when people talk about climate models. But information on conditions at the end of the century isn’t helpful to most livelihood activities. If a farmer in Vietnam is deciding what to do for the next season, and an aid worker comes along and says that by the end of the century, that part of the world could be 40 percent wetter or 40 percent drier, the farmer can’t do anything with that. But if we can provide good information for the timeframe or timeframes that matter most to farmers and other decision makers, they will be able to make better decisions and get better results. For example, in most poor countries, economies are built around farming, tourism and other activities that operate on a seasonal basis, and so they need information about what’s going to happen in the coming weeks and months. I think IRI is helping tremendously in this regard. I think it’s vital for people in the developing world to have the information that IRI produces.

ACToday Response to COVID-19

Continuing to support country partners to maintain operations of NextGen forecasting systems, Data Library and maprooms for decision makers

Converting trainings and workshops to online formats where possible

Developing downloadable training materials & resources for offline use.

Conducting research on how COVID-19 disruptions can impact food systems.

The global coronavirus pandemic has disrupted most aspects of life in the United States. Our work on the Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today, for Tomorrow (ACToday) project is no exception. Columbia University has closed its campuses to all but essential personnel. IRI’s staff is now fully set up to work from home. We must keep in mind that the pandemic has not suspended the other challenges countries face in achieving their food security goals. Droughts, storms, and floods will continue to threaten food systems. ACToday’s work is as relevant now as it was before the coronavirus crisis, and perhaps more so as communities are weakened and financial resources are further limited.

We are currently working with each of our country partners to determine several things that will inform how we can continue to make progress.

Here’s a summary of what we know at the moment:

• As is the case in the U.S., most countries have instituted travel restrictions, restrictions on social gatherings, and business closures.
  
• In-country staff from national meteorological agencies, agriculture and health ministries and other key government agencies have been asked to work from home as much as possible. The good news is that ACToday’s installations of the NextGen forecasting system and food security maprooms are online and available for decision makers to use.
  
• Connectivity and remote-work challenges vary among the countries, but in general we can expect to continue to have at least limited interactions with our main collaborators via email and conference calls.
  
• Planning and activities with health institutions, important to make progress on nutrition goals, are generally on pause, as these institutions shift much of their attention and resources to addressing COVID-19.

A significant portion of our work is training the staff of our host-country partners on all aspects of the climate services chain. The travel bans and restrictions on the sizes of gatherings currently prevent us from giving in-person trainings; our country teams are figuring out which of these trainings can be given online. But we’re facing what most people face who work in development: internet accessibility and connectivity varies considerably among the countries in which we work. For partners who are working from home, we are trying to determine if the computer and internet resources they can access away from the office will enable them to participate. Because of these limitations in connectivity, we are also developing training materials for our partners to download and use later, as opposed to only working interactively in real-time.

We are also learning about how different parts of the food system in each country are currently, and may soon be, affected by the closing of borders and other disruptions to trade and commerce. In many places, farming may be unaffected, but food processing and distribution could be disrupted by worker illness or isolation. Markets, retailers and restaurants may be closed. While these are not climate related, they may influence elements of national-to-local agriculture, food security, and nutrition that ACToday is working on.

As we learn more about the impacts in our partner countries, and adjust to impacts here in New York, we will adjust our approaches to the project. We believe that we can continue to make progress by finding creative work-arounds for the impediments posed by COVID-19. Most importantly, we want our staff and our partners to be safe and healthy. We will update this page as we learn more.

“The explosion of COVID-19 cases in China was largely driven by individuals with mild, limited, or no symptoms who went undetected,” says co-author Jeffrey Shaman, professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University Mailman School and an affiliate researcher at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society. “Depending on their contagiousness and numbers, undetected cases can expose a far greater portion of the population to virus than would otherwise occur. We find for COVID-19 in China these undetected infected individuals are numerous and contagious. These stealth transmissions will continue to present a major challenge to the containment of this outbreak going forward.”

Read the full press release issued from the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.

Below is a video we’ve produced celebrating the launch and the many organizations involved.

“It is extraordinary to see all our ACToday partners in Colombia interacting to build better climate services to fight hunger,” says Ángel G. Muñoz, the ACToday country lead for Colombia. “IDEAM has done an outstanding job co-developing NextGen, and involving all key institutions, at all levels, to help with the translation, transfer and use of tailored climate information.”

The Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today, for Tomorrow (ACToday) project, is the first Columbia World Project. Led by the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI), ACToday aims to combat hunger and improve food security by increasing climate knowledge in six countries that are particularly dependent on agriculture and vulnerable to the effects of climate change and fluctuations ⁠—Ethiopia, Senegal, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Colombia, and Guatemala.

Our report takes a closer look at four key activities and accomplishments so far:

1. Helping countries fill in gaps in their historical data and improve the quality of data they collect. We’re also helping them to implement advanced forecasting and data management systems and train staff on how to use these tools.
2. Supporting and training ministries and government agencies to understand the value of climate services and build up their technical capacity to integrate these services into decision making.
3. Bringing together those who generate climate information with those who use such information, so each can understand the other’s needs and capabilities. The end result: decision makers have access to better, more relevant climate information and are better equipped to use such information for agriculture and food security.
4. Working with business, government and agricultural stakeholders to develop innovative insurance products to cover some of the risks farmers face.

Click on the cover image below to view the interactive report.

Video transcript:

If you paid any attention to the news over the past few years, you may feel like we’re living through Old Testament times. There have been record floods in the Mississippi Valley of the United States, floods in England floods in India. We’ve seen massive fires in California that have been dwarfed by the massive fires in Australia. Now East Africa is facing swarms of desert locusts.

I’m John Furlow with the International Research Institute for Climate and Society, part of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. At IRI, we specialize in helping people use science to anticipate and prepare for these types of disasters. In the case of locusts, we’d like to highlight a set of mapping tools we developed about 15 years ago to help people see where locusts are likely to breed and swarm. The tools are freely available on the web, if you know where to look. I’ll walk you through how to find the information.

First, go to iri.columbia.edu, then click on Resources. Scroll down to the Maprooms. Once you’re in the Maproom area, lets choose Food Security, and then the Locust Maproom.

We designed these maps together with desert locust experts so that on one page they have all the different types of information they need to pinpoint areas of concern, from rainfall accumulation to greenness or plant growth.

Locusts like to feed on fresh young plants, so knowing where vegetation is just starting to grow can give a locust control officer an idea of where to find and kill locusts before they swarm. The Greenness Estimates map gives us that information.

Once we’re in the map, I’m going to draw a box around the area in East Africa. Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda have been in the news lately because of the locust swarms. Next, I can enter specific dates to see how plants grew and matured over a given time period. Lets look at July of last year up to the end of January.

The map room is going to give us an animation of plant growth over the last six or seven months. The red, orange and yellow dots on the map represent the youngest plants, and the light shades of green are those that are up to about two months old. Darker areas show vegetation more than 70 days old, and probably represent perennial plants and forests. Locusts prefer younger plants. A locust control team can use this map to check where locusts are likely to find food and go there to investigate and spray, if appropriate. This saves them time and money.

IRI developed this maproom with the locust team at the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations specifically for locust control in parts of West Africa. That region hasn’t seen a major swarm since then. The maproom covers the entire locust belt, from West Africa across to India. If you’d like to learn more about our work on desert locusts or any of our other map rooms, please contact us or message us via Twitter.

Powered by IRI’s Data Library, new project aims to harness large, multi-sectoral datasets in order to identify risk factors for catastrophic events

In March 1989, a tripped circuit in the Hydro-Québec power grid left 6 million people without electricity. A week earlier, an unusually harsh snowstorm had strained the region; the day before, a solar flare and accompanying release of plasma and magnetic field sent a mountain of energy propelling toward Earth at a million miles an hour.

The complex interactions of these interconnected systems – environmental science, space weather and solar activity – pushed the electric power grid to a tipping point that could not be understood within any single one of those systems.

The Predictive Risk Investigation System for Multilayer Dynamic Interconnection Analysis (PRISM), funded by the National Science Foundation, aims to harness data in order to identify risk factors across domains for catastrophic events such as the 1989 blackout – which impacted transportation, food, water, health and finance and racked up costs exceeding $2 billion.

Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society, part of the Earth Institute, is one of the ten collaborating institutions on the project.

The PRISM team–comprising experts from data science, statistics, computer science, finance, energy, agriculture, ecology, hydrology, climate and space weather–will integrate large data sets across different sectors to improve risk prediction. Such an undertaking requires significant computing and data curation capabilities, something extremely well suited to the IRI’s Data Library platform.

“This project brings in datasets from very diverse domains of science that use different ways to describe time and space and that use different file formats,” says IRI’s Rémi Cousin. “Our Data Library removes such complexities by placing all data in an interoperable framework–one which projects scientists are able to query online to feed into their own analytical programs.”

Once the data is incorporated into the Data Library, Cousin and his collaborators will use cutting-edge analysis to identify what they’ve called critical risk indicators – quantifiable information associated with risk exposure, particularly for potential catastrophes. They’ll also employ machine learning to look for anomalies in the data that might lead to new insights.

“We want to focus our attention on these worst-case scenarios and the risks associated with them, and how we might measure their likelihood,” said Cornell University’s David S. Matteson, who is a principal investigator on the two-year, $2.4 million project.

“Our goal is ultimately to help create early warning systems for catastrophes and improve preparedness for these devastating events. We plan to integrate the results of the project and make them publicly accessible via the Data Library.”

Rémi Cousin

“Our hope is that by identifying systemically important critical risks – those that tie together different domains and have the biggest spillover potential – we will have the most widespread impact in terms of controlling those risks,” Matteson said.

If systems had been in place to recognize the heightened risks caused by the snowstorm and the solar flare, the 1989 power outage may have been averted or at least minimized. Similarly, understanding the ways it affected systems such as health care and transportation could help policy makers plan a more effective response.

The multidisciplinary approach is essential because today’s world is composed of highly interconnected and interdependent systems, and no single expert is equipped to identify the signs of risk or the full impact of catastrophes.

The researchers will then focus their efforts on identifying risk interconnections, and systemically important risk indicators across the different domains, in order to both predict potential hazards and to lessen the possible system-wide losses once they’ve occurred. They plan to examine known risk indicators and apply data science to identify new ones.

“Our goal is ultimately to help create early warning systems for catastrophes and improve preparedness for these devastating events,” Cousin said. “We plan to integrate the results of the project and make them publicly accessible via the Data Library.”

In addition to IRI’s Cousin and Cornell’s Matteson, the PRISM team includes researchers from the Lincoln Park Zoo; the University of California, San Diego; Atmosphere Space Technology Research Associates; the University of Kentucky; the University of Minnesota; Pennsylvania State University; the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; and Tufts University.

In the Sahel of West Africa – which covers Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad – land degradation has led to migration towards less densely populated and more fertile areas. The land has been made less fertile by demographic pressure, fragmenting agricultural units and rainfall variability.

We did research in Burkina Faso to understand the link between land degradation and migration. The area has seen a high number of Mossi farmers living in the densely populated central plateau and northern regions migrate to the south of the country.

Poor resource management and reduced rainfall have exacerbated land degradation. A rapidly growing population, coupled with high rates of internal rural migration and thirty years of desiccation, have resulted in profound land use and land cover change throughout the country.

In the central plateau and northern regions of Burkina Faso, land degradation has historically stimulated large-scale migration toward more fertile areas in the south. While some northern provinces are being rehabilitated by soil and water conservation projects southern provinces, considered more “pristine”, were neglected.

Our research compared the dynamics between migration and environmental degradation trends in the country. We did this by examining migration trends over several decades as well as land use and land cover data in the Bam and Sissili provinces. Bam is in the centre-north of the country close to Mali while Sissili is in the south, bordering on Ghana.

Strong correlation

The Bam province is located in the Sudano–Sahelian zone of West Africa which is an intermediary zone between the semi-arid Sahel to the north and the wetter Sudanian zone to the south. The province receives between 500 and 900mm of rainfall annually. It’s covered with thorny scrub and savanna grassland on soils that are poor in organic matter and nutrients.

Bam is home to the Mossi, the country’s major ethnic group. The Mossi are farmers who grow millet, sorghum, maize for their subsistence and cash crops such as cotton.

The Sissili province is located in the humid Sudanian climatic zone, one of the wettest zones in the country. The province receives between 800-1000mm of annual rainfall and is covered with shrubby and wooded savannas.

Sissili is home to Nuni autochtonous farmers, migrant Mossi farmers and Fulani agro-pastoralists. Some of the subsistence and cash crops grown in the area include yam, sweet potatoes, cowpea, groundnuts, maize, millet sorghum, black eyed peas and cotton.

We found a strong correlation between land degradation and migration trends. Degradation was greater in areas like Sissili which attracted migrants and much less severed in areas such as Bam which people migrated from.

On the one hand we found that land degradation stimulated intensive out-migration from a province. On the other, that soil rehabilitation helped decrease out-migration or increased in-migration toward a province.

Our hope is that by shedding light on the association between migration patterns, land rehabilitation and improved food security, our study will inform policy decisions. In particular, we hope it will encourage donors and government to invest in local initiatives that can courage positive trends. This could include soil and water conservation initiatives led by farmers.

Historical Trends

In the 1970s, land degradation in central and northern Burkina Faso led to large numbers of people leaving. In the 1980s the introduction of the soil and water conservation projects stabilised land degradation in this region.

In the Bam Province, in the north, this transformed the province’s migration patterns to the point there were – marginally – more people moving in than leaving.

These migration trends confirm the success of long-term investments in soil and water conservation. They also reflect dwindling opportunities elsewhere.

Our fieldwork data suggests that Bam’s population is increasing again. Although some households still remain vulnerable to food insecurity due to skyrocketing global market prices, farmers argue that famines are “a thing of the past”. They attribute this to their investment in improved agricultural techniques such as soil and water conservation initiatives.

This pattern can be seen elsewhere in the country. In the most degraded parts of Burkina Faso’s central plateau, soil and water conservation initiatives have helped to rehabilitate more than 200,000 hectares of land and to produce an extra 80,000 tons of food per year.

In contrast, the picture in southern Burkina Faso is bleak. It used to be one of the preferred destinations for migrants in the 1970s and 1980s. But intensive in-migration has increased human and livestock population, agricultural land, deforestation, and reduced land availability and the development of commercial agriculture.

These changes have degraded the land cover and strained social relationships. The result has been that fewer people have migrated to the area since 1996.

Today, migration toward southern provinces such as Sissili has declined. There are brewing land tenure conflicts between migrants and communities made up of the province’s original inhabitants.

Sissili needs to control land use and conservation programmes where the situation now resembles that of the Bam province back in the 1970s.

What can be done

Migration is often perceived as a distinct problem that needs to be stopped even though it’s a natural process that helps reorganise populations and regulate economic and health inequalities. While planned and voluntary migrations can help improve the well-being of individual migrants and their households, unplanned and involuntary movements often overwhelm local support systems in destination areas.

Thus, the drivers of migration must be anticipated and understood so that countries can manage better or direct them.

A lot of readers might not know what subseasonal forecasts are and why they matter. Can you give us an elevator pitch?

Subseasonal forecasts predict weather conditions up to several weeks ahead, filling the gap between weather forecasts issued every day for the next 10 days or so, and climate forecasts issued every month for the upcoming seasons. For example, forecasts issued every week for the average rainfall expected 2-4 weeks ahead, or the likelihood of heavy rainfall or drought. Like seasonal forecasts, subseasonal ones are inherently uncertain, so they are issued as probabilities, to convey the forecast confidence.

What makes subseasonal timescales so notoriously difficult to forecast?

Weather forecasts harness the predictability of atmospheric weather patterns several days in advance, while seasonal forecasts capitalize on the slow impacts of sea surface temperatures on average rainfall and temperature conditions. Until recently, subseasonal variations could not be successfully predicted. With today’s improved forecast models, that is starting to change.

What is the most rewarding part about making gains in what was once called a “predictability desert”? What do you see as next for subseasonal forecasting?

New subseasonal forecasting capabilities pave the way toward forecasts that are “seamless” from weather to climate, providing a heads-up from days to seasons ahead that have many potential uses such as for a reservoir operator that needs to manage storage up to seasons ahead, and releases often on a daily and weekly basis.  

In our last AGU Q&A, you described subseasonal forecasts as still being highly experimental. At this AGU meeting, you’ll be presenting an online maproom that takes these forecasts one step closer to being used by decision makers. What functionalities of this new tool are you most excited about?

By making this maproom, we hope to expose more people to the existence and potential of subseasonal forecasts issued every week. We plan to add a flexible option, so that users can choose the particular threshold of rainfall amount that’s relevant to them, as we already do for our IRI seasonal forecasts.

For a primer on seasonal-to-subseasonal (S2S) forecasting, read this interview with Andrew Robertson. Learn more about our work in Bihar here.

These experimental subseasonal forecasts focused on the 2018 monsoon in Bihar. Why the monsoon season and why Bihar?

Bihar, located in northern India bordering Nepal, is one of the most climate-sensitive states in the country due to its geographical setting, hydrometeorological uncertainties, dense rural population and high level of poverty. The Himalayan Mountains in the north have a significant bearing on the distribution of monsoon rainfall. The state is divided into four agroclimatic zones, with two zones north of the Ganges River prone to floods while the southern two zones are exposed to droughts.

Agriculture is the backbone of Bihar’s economy. It accounts for nearly a fifth of the state’s gross domestic product and provides employment to about 70% of the work force in rural areas–much higher than the national average.

Both irrigated and non-irrigated agriculture in Bihar is crucially dependent on rains that full during the monsoon, which account for 84% of Bihar’s total annual rainfall.

There are three crop seasons in Bihar: Kharif, Rabi and Zaid. The Kharif season is generally from June to September. Crops are usually sown at the beginning of the monsoon season around June and harvested by September or October. Onset of the monsoon toward the end of June or early July generally provides enough water for the rice, the main Kharif crop. Any aberration in rainfall during this period affects the prospect of good yield, so this motivated our concerted effort to study the potential usefulness of disseminating subseasonal forecast information to the rural commuintes of Bihar to improve climate resilience in agriculture.

For our case study, we included both the flood-prone northern districts of Darbhanga and East Champaran as well as the drought-prone southern districts, Nawada and Jehanabad.

The work was part of the International Research and Applications Project (IRAP), a joint effort led by researchers at IRI and the University of Arizona and funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

What kind of information did the forecasts provide and how far in advance?

We provided subseasonal-to-seasonal rainfall forecasts throughout the 2018 Indian summer monsoon season. Two-week subseasonal forecasts were generated in real time every Thursday from June 7 to September 27, making 17 weekly issuances in all. We restricted the forecast lead time to about two weeks in advance because we found a lack of forecast strength and skill at longer lead times. The forecast maps were discussed each week with IMD, and displayed through a virtual maproom. A text summary was sent to Bihar’s State Agricultural Universities, which then forwarded them via a nongovernmental organization to disseminate to farmers.

What’s unique about this collaboration with the India Meteorology Department?

IRI has had a long relationship with IMD in terms of scientific collaboration. This particular work had a number of unique components. First, although IMD has recently begun issuing extended-range forecasts of monsoon rainfall up to 4 weeks ahead for every meteorological subdivision in India, access to timely and relevant climate information for rural communities at district-level is still very limited. IRI and IMD worked closely to develop subseasonal forecasts specifically at the district level.

Second, the two institutions also worked closely with government and nongovernmental institutions to improve dissemination of the forecasts, so that they reach rural communities. This also included capacity building for agricultural extension staff.

As part of the project, we helped develop and launch a virtual maproom that includes not only subseasonal forecasts, but also historical information, other forecasts and real-time monitoring. IMD provided its own high-resolution data to feed into the maproom. And finally, it’s great to see that even after the end of the project, IMD and its partners continue to send the S2S forecasts to farmers in Bihar. This is itself a huge success of the project.

In what ways is (or can) this information be useful for decision making? Are there plans to go beyond Bihar?

Farmers in the four districts used the forecasts for farm-level planning and decisions. For example, the 2018 monsoon reached Bihar on June 25–26, almost 16 days later than the average onset date of June 10 for the state. Rice farmers used this time-ahead knowledge to delay sowing and planting.

Because this experimental S2S forecast generated strong demand by the user community, our colleagues at IMD say they plan to extend the system for the entire country in the near future.

Here at IRI, we’re working on replicating the system for our partner countries in ACToday, the Columbia World Project we’re leading. For example, we’ve heard from both the meteorological department and the agriculture extension service of Bangladesh to implement S2S forecasts in the country as part of ACToday-Bangladesh.

You’ve been developing a model that tries to predict climate migrations, using the 2018 Guatemalan migration as a test case. What are the factors that go into such a model? What are its limitations?

Migrations are caused by multiple and entangled factors, making them in general virtually impossible to predict. Our analysis found that a combination of an increasing infant mortality rate since 2012, a high food-price inflation rate (the fourth highest since 1996), and an increase in the unemployment rate set the stage for the migration that occurred in 2018. In addition, the region endured a multi-year drought during the previous three years. This acted as the final stressor because it drastically increased household debts via reduced staple crop harvests, and it limited access to unskilled employment in the agricultural sector.

Over the last year, there have been numerous stories (e.g., here, here and here) that imply climate change was the chief culprit behind the mass migration out of Guatemala and other Central American countries to the U.S.? Is this accurate?

It is not accurate. Our research shows that socio-economic factors are the most important drivers of the 2018 Guatemalan migration to the U.S., although the recent multi-year drought in the region played a role as a trigger of the population displacement. Nonetheless, this multi-year drought is mostly related to natural climate variability. Climate change typically explains about 1% of the total annual rainfall variation in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

You’ll also be showcasing the latest developments in the NextGen forecasting system that ACToday has helped implement so far in Guatemala and Colombia. Briefly, what is NextGen, and why is the forecasting community becoming so excited about it?

NextGen is a systematic general approach for designing, implementing, producing and verifying objective regional-scale climate forecasts. It helps staff at national meteorological institutions select the best set of dynamical models for their regions of interest. It allows them to create forecasts based on these models for seasonal and sub-seasonal time scales and at a regional, national or sub-national level. NextGen also automates the process of generating and verifying these forecasts.

The forecast and climate services communities in Colombia and Guatemala are excited about NextGen because it helps provide more skillful predictions at multiple timescales for total rainfall, consecutive dry days and other variables and thresholds of interest to their users. It’s an approach known as flexible format forecasting, pioneered at IRI.

What are flood-sensing algorithms? How do they work? How do you improve the accuracy of these algorithms?

Flood sensing algorithms are equations designed to identify the signal of water on the land surface. Once this water signature can be identified mathematically, it can be detected in any pixel in satellite image to classify if that pixel is water or land. Every satellite has a unique water signal. In optical satellites, which operate sort of like a fancy camera that captures many intervals of the light spectrum, water tends to be very dark and easily separated from other objects. The land surface—even dark objects like roads or soils—tend to reflect some light in the near infrared or short-wave infrared spectrum. Other satellites are radar based—sending down active signals to earth and assessing the way the signal bounces back (often called backscatter). Water—a smooth object—tends to have a smoother signal (and lower backscatter) compared to other surfaces. So, flood detection algorithms essentially map surface water, and the analyst can then remove “permanent” water to separate the flood water from normal or seasonal surface water.

Improving algorithm accuracy for single-satellite sensors can be done by developing better mathematical techniques to separate water from land. This is typically done through better methods or better reference data (e.g points or maps of verified flood and non-flood areas) to fine tune or train algorithms. However, because of infrequent satellite revisit time and cloud interference, I argue that perfecting algorithms is unlikely to make better flood maps. The most gains can be made using data fusion—mapping floods across many types of sensors, or using other data from crowdsourcing or flood models—to fill in what the satellite cannot see.

You’re relatively new at IRI, how do you see your specialty in remote-sensing fitting into existing work IRI has done on flood-vulnerable communities?

IRI has done a lot of work on climatic extremes for both droughts and floods, mostly looking at precipitation and soil moisture. My expertise can take these analyses one step further by linking observations of flood damage and inundated areas to climatic variability. Humans have built so many adaptions to floods, that heavy rainfall does not always mean a heavy flood if there is well-built infrastructure. Floods also tend to accumulate in marginalized communities who experience systematic inequality or who can’t afford—or aren’t afforded by their government—the necessary protection. Directly observing inundation provides data to dig deeper into these social questions that precipitation data alone cannot resolve.

I am using these data in applications for index-based insurance in Bangladesh as part of Columbia World Project’s Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today, for Tomorrow (ACToday).

In your abstract, you point out an accuracy gap between the published methods for making flood maps from satellites and many instances in which these methods are implemented across many images. Why do you think this gap is so large and how does the new metric you’re proposing help close it?

The gap is large because most accuracy and validation techniques rely on sampling many points or comparing a flood map to a high-resolution optical image. This method demands a relatively cloud-free optical image. Cloud-free images that capture flooding are rare because floods often occur due to heavy rainfall and storms that come with large clouds that block the view. This means that cloud-free images are available usually after the storm subsides, and flood water will only be present in a large watershed or a slow-moving event. Urban floods or floods of lower magnitude or high frequency are often not captured. Thus, algorithms tend to report high accuracies on slow-moving floods, which are easy to map.

Reproducing these same algorithms on fast-moving floods, in areas with many clouds and cloud shadows (which are dark and often misclassified as flood), or in more complex urban areas with infrastructure, tends to achieve lower-accuracy results.

I also think the sampling approaches accepted in published literature tend to be too generous towards correctly mapping land! Mapping flood waters—which are turbid and often mixed with vegetation—are much harder to map than surface water in a lake on a clear day. Most papers use one or several flood events to test an algorithm, instead of assessing how well an algorithm works consistently over time.

We need metrics that measure data coverage and algorithm accuracy targeted at the objects decision makers care about, which I call critical assets. Coverage and critical asset accuracy need to be assessed daily over an entire rainy season—ideally over multiple seasons.

Most algorithms mark cloud or cloud shadow areas as “no data”. This means that a flood map where 80% of the area is “no data” but the remaining 20% was accurate mapped at 95% is often reported as having 95% accuracy. But for a decisionmaker—is a map where 80% of the area is missing a flood map with 95% accuracy? Probably not. I think in flood mapping we need to report the data coverage metrics along with algorithm accuracy metrics—and calculate the unmapped area over time. Using a sensor that often has missing data due to clouds, even if the algorithm is 95% accurate, could be less preferrable to a decisionmaker (but depends on the decision!) than using a radar sensor (that can see through clouds), which has 100% coverage but an algorithm that is only 70% accurate. The accuracy-coverage tradeoffs need to be made clearer in remote sensing publications. The accuracy-coverage tradeoff may be different for disaster relief, insurance, or flood recover applications.

Why is it so important to continue to evaluate and improve the quality of information from satellites? 

The frequency and magnitude of floods already causes setbacks to development especially in vulnerable communities – and is only expected to increase. Flood impacts are expected to double with 1.5 degrees of warming and could potentially quadruple with 3 degrees of warming—which is the track we are essentially headed on now!

Satellite-based flood maps can improve models that predict flooding and establish new forms of financial protection, like insurance, in new and cost-effective ways to protect and promote sustainable development. Satellite information can also provide greater access to flood maps in places that lack field instrumentation and need immediate information for response in emergencies. Investing in this technology is an investment in mitigating the damaging effects of floods and now and in the future.

NASA and Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) partner with humanitarian organizations to provide near real-time data on land use, rainfall and elevation.

Camp managers and other local officials overseeing Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh are now incorporating NASA satellite observations into their decision making in order to reduce the risk to refugees from landslides and other natural hazards. Information like daily rain totals can help inform how to lay out refugee camps and store supplies.

More than 740,000 Rohingya refugees have fled to Bangladesh since August 2017. Many of them have sought shelter in camps located in the hilly countryside, where landslide risk may be the greatest. Increasing this danger is Bangladesh’s intense monsoon season. Approximately 80 percent of Bangladesh’s yearly rain falls in just five months, from June to October, bringing with it an increased risk of flash flooding and landslides.

When these refugee camps were built in the southeastern part of the country, plants and trees were removed and their roots no longer helped to hold the soil in place. The soaked hillsides are at even greater risk of cleaving off with heavy rains. In July 2019, after 14 inches of rain fell in 72 hours, 26 landslides in Rohingya refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, killed one person and left more than 4,500 without shelter.

“We have little information on landslides,” said Hafizol Islam, who is in charge of one of the most densely populated camps of the Kutupalong mega-camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. “It is unpredictable for us and can happen at any time.”

Now Islam and other camp managers have access to maps and a daily-updated website that provides near real-time data on land use, rainfall and elevation, thanks to a collaboration between NASA and Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI).

The data come from the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instruments on NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites. Taken together, these maps and data provide a clearer picture of when and where landslide hazard is concentrated, and can help support decision-making by disaster response managers, businesses, and humanitarian aid organizations.

“With landslides, flash floods and rapid development, the terrain of these camps is constantly changing,” said Robert Emberson, NASA Postdoctoral Program fellow at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Emberson and other researchers from NASA’s Earth Applied Sciences Disasters Program as well as IRI are using new approaches to work alongside humanitarian end-users and develop products to address pressing needs in vulnerable settings. During a workshop and field visit this August to Cox’s Bazar, the NASA and IRI team worked with UN partners to bolster their understanding and integration of landslide hazard products, while also learning about the different needs of humanitarian actors.

“This partnership has provided an iterative dialogue that enables us to develop NASA products as the changes occur, and supports the different timelines of hazard-related actions,” said Emberson. The partnership is the first of its kind to seek the feedback of the people affected about the decisions made and actions needed. It is also the first to develop maps based on this input.

The need for coordination is pressing. Bangladesh has seen steadily increasing rainfall totals over the past 50 years, and in addition to making monsoons in Asia more extreme, climate change may be doubling the likelihood of extreme rainfall events even before monsoon season begins. The results can be devastating: In September 2019, nearly 20,000 refugees were affected by 16 different floods, including 2,000 refugees who were affected by new landslides.

The mechanism for coordination of the UN and NGO response to the Rohingya crisis is the Inter-Sector Coordination Group, which has adopted and endorsed the resulting landslide susceptibility map as the official common reference map for hazard assessment and risk reduction investments. This information is helping the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and other UN agencies plan risk reduction and hazard mitigation within the camps.

“We need to understand if, why and when existing risk information is being used,” said IRI’s Andrew Kruczkiewicz, one of the principal investigators of the project. “This strengthens the development of data services for humanitarian emergencies, where decisions and priorities change rapidly. Working in teams that bridge traditional professional and disciplinary boundaries gives data and climate scientists the opportunity to learn more about decision making in specialized contexts.”

Cathrine Haarsaker is project manager for the UNDP Disaster Risk Management in Cox’s Bazar Programme. “The partnership with NASA and IRI helps the UN agencies to assess risks like landslides or flash flooding and supports the disaster management in a scientific way to save lives and reduce damages in the refugee camps,”she said.

Next steps for the partnership between NASA, IRI and the UN agencies include the integration of different hazard types affecting the area, such as flash floods, and incorporating additional data that can more closely speak to the exposure of roads and buildings to these hazards. The team is co-developing the information with UNDP, the International Organization for Migration, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, and the Inter-Sector Coordination Group for Cox’s Bazar through the Connecting Earth Observations to Decision Makers for Preparedness Actions project.

The organizers say their partnership will serve as a template for future science-driven data development and integration for humanitarian efforts in complex settings.

Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today, for Tomorrow

Columbia World Projects’ first project, ACToday, aims to combat hunger and improve food security by increasing climate knowledge in six countries that are particularly dependent on agriculture and vulnerable to the effects of climate change and fluctuations—Ethiopia, Senegal, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Colombia, and Guatemala.

With its population of nearly 160 million people, Bangladesh is the eighth most populous country in the world. Its geography – tropical, low-lying, with a sizable coastline – make the country one of the most vulnerable to climate change. Rising sea levels, increased cyclone intensity and frequency, and higher temperatures all pose threats to an agriculture sector already under pressure to feed the country’s food insecure. The ACToday project is involved with a number of initiatives in Bangladesh aimed at managing this risk, learning from seasoned practitioners, and collaborating on proactive adaptation strategies for agriculture.

In the Q&A below, Ashley Curtis discusses what it means to manage a world project and the necessity of addressing present day variability in addition to its context of long-term climate change. Curtis is a senior staff associate at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) and part of the ACToday Bangladesh team. She also coordinates IRI’s Climate Program and is actively involved with the IRI’s partnership with the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC). 

You spent several years as a Peace Corps volunteer with a wildlife conservation group in the Philippines. How has this experience working directly in project implementation informed the work you do for ACToday Bangladesh?

Besides fine-tuning my karaoke repertoire? Peace Corps in the Philippines made me comfortable with fully immersing myself in different cultures. The most useful discussions often happen in casual conversation instead of formal meetings. Taking the time to appreciate local traditions, values and food is not only an incredible cultural experience, but is invaluable for building camaraderie and trust, laying the groundwork for working together. We’re not just coming in out of nowhere with no context – we’re there to learn about local perspectives and needs first before moving forward with an agenda.

As a project manager for ACToday activities in Bangladesh, I’ve learned to balance going with the flow – adjusting to the varying pacing and demands of remote collaboration – and pushing forward with what we are trying to accomplish. Understanding and accepting that projects rarely develop exactly according to plan has allowed me to be flexible and creative in their implementation.

Bangladesh is often referred to as being on the frontlines of the fight against climate change. Given the many dimensions of Bangladesh’s vulnerability, how is ACToday prioritizing which climate service initiatives can most effectively promote food security?

Beyond prioritizing specific climate services, IRI is working to provide sustained, holistic support for the development of climate services in Bangladesh. To this end, we co-founded the Bangladesh Academy for Climate Services (BACS) with the Bangladesh Meteorological Department, the International Center for Climate Change and Development, and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center. Sustained, holistic support includes both building local capacity to provide climate services and creating a network to connect people and organizations in a country where knowledge and activities are typically very siloed. There are so many efforts that aren’t connected; getting everyone on the same page replaces needless duplication with productive collaboration. 

Bangladesh is also recognized as a world-leader in climate adaptation. What can the rest of the world learn from Bangladesh’s actions against climate change? Given the whole ecosystem of adaptation initiatives already underway in Bangladesh, what unique contribution does ACToday and Columbia University have to offer?

Bangladesh may be leading the way in climate adaptation, but we’ve found that the idea of providing climate services on shorter timescales is still new to most of our partners and stakeholders. Seasonal, sub-seasonal and even historical climate information can be useful in ways that differ from long-term climate projections. Bangladesh is vulnerable right now. It’s great that climate change is being embedded in long-term planning, but we also need to focus on dealing with the climate variability stakeholders are already experiencing.

“Fish and rice make a Bengali.” This proverb identifies two key staple foods in the local diet and two major focus areas for ACToday Bangladesh. Agriculture and aquaculture stakeholders have a more immediate need for seasonal and sub-seasonal forecasts than for longer-term climate projections. This was re-affirmed in the recent Enhancing National Climate Services (ENACTS) launch in Dhaka, where representatives from these sectors discussed ways in which they could use short-term climate information in decision making. To connect users with services available on these time scales, the upcoming BACS workshop in October will include an introduction to the ENACTS data sets and maprooms. Our goal is to develop a seamless set of climate services that connects all time scales. With this, users will be able to draw on information from different time scales as they need it.

One of the key objectives of the Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today, for Tomorrow (ACToday) project is to use trainings to build up the technical skills and capacity of staff working within national and regional climate institutions in the project’s six focus countries.

One such training took place this past summer. Seven climate scientists and modelers from four Latin American countries spent a week at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society in New York to learn the state-of-the-art model calibration approach, data analysis and verification methods that comprise the NextGen forecast system being implemented by ACToday. The training was also supported by Columbia University’s President’s Global Innovation Fund and the Columbia Global Center in Santiago, Chile.

NextGen is much more than just an advanced technical way of combining models or developing forecasts, said Ángel Muñoz, who leads ACToday’s work in Colombia and Guatemala.

“It’s designed with users and decision makers in mind, and it taps into local technical expertise and local climate data,” he said. “Because we work so closely with the national meteorological services to develop NextGen, they become co-owners and are invested in its success.”

The improved seasonal climate forecasts produced by NextGen are tailored to be especially useful to decision making and planning in agriculture, energy and other sectors, said José Franklyn Ruiz, from Colombia’s Instituto de Hidrología, Meteorología y Estudios Ambientales (IDEAM), which launched NextGen earlier this past month.

Another training participant, Rosario Gómez, who works in the country’s Instituto Nacional de Sismología, Vulcanología, Meteorología e Hidrología (INSIVUMEH), is also excited about giving farmers and other end users better information.

“It’s the poorest people or those with fewest resources who are most affected by climate risks,” she said. Gómez has worked closely with ACToday to recently launch five new mesas técnicas agroclimáticas or agroclimatic roundtables across the country. Guatemala launched NextGen last week (NBC story).

For Diego Campos, from Chile’s Dirección Meteorológica (DMC), the weeklong training offered an important opportunity to spend time among colleagues from other regions in Latin America. “Now we’re a network, and I know I can count on them and they can count on me to work through difficulties we might come across when developing new forecasts.”

Muñoz later visited Chile to follow up on the training and meet with Campos and his colleagues to discuss NextGen implementation at the DMC.

Ousmane Ndiaye, an adjunct research scientist at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society, recently became the director of Senegal’s national meteorology service, which is part of the country’s National Civil Aviation and Meteorology Agency (ANACIM). Ndiaye now oversees all matters related to climate services in Senegal. 

Ndiaye earned his doctorate from Columbia University in 2010 for his research with IRI scientists to develop accurate ways to predict the onset and character of the rainy season across the Sahel. He returned to Senegal to share his knowledge and contribute to building the capacity of the country’s meteorological agency. While the allure of job offers in the United States did not make this decision easy, Ndiaye was ultimately motivated by knowing work would have more societal value back in Senegal.

In an email to IRI, Ndiaye wrote about how his experiences at IRI contributed to his career accomplishments back home, and how these experiences inform the outlook he brings into his new role. 

“While at IRI, I had the opportunity to contribute to work being done in Africa, especially trainings on seasonal forecasting,” he recalled. This illuminated a gap in local climate science capacity that he saw he could fill.

Ndiaye has remained connected to IRI, and contributes to a number of initiatives led by his former colleagues. He has worked to help implement ENACTS in West Africa, develop climate services for farmers in Senegal, and is a close partner in the ACToday Columbia World Project (Senegal is one of the six project countries).

For Ndiaye, climate science is never far from the human dimension. In an interview with NPR, he describes his relationships with the farmers and communities he works with as personal.

“It’s not just a technician coming from the Met Service coming to train people and go,” he says.  “We discuss, we consult, we talk on the phone, we talk about a lot of things. When you go to give the forecast, [you] discuss with people, engage with them. There is no price for it. You know their families, you know the names of their children, you know the problems they live with.” 

Ndiaye’s old role will be filled by Oumar Konte, with whom IRI has worked through the R4 Rural Resilience Initiative run by the World Food Program and Oxfam America. 

Now as a director, Ndiaye said, “I feel the responsibility and the moral duty of not failing and to raise the met service to another level for the betterment of the population who direly needs climate services.”

We look forward to working with him. Congratulations once more, Ousmane! 

ENACTS enjoyed a fantastic representation and reached the hundreds of climate professionals, policy makers, and users gathered at the 2019 GHACOF. The meteorological agencies of both Ethiopia and Rwanda, as well as ICPAC itself all featured IRI’s ENACTS (Enhancing National Climate Services) initiative at their stalls. The marketplace has helped to spotlight how ENACTS is being used at both the national and regional level, demonstrating the program’s value in supporting decision making in agriculture, public health and other sectors.

On the third day of this year’s GHACOF, a select group of climate service providers participated in a marketplace-style event where they could present and discuss their products, programs and impacts in the Greater Horn region with forum goers. The “marketplace” approach is a very effective way that allows group of participants to visit different stalls and then discuss what they have observed.

“ENACTS has been implemented by six countries in the region as well as by ICPAC now,” said IRI’s Tufa Dinku. “The marketplace gave a lot of visibility to the ENACTS approach of improving climate data and information products, as well as their use. We are very happy that the first three stalls were ENACTS stalls.”

DfID’s WISER program, which has been supporting the strengthening and expansion of ENACTS in the region, also supported the participation in the marketplace.

Central to ACToday’s goal is to work closely with the national meteorological agencies of the six partner countries, and help build their capacity to provide state-of-the art climate services to ministries, other government agencies, farmers and other decision makers. IRI’s 20 years of experience has shown that organizing tailored in-country trainings in both forecasting methodology and new data tools can be very effective and provide longstanding benefits for these institutions and the users who depend on their products.

The IRI researchers working on ACToday also understand that the simultaneous building of skills and accumulation of experience within these six countries often allows for new knowledge and problem-solving lessons to cut across national boundaries. Such an outcome is critical for a multi-country, multidisciplinary project that ultimately aims to improve the food security of a combined population of nearly 500 million people.

For example, this past April simultaneous trainings occurred in Ethiopia and Vietnam. The training in Ethiopia was led by the ACToday country lead for Senegal, Sylwia Trzaska. The training in Vietnam was led by climate scientists Bradfield Lyon and Simon Mason. Both of these trainings extended beyond the typical tutorial image that the word “training” conjures.

“The training was designed as more of a workshop than a series of lectures,” said Lyon. “We encouraged input from the participants, not only on technical aspects of the work, but also on specific areas of inquiry that they are either currently working on or are interested in pursuing.”

This approach creates a feedback loop wherein the participants can make sure they get the most relevant experience as possible out of the two-week-long sessions. 

In most cases, Trzaska says, “The participants are already very good at using the various data, tools and applications operationally; this training was about refining the understanding of what’s behind the tools and what the next developments could be.”

Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today, for Tomorrow

Columbia World Projects’ first project, ACToday, aims to combat hunger and improve food security by increasing climate knowledge in six countries that are particularly dependent on agriculture and vulnerable to the effects of climate change and fluctuations—Ethiopia, Senegal, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Colombia, and Guatemala.

Colombia is highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate variability and change. Large settlements in the Andes and coastal regions means that people’s safety and well-being are at risk from both water shortages and flooding. Climate change also threatens to disrupt the balance of Colombia’s diverse ecosystems, including agro-ecosystems that the country’s large rural population relies on for subsistence. The effect of climate on shade-grown coffee has been one focal point of the ACToday project in Colombia. Although coffee is not an edible crop, its production is a large factor in the food security of communities whose livelihoods depend on it, especially in Colombia and other major coffee growing regions of the world. In the Q&A below, Juan Nicolás Hernandez-Aguilera discusses his research on sustainable coffee production. Hernandez-Aguilera is an Earth Institute Postdoctoral Research Fellow based at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society. Originally from Colombia, his interest in the stark contrast between Colombia’s natural resource wealth and high levels of inequality, rural violence and deforestation has manifested in feeling a “responsibility to bring research toward action.”

You’re an economist specializing in making impact assessments and creating models, and you are also a member of IRI’s Financial Instrument Sectors Team, which focuses on developing index insurance to help farmers cover some climate risks. What is the value of having multidisciplinary ACToday teams working in each of the countries? How does this dynamic affect the life cycle of a project?

As an economist and social scientist, one of my primary concerns is how to translate my work into policies and recommendations for sustainable development. Both the ACToday and financial instruments teams include economists, climate scientists, geographers, physicists, biologists and data analysts, among others. This diversity facilitates a holistic understanding of the complex interactions between climate, agriculture and poverty, ultimately paving the path toward the implementation of appropriate market instruments and policies.

Projects in multidisciplinary settings are equally exciting and challenging. Just imagine the dynamics of having people with different backgrounds sit down to tackle a common problem. It requires confident members who can contribute their knowledge and expertise, but who are also open to learning. Multidisciplinary research demands building trust among team members, which can mean an extra investment of time. In the long-run, however, it is very rewarding, stimulating and relevant.

Your research explores the complex decision making that underlies sustainable coffee production. In a recent study you discussed ways in which shade-grown coffee can be viewed as an adaptive strategy to climate variability and change for smallholder farmers. How does this research tie into the work you do with ACToday Colombia?

Coffee is one of the most important–if not the most important–agricultural sector in four out of six ACToday countries (Colombia, Ethiopia, Guatemala and Vietnam). In Colombia, for example, coffee directly employs 550,000 smallholders. Changes in climate may result in significant reductions of land suitable for coffee production in all of these countries.

Addressing the challenges of climate variability and low profitability in the coffee sector will not be simple. Coffee-production systems are subject to diverse geographical and socio-economic factors, even across regions within the same country. My research on transitioning to shade-grown coffee does not attempt to suggest a one-size-fits-all recommendation. Instead, it provides scenarios and estimations for land-management decisions that incorporate the pest control services offered by birds inhabiting shade trees. These scenarios also incorporate the possibility that consumers will recognize – and pay premium prices for – improved product quality and biodiversity conservation. Finally, my research highlights other long-term benefits of shade-grown coffee, such as temperature regulation. 

Our ACToday activities are based on the needs and feedback we receive from a diverse set of stakeholders. For example, Colombia’s Ministry of Agriculture has expressed interest in improving and investing its existing risk assessment system for agriculture. Weather-based index insurance products are usually designed using a combination of satellite estimates, meteorological station data and data gathered directly from farmers’ workshops and household surveys. While satellite data can cover large areas, weather patterns and local topography can affect its reliability. Traditional participatory processes can produce valuable and detailed data but are time-consuming, expensive and limited in scope. As such, I am now looking at gamification–the use of game design elements in non-game contexts–as a way to incentivize and scale-up the generation of historical climate information from rural communities. If we increase our understanding of how to get large numbers of smallholders to produce good quality climate data on a regular basis, we can improve the availability of farm-specific, user-friendly, reliable and affordable information.

How is your work with ACToday Colombia helping to promote food security in the region? As a Colombian, what do you see as the main challenges to successful implementation of your research results and recommendations?

Coffee constitutes the main cash crop for 25 million producers and their families worldwide. This is a production system that mainly employs smallholders. We know that food security is linked with income: having a sustainable source of income facilitates access to more nutritious foods. Moreover, financial instruments and early-warning systems reduce vulnerability to climate shocks, which can otherwise compromise long-term investments and productivity.

Rules, legislation and frameworks in Colombia are usually very good and even serve as reference points for other countries in the region. However, the implementation of polices and effective coordination between different groups and agencies are always challenging. As a Colombian, I perceive that the main challenge is generating a cohesive dialogue among key stakeholders.

In addition to our collaboration with  the National Meteorological Institute, we have also worked with the National Department of Planning, Ministry of Agriculture, and the Rural and Agriculture Planning Unit. Finally, we are involving local academic research centers as platforms to facilitate these dialogues. This summer, two interns from Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs supported by ACToday are actively collaborating with the Center for Sustainable Development Goals for Latin America and the Caribbean (CODS) at the Universidad de Los Andes. The ACToday Colombia team is now reinforcing those connections and inviting new and diverse actors.

Since August 2017, Bangladesh’s south-east area has seen a huge influx of Rohingya refugees from Myanmar.

During the summer and rainy season, vulnerability of refugees and host communities to wind, landslide and flooding increases greatly, and despite best efforts from public and private sector partners, there still remains room for improvement in reducing the risks of disasters.

To take early action and respond effectively to these events, it is crucial that decision makers have access to appropriate weather and hazard information to help them prioritize needs and effectively use limited financial resources.

In light of this, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the International Organization for Migration (IOM), and the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) together with NASA and Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) are working to support weather and climate-sensitive decision making for disaster preparedness.

Under the “Connecting Earth Observations to Decision Makers for Preparedness Actions (COMPAS)” project, there will be provision of climate and weather advice, development of hazard modeling products, and learning opportunities on risk-informed decision making.

UNDP recently hosted a team from NASA and IRI in Cox’s Bazar, where the scientists met with the teams from UNDP, IOM and UNHCR on the ground.

The visit included a learning workshop with staff from the UN, international and national nongovernmental organizations, as well as the Bangladesh government. The workshop involved walking through different decisions that are made before an action is taken during heavy rainfall events in the refugee camps.

“The workshop was to help familiarize participants with contextualizing risks through earth observations and other types of data like maps in their decision-making process,” said Shanna McClain, from NASA’s Earth Science Division. She noted that it was a reciprocal interaction, where the workshop participants learned about approaches used be NASA and IRI, and the visiting scientists learned about the highly localized decisions that must be made by humanitarian professionals working in the camp.

“The COMPAS project offers an opportunity for climate scientists to learn more about decision making in humanitarian emergencies and specialized contexts, such as the Rohingya refugee camps, which are challenging due to complex climate and socioeconomic factors,” said IRI’s Andrew Kruczkiewicz, who is one of the principal investigators of the project.

The team also visited sites within the Rohingya camps to assess landslide susceptibility and meet with government representatives and Rohingya refugees. The Camp-In-Charge of Camp 10, Hafizol Islam, welcomed the discussion around landslides, about which he has less knowledge than cyclones. “We have little information on landslides. It is unpredictable for us and can happen at any time,” he said.

For McClain, the visit was a chance to get more support from multiple decision-making levels regarding disaster risk reduction.

“Working with UNDP, IOM, UNHCR and partners in Bangladesh has helped us understand what is critical to them and also helps us develop our products in a way that answers the kind of questions they have,” she said.

Kruczkiewicz said he was grateful to the humanitarian professionals who participated in the workshop.

“It was a privilege to work alongside some of the key stakeholders involved in the Rohingya response on the ground.” He said their input was critical for IRI and NASA to develop a collaborative process for climate service development, including tailored climate risk products for specific disaster risk reduction activities.

“We realize that this meant taking some time away from their humanitarian activities” he said. “The fact that they did so shows us that they also see value in the work we are doing there.”

Ángel Muñoz provides the briefing summary:

What’s New

See below for tweets summarizing the current El Niño situation.

ENSO Forecasts

To predict ENSO conditions, computers model the SSTs in the Niño3.4 region over the next several months. The plume graph below shows the outputs of these models, some of which use equations based on our physical understanding of the system (called dynamical models), and some of which use statistics, based on the long record of historical observations.

The probability for El Niño conditions to continue has dropped to around 40% for the remainder of the year. The El Niño odds are lower in the official probabilistic forecast issued by CPC and IRI in early August than in the mid-month IRI/CPC forecast. The earlier forecast uses human judgement in addition to model output, while the mid-month forecast relies solely on model output. More on the difference between these forecasts in this IRI Medium post.

ENSO in context: Resource page on climate variability

IRI’s Global Seasonal Forecasts

Each month, IRI issues seasonal climate forecasts for the entire globe. These forecasts take into account the latest model outputs and indicate which areas are more likely to see above- or below-normal temperatures and precipitation.

All forecast maps, including temperature in addition to precipitation, and also including a description of the methodologies, are available on our seasonal forecast page. Additional forecast formats, such as our flexible forecast maproom, are available in the IRI Data Library.

Learn more about El Niño and La Niña on our ENSO resources page, and sign up here to get notified when the next forecast is issued. In the meantime, check out #IRIforecast.

Columbia World Projects‘ first project, Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today, for Tomorrow (ACToday), aims to combat hunger and improve food security by increasing climate knowledge in six countries that are particularly dependent on agriculture and vulnerable to the effects of climate change and fluctuations ⁠—Ethiopia, Senegal, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Colombia, and Guatemala. The project is led by the International Research Institute for Climate and Society. This article takes an in-depth look at recent activities in Vietnam that advance ACToday’s objective of helping the country meet its goals on food security. Read the full story here.

When many people envision food security in Vietnam, they think of rice. More than seven million tons of it are harvested each year, making Vietnam the third largest exporter of the crop. What isn’t exported feeds the Vietnamese population: rice provides 65% of people’s daily calories on average, making it a vital piece of both food and financial security.

However, many of those working in agriculture in Vietnam believe rice may not be the future of food security for the country going forward. Cash crops such as coffee, cashews and fruit may provide more stability and better value, allowing small-scale farmers to start to pull themselves out of poverty and to access higher nutrition foods. Regardless of the crop, the uncertainties of a variable climate pose a challenge to farmers’ success.

“We’re building working relationships between the users of climate information and those agencies responsible for providing that information, and evaluating where ACToday can best provide support to Vietnam.”

John Furlow, ACToday country lead in Vietnam & Deputy Director (IRI)

These are the kinds of ideas that teams from the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) and the Center for International Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) heard at a policy workshop in March in Vietnam, as part of Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today, for Tomorrow (ACToday), the first Columbia World Project. The workshop, supported by ACToday and by a CIAT-implemented project known as DeRISK, convened representatives from government agencies and farmers’ groups to discuss what climate information is currently being generated and used for agriculture and where the process can be improved for more effective decision making.

The IRI and CIAT organizers asked officials from the National Center for Hydrological and Meteorological Forecasting (NCHMF), the Vietnam Institute of Meteorology, Hydrology and Climate Change (IMHEN), and the Ministry of Agriculture and the National Institute of Nutrition to work together on their approaches to food security and nutrition. Each of the agencies presented their mission and objectives and explained their role in helping Vietnam achieve UN Sustainable Development Goal 2: ending hunger and malnutrition, achieving food security, and promoting sustainable agriculture.

Experience the full story here.

The El Niño-Southern Oscillation has been responsible for widespread, simultaneous crop failures in recent history, according to a new study from researchers at Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and other partners. This finding runs counter to a central pillar of the global agriculture system, which assumes that crop failures in geographically distant breadbasket regions such as the United States, China and Argentina are unrelated. The results also underscore the potential opportunity to manage such climate risks, which can be predicted using seasonal climate forecasts.

The study, featured on the cover of this month’s Science Advances, is the first to provide estimates of the degree to which different modes of climate variability such as ENSO cause volatility in global and regional production of corn, wheat and soy. Such variability caused nearly 18 percent volatility in global corn production from 1980 to 2010, for example.

“Global agriculture counts on the strong likelihood that poor production in one part of the world will be made up for by good production elsewhere,” said Weston Anderson, a postdoctoral research scientist at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society and lead author on the study.

Of course, there’s always a chance—however small—that it won’t. The assumption until now has been that widespread crop failures would come from a set of random, adverse weather events, Anderson said.

He and his co-authors decided to test this idea by looking at the impact that the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, the Indian Ocean Dipole, and other well-understood climate patterns have had on global production of corn, soybeans and wheat. They analyzed how these modes of climate variability influenced drought and heat in major growing regions.

“We found that ENSO can, and has, forced multiple breadbasket failures, including a significant one in 1983,” said Anderson. “The problem with pooling our risk as a mitigating strategy is that it assumes failures are random. But we know that strong El Niño or La Niña events in effect organize which regions experience drought and extreme temperatures. For some crops, that reorganization forces poor yields in multiple major production regions simultaneously.”

How important is the influence of climate variability? The authors found that, on a global level, corn is the most susceptible to such crop failures. They found that 18% percent of the year-to-year changes in corn production were the result of climate variability. Soybeans and wheat were found to be less at risk for simultaneous failures, with climate variability accounting for 7% and 6% of the changes in global production, respectively.

“The bigger the uncertainty around climate drivers, the bigger the risk for those involved in the food systems,” said co-author Liangzhi You, a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute. “The worst affected are poor farmers in developing countries whose livelihoods depend upon crop yields as they do not have an appetite for risks in absence of formal insurance products or other coping mechanisms.” The risk is further exacerbated by challenges posed by lack of infrastructure and resources in developing countries.

“ENSO may not be important in all years, but it is the only thing we know of that has forced simultaneous global-scale crop failures,” said Anderson.

Within specific regions, the risk to agriculture by climate variability can be much higher. For example, across much of Africa and in Northeast Brazil, ENSO and other recurring climate phenomena accounted for 40-65% of the ups and downs of food production. In other regions, the number was as low as 10%.

While on the surface this may appear to mean that those areas more affected by ENSO and other climate patterns are more at risk to extreme events, the numbers actually reflect a link to climate patterns that can be monitored and predicted.

“What excites me about this work is that it shows how predictable modes of climate variability impact crop production in multiple regions and can scale up to influence global production, said co-author Richard Seager of Columbia’s Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory. “This should allow anticipation of shocks to global food prices and supplies and, hence, improve efforts to avoid food insecurity and provide emergency food assistance when needed.”

Media Contacts

This research was supported by ACToday, a Columbia World Project, as well as by the National Science Foundation (Award Numbers: NSF-GRF DGE-11-44155, NSF OCE 1657209, NSF 1602581) and from the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (program no. 2662018PY101).

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The International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI), part of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, aims to enhance society’s ability to understand, anticipate and manage the impacts of climate in order to improve human welfare and the environment, especially in developing countries. Visit iri.columbia.edu and follow @climatesociety on Twitter and Instagram.

The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) seeks sustainable solutions for ending hunger and poverty. IFPRI was established in 1975 to identify and analyze alternative national and international strategies and policies for meeting the food needs of the developing world, with particular emphasis on low-income countries and on the poorer groups in those countries Visit: www.ifpri.org

Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today, for Tomorrow (ACToday) is a Columbia World Project led by the International Research Institute for Climate and Society. The project aims to combat hunger and improve food security by increasing climate knowledge in six countries that are particularly dependent on agriculture and vulnerable to the effects of climate change and fluctuations: Bangladesh, Colombia, Ethiopia, Senegal, Vietnam and Guatemala. This is an excerpt of an article that takes an in-depth look at a new series of roundtables launched in Guatemala to advance ACToday’s goals. Read the full story here.

Thousands of Guatemalan farmers will now have access to state-of-the-art forecasts and other climate information to help them increase crop yields and earn more, thanks to five new regional collaborative networks launched by the International Research Institute for Climate and Society and its international and Guatemalan partners. 

“We’re excited that we can have a direct impact on the population. This is something that really gets us up and out of bed every morning.”

Juan Pablo Oliva Hernández, Director of Guatemala’s national meteorological service (INSIVUMEH)

The collaborations are called mesas técnicas agroclimáticas, or agroclimatic roundtables, abbreviated as MTAs. They comprise experts and decision makers ranging from small farmers to representatives from a wide variety of institutions, including local municipalities, national government, humanitarian agencies, farmers associations and international organizations. The representatives meet regularly to discuss recent climate conditions and the latest forecasts. They then agree on a set of good agricultural practices for the region, as well as strategies to communicate those recommendations.

MTAs are a key component of IRI’s work in both Guatemala and Colombia for Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today, for Tomorrow (ACToday), the Columbia World Project it leads.  The goal of ACToday is to use climate science and services, including state-of-the-art forecasting tools, to help Guatemala and five other countries combat hunger and improve food security.

“It’s important we don’t underestimate the tangible difference these roundtables will make in people’s lives,” said IRI’s Walter Baethgen, who co-leads the ACToday project. “We are ensuring that the best climate information Guatemala produces is not only directly making its way to underserved communities, but that the communities have a say in what information gets produced, based on the needs of their growers.”

Much more in the full story here.

ENACTS, which stands for Enhancing National Climate Services, blends together climate data from on-the-ground weather stations with similar data observed via satellite as well as outputs from climate models. The result is a richer, high-quality climate dataset that can be used to improve climate analysis and forecasting for the whole country. The governments of Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda and ten other countries in Africa have integrated ENACTS into their national meteorological services. Regional climate centers in east and west Africa also use ENACTS to provide similar services.

Currently, Bangladesh has only 35 ground-based weather stations, and they are not evenly distributed throughout the country, leaving significant swaths of land without local weather and climate data. The kind of easily accessible climate information provided by ENACTS is essential for enacting risk management strategies that can improve Bangladesh’s resilience to climate shocks.

Building an ENACTS dataset requires a close collaboration between a national meteorological service and scientists from the International Research Institute for Climate and Society. Earlier this month, IRI’s Asher Siebert and Rija Faniriantsoa worked with members of the Bangladesh Meteorological Department (BMD) to quality control the country’s weather station dataset using IRI’s Climate Data Tool, developed by Faniriantsoa and IRI climate scientist Tufa Dinku.

Dinku conceptualized ENACTS after years of operational experience at Ethiopia’s national meteorological service and later research experience at IRI. “The ENACTS team is very excited about establishing our service in Asia. We have started with Bangladesh, and are finalizing plans to be in Vietnam before the end of the year.” Dinku hopes ENACTS will cover a number of other countries in the region within the next few years.

In June, members of the IRI Data Library team will be at BMD to install the new ENACTS datasets, including the quality-controlled weather data. IRI will provide additional technical support for BMD to create custom, publicly-available climate information products, called maprooms. The new products that will provide information that’s useful to planners and decision makers in agriculture, health, water management and other economic sectors.  

“Climate variability contributes to hunger and malnutrition in many parts of Bangladesh,” says Mélody Braun, who leads the ACToday work in Bangladesh. “Helping the BMD provide improved forecasts and other climate tools specifically created for decision makers in the food sector is a key part of our objectives for ACToday.”

A few blocks off of one of Adama’s main roads is an office of the Oromia Regional State’s Agriculture Bureau. It’s a small compound of single-story buildings that surround a dusty courtyard peppered with trees, trucks, tractors and scooters. Mekonnen Diriba has been an agronomist here for the last four years, advising surrounding farming communities on new and best practices in agriculture.

In October 2018, Diriba was one of 55 participants who completed a two-week training held in Addis Ababa on using new climate information products available online. The course, supported by ACToday—a Columbia World Project led by the International Research Institute for Climate and Society—was the first to bring personnel from district offices of the National Meteorological Agency as well as those from agriculture, health and disaster risk management agencies. The training marked the next major step for ACToday in Ethiopia, as the project aims to equip farmers with the best available climate information to manage their food production in times of drought and other climate extremes. Agronomists like Diriba play a key role in ensuring that this happens.

Managing rainfall variability is the most important issue farmers face in Ethiopia, Diriba said. “Because the onset and ending of the rainy season are highly variable, this makes a big challenge for farmers to practice their normal agriculture.”

Ethiopia is still heavily reliant on smallholder farming, which accounts for 85% of the country’s employment and 95% of its agricultural production, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization. Most of the country’s 12 million farming households do not have access to irrigation, making the timing and amount of rains even more critical.

“In Ethiopia, which is frequented by drought, climate variability has drastic impacts on crop yields, which leads to lower incomes for farmers and less available food,” said IRI’s Tufa Dinku, who oversees ACToday efforts in Ethiopia. Dinku worked extensively with the Ethiopian government to bring together different government ministries for this training. “It’s only through trainings like these that we can solve the problem of how to get actionable climate information to those who need it to make decisions that can affect millions of people.”

For a decade, Dinku has led IRI’s ENACTS initiative, which has been able to transform the quality and quantity of national climate data sets and derived information products in a dozen African countries, including Ethiopia. Helping create these new resources and making them available online was only the first step, said Dinku. Equally important is that these products be accessible and useful to individuals and institutions who make planning decisions about agriculture, public health, water and other climate-sensitive sectors.

That’s why he intentionally developed the two-week training for regional-level personnel. “The staff working in the country’s branch offices play a critical role. They’re closer to the actual users of climate information,” he said. “They understand their needs.”

 For example, while employees at headquarter offices in Addis Ababa could brief the Ministry of Agriculture on a national-level overview, they are less likely to be up-to-date on farm-level issues, or to be able to tailor their advisories to millions of Ethiopian farmers.

The participants received a week of instruction on fundamental climate science followed by a week on using maprooms—web-based interactive tools powered by IRI’s Data Library that allow users to find and interpret accurate, up-to-date climate information at the local level. One of the first goals of ACToday in Ethiopia has been to improve the maprooms’ data and user interface to make them more usable for non-scientists. The training introduced several new maps that build off of six years of work under the ENACTS initiative and offered a first opportunity to share the results more broadly. A dozen new maprooms have added information tailored for the water and agriculture sectors, as well as climate information of interest across sectors (see graphic). These maprooms in particular have been better tailored to the needs of the people who are going to use them, and they’ve since generated more demand. Participants immediately noted the profound changes the maprooms could make in their work.

The maprooms utilize historical data, monitoring data, statistical analyses and forecasting methods to provide climate information. For example, with one click a user can see how recent rainfall in their area compares to the last few years and to the long-term average. By monitoring a season’s rainfall as it goes along, there can be better real-time understanding of climate-related risks – for example, whether crops are likely to fail from lack of rainfall. A user can also see whether there’s an increased chance in the months ahead for below or above average rainfall. The maprooms are the only place where this kind of information is available together and without having to download data and run separate analyses.

Akoma Okugn attended as a representative from the Gambela Regional Health Bureau. With the maproom tools, he said, his office can now learn about potential droughts ahead of time and that food aid and nutrition assistance may be needed to help communities.

Maprooms also help climate experts from the Ethiopia’s weather service do their jobs faster and with more accuracy. Participant Wendesen Temesgen, from the National Meteorological Agency’s Southern Regional Service Center, develops climate bulletins for people working in health, agriculture and water management. “We have a variety of climates in this region,” he said. “We have some parts which receive rainfall almost 10 months of the year. Other parts receive a very small amount of rainfall for only few months.” The number and distribution of weather stations in the region is also uneven, he said, which has made it very difficult to give accurate information to decision makers in certain areas.

“The maprooms have solved this,” said Temesgen. “Now we can give any information about every point of the region. This will make our job easier.”

Eneye Assefa, a crop expert at the Amhara regional agriculture office, said she had no meteorological knowledge before the training. The training gave her more confidence to advise farmers on what crops to plant based on rainfall forecasts, with the goal of increasing their productivity.

Assefa planned to train her colleagues as well as those in administrative units below hers when she returned to her office. This is exactly what Dinku hoped would happen—that the participants go back to their respective regions and propagate the training and use of maprooms to other agronomists and agriculture extension professionals. And since many farmers don’t have direct internet access, this is what it will take for farmers to make climate-based decisions to help them grow more food – thousands of intermediaries with enough training and access to deliver the information to farmers in a usable format.

Next, Dinku says that the NMA and the other relevant ministries will need to plan and budget for more training on a wider scale. “The Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock has already indicated an interest to support training of users through its extension system,” he said. Other efforts will use events and meetings to raise awareness about the tools, and a training curriculum, manual and guide are being developed under ACToday to provide support for the trainings. There is also buy-in at the international level – the World Meteorological Organization’s Global Framework for Climate Services has indicated it could provide financial support.

The training ended in Addis Ababa on a Friday. The following Monday morning, Diriba presented what he learned to his regional office director, including his ideas for training people like the development agents who interact with farmers the most. The director approved his plan that day.   

Climate resilience is increasingly prioritized by international development agencies and national governments. To this end, recent years have seen an escalating demand for information about the future impacts of climate change to guide climate resilience efforts in development practice. The growing demand has been met by a proliferation of climate change information products—data portals and analysis tools—and by services that rely on climate model output to guide decision making at national and even local scales. An informed user community is imperative to navigate this rapidly-growing market of climate change information products, and to make informed demands of climate information providers.

In WIREs Climate Change, scientists at Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society and the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre review the evidence on the suitability of climate change projections for use in decision making, including those products developed with the explicit goal of informing adaptation. Worryingly, they caution that current practices in international development are not making use of the best available scientific knowledge to guide development practice.

Within international development programs, projects often rely on climate model projections of expected changes several decades ahead. This predominant focus on end-of-century projections constitutes a serious opportunity cost for the limited financial and human resources available to tackle development challenges. Resources are urgently needed to address more immediate problems in development, such as building resilience to climate shocks and stressors and developing early warning systems and seasonal adaptation plans. In fact, in many situations this approach is also the best protection against future trends, which will be felt through changes in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather and climate events. This observation is particularly relevant in developing countries where vulnerability to today’s climate is already high and adaptive capacities are lower than in more industrialized nations.

There are, of course, situations where a longer-term view is needed. In addition to energy policy, examples include infrastructure projects, such as irrigation reservoirs, coastal development and flood defenses, and other long-term investment and planning. Research on longer-term climate change also helps shape policy priorities by influencing the discourse around resilience and can cast shorter-term decisions in the context of underlying trends.

However, even when long-term information really would be relevant for decision making, the authors warn that the use of climate change projections for detailed planning stretches the models beyond their capabilities. An inflated demand for and supply of highly localized projections for specific dates in the future is leading to a proliferation of poor-quality information. While climate model projections are able to capture many aspects of the climate system and so can be relied upon to guide mitigation plans and broad adaptation strategies, the use of these models to guide local, practical adaptation actions is unjustified. In particular, projections cannot be relied upon at local scales (for particular project sites or areas of a country). Nor can they be used to align adaptation plans with the timing of particular outcomes or thresholds predicted by the models (for example by extracting model projections for the 2040s). Practitioners would often like to know the probabilities of different climate futures, but the climate projections were never intended to give accurate probabilities – yet they are often presented as if they do. This practice gives a false impression of confidence to those who seek to act on climate change information.

Where do we go from here?

Addressing two communities of practice: development practitioners and scientists providing climate change information for adaptation, the authors propose practical solutions that aim to redirect both the demand for and supply of climate change information where it is most reliable and can usefully be applied. Solutions to mobilize the best available science include a focus on decision-relevant timescales, a greater role for targeted model evaluation before disseminating information from models and the integration of climate variability into climate change services. In Uruguay, for example, future climate variability was stochastically simulated around projected trends to estimate agricultural risks.

Climate services can facilitate robust adaptation, and there is a growing roster of examples of the effective use of climate information in development. Rather than designing adaptation strategies around climate projections, these projects begin with the adaptation options available and assess the sensitivities of these strategies to plausible changes in climate. A recent report on the World Health Organization’s long-term malaria eradication strategy proposes the integration of climate and health surveillance systems to enable better management of fluctuations in malaria risk, and a flexible long-term strategy that can reviewed periodically to incorporate new information about climate change and its impacts on malaria.

Other innovative approaches involve sensitivity analyses to explore the impacts of uncertainty in future climate on decisions. In the late 1990s and 2000s, Australia experienced prolonged droughts, and water managers faced decisions over whether to augment water supplies and impose demand restrictions. These decisions depended on the likelihood that the recent droughts might be symptomatic of a longer-term drying trend resulting from climate change, and therefore may be liable to continue. In the absence of robust methods to quantify this likelihood, analyses were conducted to determine the impacts of different plausible future climate scenarios on the available adaptation options. The sensitivity of the analyses was tested against different probability weightings for each scenario. Further scientific clarity is simply not possible, but such analyses can assist decision makers to move forward in full awareness of the uncertainties involved.

This story originally published by Advanced Science News.

This post originally appeared on the Earth Institute’s State of the Planet blog.

In the Sahel drylands of West Africa, migratory cattle herding is still a major way of life. For centuries, the region’s indigenous Fulani communities have followed informal seasonal migratory routes between arid zones, river valleys and wetlands to keep herds fattened on fresh pasture. In Burkina Faso, livestock are an important part of the economy, and migratory herding is a more resilient means of raising cattle, adapted to the local environment.

But Burkina Faso’s Fulani (also known as Fulβe) migratory herders are in crisis. Agriculture increasingly disrupts their traditional migratory routes, as increasing food needs and declining soil fertility have pushed farmers to expand their fields. When herders’ cattle trample farmers’ crops, violent conflict often results. Climate change is also reducing the reliability of traditional seasonal signals from local birds, trees and weather that herders have passed down through the generations to drive migration decisions. These challenges could put the food security and livelihoods of the Fulani people at risk.

So far, attempts to help the herders via policy making, climate forecasts and climate warning systems have largely failed. That’s because knowledge of herders’ migratory routes and decision-making was poorly understood. People on the move across remote landscapes are difficult to track, and mobile ways of life have long been seen as ‘backward’ and detrimental to the environment, so that herders are widely blamed for their own predicament.

A research project currently under way aims to fill in these gaps and promote knowledge- sharing between the Fulani and climate scientists. The project is led by UNESCO’s “Knowing our Changing Climate in Africa” project under the Climate Frontlines program. In collaboration with Fulani leaders, anthropologist Elisabeth Ilboudo-Nébié from Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society has developed detailed visual maps of migratory routes and a calendar that translates Fulani seasons into the language of Gregorian months and Western seasons. In addition, Ilboudo-Nébié and colleagues have worked with the Fulani northern Burkina Faso to catalogue the signals herders collect from the environment to guide migratory patterns.

In conducting this research, Ilboudo-Nébié is collaborating with anthropologist Carla Roncoli from Emory University and Al Hadji Hanafi Dicko, a Fulani pastoralist leader, who have worked together to document Fulani migratory patterns for the last 20 years. The project’s data comes from a series of participatory mapping exercises, during which local herders trace their migration itineraries on high resolution maps using colored pins and markers, and discuss how they make decisions about when and where to travel.

“Not all scientists are open for dialogue with communities that are not formally educated and whose knowledge is viewed as ‘myths,’ anecdotal and unverifiable,” says Ilboudo-Nébié. “The goal of this study is to foster a better understanding of indigenous knowledge within the scientific community, in order to kick off a dialogue between both communities.” Ultimately, the aims are to improve climate science as it pertains to the Sahel, and help scientists provide herders with the kind of climate information they will actually use. Ideally, says Ilboudo-Nébié, indigenous indicators of seasonal changes would be recognized by climate scientists and integrated into climate science models for the region.

Today, climate scientists and early warning systems in the Sahel tend to provide information to local communities that mostly addresses the needs of farmers. For instance, the government or other institutional sources might provide information about when the rainy season will start and how much it will rain, says Ilboudo-Nébié. But information about rainfall quantity is less relevant to herders. To plan migration routes, herders need to know about the frequency of the rains and how this will affect the growth of pasture with sufficient lead time to make adequate preparations. They also need to receive the information in Fulfulde, rather than French, as is currently the case with climate information.

The Fulani herders draw on a vast number of signals from the environment to detect changes in the seasons and determine when it’s time to begin migrating or to return to their villages of origin. One key set of signals is the arrival and departure of three kinds of migratory birds. They also watch for blossoms, fruit or leaf shedding on certain local trees. For example, in the dry season, when the ficus tree starts bearing fruit, the herders start sending scouts in different directions to assess the condition of grass and water. They also pay close attention to livestock behavior—when livestock start walking in the direction of home, it’s time to return—and read the stars, the color of the sky, the wind and temperature, the timing and strength of the rains.

But the Fulani are increasingly struggling to make good migration decisions based on these indicators; rainfall variability and unpredictability can cause birds to migrate too late or too early, and some plants and wildlife used to predict rainfall quality are disappearing. Fulani migratory routes are also becoming more restricted due to concerns over terror or jihadist attacks in traditional migration routes and destinations, such as the northern areas near the Mali border. Disruption of the seasonal migration process could lead to loss of livestock and food insecurity in pastoral households, with negative consequences for the country’s GDP.

“For many years, herders have been used to blending diverse sources of knowledge to make herd management and livelihood decisions,” says Ilboudo-Nébié. “In the times of climate change, as herders’ indigenous indicators become less reliable, they might be keen to combine climate information with what they already know — if it helps keep their livestock well fed and in good health.”

The International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) of Columbia University’s Earth Institute is one of the core partners in the new, five-year project, called SERVIR-Amazonia.

“This is great opportunity for IRI to expand our work on forecasting seasonal fire risk in the Amazon,” says Kátia Fernandes, IRI’s lead scientist on the project.

Using state-of-the-art geospatial technologies, SERVIR-Amazonia will enable the tracking of environmental changes in the region in almost real-time. It will also help stakeholders evaluate climatic threats and rapidly respond to natural disasters. By building the capacity of people and institutions to integrate science and technology into decision making, the project will support sustainability and self-reliance throughout the region.

“Empowering local stakeholders is important for transparency and ownership of policies and programs that meet the needs and aspirations of the people living in Amazonian landscapes,” says Louis Verchot, of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), and chief project scientist.

SERVIR-Amazonia will enable governments, institutions and communities to use publicly-available satellite imagery, geospatial data and maps to inform decisions in four areas: drought and fire, water resources and extreme events, ecosystem management, and weather and climate.

“IRI’s expertise fits in all four of these themes, which along with our long tradition of capacity building will help the new project achieve its goal of improving local capacity to harness satellite data and geospatial information to manage the Amazon’s incredible natural resources in a sustainable way,” says Fernandes.

SERVIR Amazonia will be one of five SERVIR hubs currently operating around the world. SERVIR connects USAID’s development network with NASA’s science, technology and extensive satellite data. Together with leading regional organizations in Africa, Asia and Latin America, the SERVIR global network has developed demand-driven services, tools and trainings for decision makers in more than 45 countries.

For example, SERVIR’s Enhanced Flood Early Warning Service is increasing flood forecast lead times in the South Asia region. This includes an operational 15-day flood forecast that integrates local data into a global model using methods co-developed by U.S. researchers, local experts, and decision-makers. Longer lead times and access to accurate, appropriate information ensures better preparedness for disaster responders, who can help to save lives and property. SERVIR Amazonia will bring similar tools to bear on the challenges of the region.

USAID will fund SERVIR-Amazonia, and NASA will provide science and technology support. The project will be implemented by the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) and a network of local and international partners serving the Amazon region, including the Amazon Conservation Association (ACCA), the Institute of Agricultural and Forest Management and Certification (IMAFLORA), and Spatial Informatics Group (SIG).

More information on SERVIR is available at www.servirglobal.net.

Over the last decade many countries in the Sahel region – the semi-arid southern edge of the Sahara that stretches from Senegal to Ethiopia – have been embroiled in conflict. Populations in these countries are growing. This means that resources are increasingly scarce, and a highly variable climate is making agriculture based livelihoods more uncertain.

These events in the region have been linked to climate change.

Over the last 100 years there have been major swings in the region’s climate. Abundant rains in the 1950s and 1960s were followed by persistent drought in the 1970s and 1980s. The period since the mid-1990s is characterised by the alternation of good and bad years.

My latest research attributes this evolution to emissions from fossil fuel burning. We show that the most recent generation of global climate models account for the Sahel’s persistent drought when information about emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases is included. And that these models can do that. This is because they simulate changes in ocean temperatures and in regional rain consistently with what’s observed in the real world.

This is the first time that the 20th century evolution of rainfall over a region is shown to have been directly affected by human emissions – specifically pollutants and greenhouse gases. It’s also the first time that a single argument is proposed that consistently explains natural fluctuations and anthropogenic change. This argument rests on the influence of the oceans on regional climate.

Drying Sahel

The Sahel gets its rain from moisture that is carried by monsoon winds from the North Atlantic Ocean.

As air rises, it cools and condenses the moisture that falls back as rain. The warmer the North Atlantic Ocean, the greater the moisture that evaporates from its surface and is carried onto land, the wetter the Sahel.

But whether air can rise locally depends on where else air is rising globally. For example, during an El Niño event, air rises over a much warmer tropical Pacific, and, sinking elsewhere, produces widespread drought. During the second half of the 20th century greenhouse gases warmed the tropical oceans, making conditions for air to rise elsewhere similarly unfavourable.

At the same time the amounts of fine solid particles – known as sulfate aerosols – that were emitted by coal-fired plants increased, as countries rebuilt their economies after World War II. These cooled the North Atlantic directly, by reflecting incoming solar radiation, as well as indirectly, by favouring the formation of clouds which in turn reflect incoming radiation.

Our analysis of an ensemble of 29 global climate models shows that the unique combination of the warming of tropical oceans – caused by greenhouse gases – and cooling of the North Atlantic Ocean – caused by sulfate aerosols – that characterised the second half of the 20th century led to the drying of the Sahel.

Our analysis also shows that despite the role of greenhouse gases in past drought, drought is not necessarily the future of climate change in the Sahel. Now that sulfate aerosol emissions have been drastically reduced around the North Atlantic, thanks to environmental legislation aimed at reducing acid rain and the public health consequences of pollution, warming has picked up in the North Atlantic Ocean.

Therefore, projections for wetter conditions under warming are in line with the explanation given above: air can now rise over the Sahel, fuelled by the increased moisture imported from a warming North Atlantic Ocean, in a challenge to the sinking motion imposed by warming tropical oceans elsewhere. Projections are also in line with emerging trends in observations toward a more vigorous water cycle: the more intense, though perhaps less frequent, rainfall events that have led to recurrent episodes of flooding over the past decade.

Future policies

Attribution of Sahel drought to emissions demonstrates that climate change is real, and is already here. Technologies to adapt to drought and more generally to climate variability do exist. They include seasonal climate prediction and land management practices like agro-forestry, conservation agriculture, and soil and water conservation, which already play a role in resilience building.

However, given the societal pressures mentioned at the outset, to develop the Sahel needs to diversify economies away from agriculture. This needs a lot more energy than is produced in the Sahel at present. Within the global context of climate change policy it is mitigation that opens up the opportunity to develop sustainably, with support for an energy transition toward renewable energy particularly appealing in a region endowed by an abundance of sun and wind.

Coffee has huge importance to many smallholder farmers around the world.  The success of a year’s coffee crop can mean the difference between having enough cash in-hand for buying food and watching your household go hungry.  For many, it is the crucial component of their food security, despite coffee not being an edible crop.

As is true for many agricultural products, the process for growing coffee is complex.  Frequently, this process is presented as having trade-offs. Increased use of fertilizer and pesticides will likely lead to higher crop yields, but at significant cost to wildlife populations and human health. Using fewer agrochemicals is more environmentally-friendly but requires farmers to face increased risks of losing crops to pests and disease.  A recent paper led by researcher Juan Nicolás Hernandez-Aguilera, a postdoctoral scientist at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society, suggests this trade-off may not be as straightforward as previously thought, and that farmers could be better off financially if they used shade-growing practices for part of their production.

Usually, coffee is grown in homogenous fields of trees in full sun.  Hernandez-Aguilera and his coauthors, who are from Cornell University, examined the merits of an alternative method of growing coffee in the understory of shade-bearing trees. Shade-grown production systems mimic a forest structure and provide better habitats for birds than do full-sun systems.  Both the birds and the shade trees provide ecosystem services to the coffee plantations, and these services can replace fertilizer and pesticides and save the farmer money. More birds means more predators of insect pests that can jeopardize a farmer’s coffee crop. Estimates suggest that a single bird could help save 23-65 pounds of coffee per hectare every year from pests.  Additionally, shade trees in shade-grown coffee plantations, often the species Inga edulis, fix nitrogen in the soil, providing the coffee trees additional nutrients. Hernandez-Aguilera notes that other services provided by this system include a reduction in temperatures beneath the shade trees, which is a crucial adaptation strategy for climate change.

Hernandez-Aguilera points out that shade-grown coffee beans are often considered higher-quality in the market, and can provide a price premium to farmers that offsets the comparatively lower yields of the shade-grown system. “Our estimates can guide the design of market-based mechanisms that aim to promote sustainable practices in coffee,” Hernandez-Aguilera says. “That said, the effective implementation of these instruments heavily relies on a better promotion and knowledge of the interactions between shade-grown coffee, environmental conservation and product quality among coffee consumers.”

While this image of shade-grown coffee is a romantic one, especially for those of us actively imagining how sustainable agriculture should look, farmers are not likely to change their systems unless it makes sense financially.  No previous study has quantified the economic trade-offs a smallholder farmer would experience in shifting from conventional coffee-growing to shade-grown. Hernandez-Aguilera and his colleagues developed a model to evaluate the financial costs and benefits for farmers.  They examined a number of factors, including the cost of planting new trees, the price premiums that coffee consumers are willing to pay, and the potential yields farmers could see.  The model suggests that farmers can optimize their coffee profits by converting 36-66% of their acreage to shade-grown production.

Coffee is also an important crop in many of the developing countries in which IRI is currently working. Hernandez-Aguilera’s study paves the way for further research into how to make growing coffee a more secure and financially stable source of income for farmers who often operate on tight margins under highly variable climate conditions.  Through IRI’s work with Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today, for Tomorrow (ACToday), a part of Columbia World Projects, careful consideration is being given to coffee farmers in Vietnam, Guatemala, Colombia, and Ethiopia. 

“This paper is a great example of the kind of work ACToday is already catalyzing in our pilot countries,” says Ángel Muñoz, the country lead for Guatemala and Colombia on the ACToday project. “This kind of work encourages our partners to ask key questions about how they can maximize income and promote sustainable practices in ways that are harmonious for the environment and that foster the conservation of biodiversity.”

For more about this study and the methods used, check out this video below, produced by Living Bird magazine and Cornell Lab of Ornithology:

During a recent training in Dhaka, Imran Nizami recalled his “aha” moment.

“In (the city) of Barisal, heavy rains and floods destroyed the inventories and businesses of many of our entrepreneurs in 2018,” he said. “If I knew at the beginning of last year all that I’ve learned in the last five days, I could have helped them avoid these losses.

Nizami works on a project called Sanitation Marketing Systems, which trains and supports local entrepreneurs to provide improved and affordable services to poor and disadvantaged communities in Bangladesh. The availability of safe drinking water, sanitation and hygiene in the world’s poorest areas is a key component of many sustainable development goals, including food security.

Nizami was among twenty professionals who participated in a weeklong course on climate services. It was the first in-country training organized by the new Bangladesh Academy for Climate Services. The academy, known as ‘BACS’, is the first of its kind in the country and aims to incorporate climate thinking in decision-making processes across all sectors and all branches of government.

Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society is one of the founding partners of the new academy, along with the International Center for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD), the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) and the Bangladesh Meteorological Department.

BACS is also one of the early outputs of the IRI-led Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today, for Tomorrow (ACToday) project, part of Columbia World Projects. ACToday is building connections among scientists, government, humanitarian agencies and the food security sector in Bangladesh and five other countries. It aims for decision makers to have the best and most useful climate information they need to grow more nutritious food and feed more people.

Because of its geographic location, Bangladesh faces a number of recurring climate-related risks, and the country has made significant strides over the decades to reduce people’s vulnerabilities to some of these risks.

In 1970, for example, Cyclone Bhola killed more than 500,000 people in a week’s time. Three and half decades later, when Cyclone Sidr, a storm of similar strength, tore through the country, the casualties numbered in the low thousands.

“Bangladesh is a leading example when it comes to cyclone preparedness,” says Mélody Braun, who is leading ACToday activities in the country and is coordinating with national and international partners there.

Besides cyclones, Bangladeshis must also contend with risks that come from both short- and near-term climate variability. Periodic killer heat waves that greatly impact urban areas, for example, or a temperamental monsoon system that can leave farming communities at the mercy of droughts in some years, and excessive flooding in others. Both extremes can ruin harvests and cause widespread malnourishment and famine. Long-term climate change is expected to make the situation worse.

“Bangladesh may be one of the most vulnerable countries to climate change, but it is also a country where almost everyone–all the way to the smallest communities–is aware of climate change, thanks to the massive awareness-raising campaigns on these issues and numerous adaptation initiatives,” says Saleemul Huq, Director of the International Center for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD). “Now we have to move further into mainstreaming of climate into all sectors of the economy.”

In order to do this, the country has to better integrate climate information at all time scales into its government planning and preparedness work. In Bangladesh, there are many agencies across multiple ministries responsible for data collection, forecasting and dissemination, but they’re not set up to share information in a useful, efficient way.

“There is a gap in understanding and communication between climate scientists, policy planners, development and extension organizations, and downstream users of climate information,” says Ziaul Islam, who works in the Ministry of Planning. “In this regard, the new Bangladesh Academy for Climate Services can be a powerful platform to promote cross-sectoral dialogue on climate.”

For example, the Bangladesh Meteorological Department, which is under the Ministry of Defense, has a mandate to produce weather and seasonal forecasts and other climate information. The Flood Forecasting and Warning Center (FFWC), under the Ministry of Water Resources, produces flood-related information. Guidance on disaster preparedness is provided under yet a different government body–the Ministry of Disaster Management and Relief.

For key potential users of all this information, such as the Ministry of Agriculture or the Ministry of Fisheries and Livestock, navigating the current setup is complicated. The recent training, as well as previous meetings, showed that there is a strong interest to change things.

A measure of success would be if reliable and practical climate services are able to make it down to decision makers like Imran Nizami, who have little or no background in climate science, but who nonetheless are making decisions that could be improved by climate information.

“This is IRI’s strength,” says IRI’s Director, Lisa Goddard. “We bring together both the providers and users of climate information to help them co-design effective climate services. Part of this is to allow them to identify their information needs at different timescales, and then align those needs with what already exists and how well it has been working.”

Goddard says IRI’s aim is to help build decision-support systems that use climate information translated into the most relevant variables, formats and timescales for the decisions at play. Different stakeholders have different needs, and this is why the recent BACS training in Dhaka was so critical.

“Before this training, I didn’t have any experience with climate information and yet I work with experts to implement resilience planning and agrometeorological services,” says Hossain Ish-rath Adib, who works in the Bangladesh office of the UK-based nonprofit, Practical Action.

Adib especially valued the sessions on using forecasts of different time scales and understanding the uncertainties to consider in each.

“When we’re dealing with probabilistic forecasts, we should always have a ‘Plan B’,” he says, “because if we take a decision based on a 99% probability, what will we do if the 1% event turns out to be true? The communities we work in are depending on us. We have responsibilities, we have skin in the game.”

The course will hopefully be the first of many that BACS will offer to early-to-mid-level professionals and students like Adib and Nazimi who are working in fields related to agriculture and food systems, disaster preparedness and response and public health.

Scenes from the first in-country training of the Bangladesh Academy for Climate Services in Dhaka. Photographs by Dannie Dinh/IRI and Ashraf Haque/ICCCAD.

This open-air market in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia covers several square miles, serving as a central trade hub for food and other goods in the country. Photo: Elisabeth Gawthrop/IRI.

Q: This is the first National Climate Assessment which included a chapter dedicated to threats climate change has on U.S. interests abroad. Why weren’t there similar chapters in previous reports? What were the motivating factors that led to its inclusion this time around?

The NCA is a huge undertaking, and managing the workload was a concern. There was interest in including international issues in previous assessments, but there was stronger interest in conducting the assessment on the U.S. itself and trying to publish it on time. The Global Change Research Act of 1990 requires an assessment every four years (and this is the first NCA to meet that timetable), but the act isn’t clear about what must be included. There were also questions about scope of an international assessment, given that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change looks at the entire world. Still, reviews of the last NCA showed that the lack of an assessment of international issues was a major gap.

It is clear that climate shocks and stresses impact things Americans care about: the U.S. economy depends on supply chains that extend into almost every continent; we are the largest funder of humanitarian aid and development assistance; we have diplomatic and military personnel and activities all over the world; many of us have families in other countries affected by storms, droughts, fires. All of these are affected in some way by weather and climate. We decided to include an international chapter but limit its scope to climate impacts on U.S. interests overseas, focusing on business, development assistance, security and transboundary issues. If the chapter is well received, the U.S. Global Change Research Program (the interagency group that coordinates federal climate research and manages the national assessment process) will include the topic in the next assessment.

Q: The reports says that extreme events are more likely to undermine U.S. international aid and investments as well as lead to increased need for humanitarian assistance overall. How has the government responded to these increased risks, and where are the biggest gaps left to fill?

The U.S. invests heavily in helping developing countries grow and transform their economies. Poor people and poor countries tend to work in activities that depend upon, or are affected by, weather and climate. Agriculture is the biggest component of the economies of most developing countries and accounts for most of the jobs. As the conversation with Upmanu Lall showed, water availability and quality are affected by climate variability, and water problems contribute to disease risks and food security. USAID and other U.S. development agencies invest in agriculture, water, health and other things that are climate-sensitive. Over the past 15 years, these agencies have been trying to reduce climate risks by also investing in climate adaptation and reducing greenhouse gas emissions by improving the energy sector and the way land is managed. In 2012, USAID wrote a new strategy for addressing climate change in development work. In 2014, President Obama signed an executive order requiring that agencies like USAID look at vulnerabilities to climate in all of their activities. This order has not been rescinded by President Trump. USAID began systematically managing climate risks to its investments in 2015, building on earlier efforts to integrate climate considerations into the agency’s work. USAID and the other agencies that provide assistance overseas are working to coordinate their efforts and learn from each other.

Q: I noticed that you refer to climate adaptation, not climate change adaptation. Is that intentional?

I was being intentional. When I was at USAID, I realized early on that when we talked to decision makers, they had trouble getting their heads around the information that comes from long-term climate projections. It didn’t matter if they were government ministers or farmers or hotel managers, the decisions they had control over were much more short-term. Farmers think about when to plant,  what to plant, when to apply fertilizer or pesticide, and whether to irrigate. A minister may worry about crop yields or food prices, and if the roads will flood during the rainy season. Somebody working in tourism is more likely to worry about the next hurricane season than whether or not hurricanes will become more frequent, more powerful, or both by 2100.

This is not to say that long term projections aren’t important. The models used to produce long-term climate projections are critical to our discussion about managing greenhouse-gas emissions. Those projections help answer two questions: will adding GHGs to the atmosphere change the climate system in ways that have consequences we won’t like? And, if so, are those consequences significant enough to consider restructuring much of the world’s economy in order to reduce our emissions?

And of course decisions about long-lived infrastructure need long term information, but that wasn’t what I was working on at USAID. Many communities are poorly prepared to deal with the current climate. I started working with IRI because it tailors its information to support decisions that are being made, every day, across the world. The IRI seasonal forecasts and its forecasts of El Niño can really make a difference to decision makers, provided they have the understanding and resources needed to act on such information.

As we worked on the international chapter of the assessment, the same realities kept coming to the fore: supply chains are affected by the weather, and corporations are concerned with weather forecasts and seasonal forecasts; international development assistance is concentrated on current activities like public health, water management and agriculture, so again, climate variability is important. There is a growing sense that being well prepared for the current climate and the surprises it can throw at you is an important first step to adapting to longer term climate change.

Q: You and coauthors write that global trade can promote some resilience by steering production of goods and services away from areas with less favorable climates to those with more favorable ones. What’s the downside?

That statement should be read carefully. It says trade can promote resilience, but it also says that it may harm some communities where production is decreased in the name of resilient supply chains. It’s important to remember that the chapter is about climate impacts on U.S. interests, not the interests of every country or community we trade with. We give an example of flooding in Thailand that affected production of computer parts and cars. Making those supply chains more resilient might mean either improving flood management in Thailand or moving production to less flood-prone areas. Either approach would likely cost Thailand, either because the country would have to invest in flood management or face the loss of jobs associated with those industries.

This is why one aspect of the IRI-led ACToday project, part of Columbia World Projects, is to understand the role of international trade in food security in developing countries. The project aims to help countries achieve their food security and nutrition goals in the face of climate variability. International trade could play an important role in achieving food security, but we need to better understand the interplay of markets, the climate, food security and nutrition.

Better management of climate risks offers one avenue for improving agriculture production, but this requires access to quality, tailored climate information.

Farmer in Jamnapur village, Bihar, India. Photo: P. Casier (CGIAR).

A new tool developed by IRI scientists for Bihar shows promise to provide climate information useful for agriculture decisions. The tool is called a maproom because it contains a series of online, interactive maps that provide a range of climate information. It was developed for the International Research Applications Program (IRAP) – a joint project of the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) and the University of Arizona, funded by the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration.

The maproom builds on what IRI and its partners, including the Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) program, have developed for agriculture applications in South Asia and other regions. It provides not just climate forecasts but also historical climate information and real-time rainfall monitoring. Sometimes, the decisions that farmers make can be just as informed by quantitative information about the past and present as they can be about what the future might hold. For example, farmers can decide how to irrigate, select which crops to plant and decide when to plant based on a drought-monitoring tool that takes into account very recent rainfall as well as how much rain has fallen over the last several months.

A common challenge, however, is making sure the information is of a quality high enough to be useful in a local context. Global, public datasets often don’t include all of the weather station data that’s available in a given country — they rely on satellite-based information, which isn’t usually as accurate. The weather data collected and archived by India, as with many countries, is at a higher resolution than can be found in global datasets.

IRI climate scientists Nachiketa Acharya and Andy Robertson began by creating a prototype of the maproom using a global dataset, with the hope that their collaborators at the India Meteorological Department (IMD) – a partner on the IRAP project – would be impressed enough with the tool’s capabilities that they would offer more detailed data records to feed into the maps. Their hunch proved right. When Acharya sent the prototype to IMD, they immediately sent their high resolution gridded data to be incorporated. The improved data allowed for the development of high quality climate information products at a scale useful to agriculture decision makers in Bihar’s 38 districts.

John del Corral, a member of IRI’s Data Library team, helped get the maproom to its current form. Now available to the public here, it provides district-level climate information that includes real-time rainfall monitoring, historical risk of wet and dry spells and analysis of past climate variability, broken down into various timescales. Seasonal and sub-seasonal climate forecasts, as well as drought monitoring, are also available through the maproom.

While the maproom is available to anyone, the tool is likely to be most useful to those involved in translating technical information to decision makers.

“This maproom is very useful for researchers at state agricultural universities in India who don’t have much experience with climate data management and visualization,” said K.K. Singh, Head of Agromet Services at IMD.

Other potential users have also expressed interest in the maproom, including the Regional Integrated Multi-Hazard Early Warning System for Africa and Asia (RIMES), an international and intergovernmental institution supported by the United Nations and charged with providing regional early warning services for an array of natural hazards. RIMES is also an IRAP partner.

“The maproom brings together a wide array of climate data into a well-organized graphical interface,” said Govindarajalu Srinivasan, Chief Scientist for Climate Applications at RIMES. “However, awareness and capacities of sector experts need to be built for its effective use.”

To help facilitate the use of climate information agriculture risk management, IMD and RIMES joined IRI in a series of trainings to agriculture officers in Bihar. The trainings presented the maproom as one of the tools available for those seeking to use climate information in decision making. The trainings also covered fundamental weather and climate concepts, as well as information about how different climate conditions affect plant growth, what actions can be taken to address extreme climate events, and other topics. IRI is also incorporating feedback from IMD and RIMES following the trainings into the maproom. Most of the feedback was around making the maproom more simple and clear for users, with changes including grouping certain maps together and adding the district names to some of the graphics.

The new tool is something of test case for IMD to consider expanding it for other areas of the country. Singh said he hopes IRI can give trainings of this maproom to more agriculture officers and scientists in India, and RIMES is building off of the IRAP maproom by feeding its data products and forecasts into an online dashboard being developed for IMD. The dashboard will be designed to provide dynamic risk assessment guidelines and management products to assist decision makers.

Better information won’t solve all of the challenges related to growing food in a changing climate, but it’s a necessary step towards improving our ability to adapt.

Despite an overabundance of food in some parts of the world, about 815 million people suffered from chronic undernourishment in 2016. Poor nutrition leads to nearly half of deaths in children under the age of five. Many of those who are hungry are farmers and their families. Our food systems clearly aren’t working as well as they could, and climate is part of the problem. It’s also part of the solution.

Climate isn’t the only factor behind food shortages, nutritional failures and hunger, but it is a variable that countries can take steps to protect against and even use to their advantage, with the right information and resources.

Insurance is one way to increase resiliency to climate shocks, but not only in the way you might think. In advertising, the dominant narrative for most insurance products is protection from unpredictable catastrophes and mayhem. But there’s a subtler benefit to agriculture insurance, and one that is essential for adapting our food systems to a changing climate: when farmers feel financially secure, they’re more likely to take productive risks.

For example, if climate forecasts are calling for promising conditions during the next growing season, a farmer may invest in more productive practices, like planting higher quality seeds and using more fertilizer. While these decisions can result in higher yields and more income, they have upfront costs. Farmers often have to take out loans to make these investments. If a farmer doesn’t feel financially secure, he or she is unlikely to make these expensive and risky investments and will instead opt for safer but less productive practices. And not only can less productive practices mean a missed opportunity in the short term, but they may also contribute to the degradation of soil quality, which means lower productivity in the long term too.

“The sum of losses connected to missed opportunities are much higher than the sum of losses from direct failure of crops,” says Walter Baethgen, a senior scientist and director of the Regional and Sectoral Research Program at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI). “But the problem is that one year of failure can make a farmer go out of business. So if farmers are protected, they can take advantage of good years.”

In the decades to come, we can expect increasingly difficult growing seasons for farmers, and so taking advantage of good years will become more and more important – for both our food supply and farmers’ livelihoods.

To date, agriculture insurance hasn’t been available for many farmers around the world, as the cost of doing business for insurance companies has historically been higher than the potential profits to be gained. A relatively new kind of agriculture insurance, called weather index insurance, provides a way to fill that insurance gap by basing payouts on weather and satellite data instead of expensive site visits from claims adjusters. Over the last decade, IRI’s financial instruments team has been researching, designing and refining weather index insurance in their work in a dozen countries across Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean.

The team’s latest projects have been more successful than ever at getting local insurance companies to start offering a useful and affordable product to smallholder farmers. As a result, index insurance is now available to millions of farmers who previously didn’t have access to insurance. But hundreds of millions of farmers are still vulnerable to the kind of risk that index insurance helps protect against.

A new video (above) showcases what the IRI team has learned and how they hope to reach even more farmers. Team members have particularly stressed the importance of farmer-driven product design and the use of accurate climate data from rain gauges and satellites. “Using cell phones in the design process is a promising avenue to achieving that scale,” said team leader Dan Osgood. “But we need to research a way to use them so that farmers are still contributing to a product design that will meet their localized needs,” Osgood added.

“We could make a video like this, of the lessons we’ve learned, for many of the teams at IRI – for example, what we’ve learned about seasonal forecasts in the last twenty years, and what we’ve learned about creating agriculture decision tools in our more recent projects,” said Baethgen.

Baethgen co-leads a project called Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today, For Tomorrow (ACToday), part of Columbia World Projects. Through ACToday, IRI is working collaboratively with partners around the world and at Columbia University to make food systems healthier and more resilient to fluctuations in climate. The project is currently active in six countries – Guatemala, Colombia, Senegal, Ethiopia, Bangladesh and Vietnam. A key component of the project is to enable governments and nongovernmental organizations to better respond to food shocks, particularly those caused by climate events such as droughts and floods.

“The wonderful thing about the ACToday project is that we have the opportunity to bring all of these lessons together in each country in an integrated way, not as siloed projects happening in different places,” said Baethgen. “We can look holistically at a country’s vulnerabilities and opportunities, including index insurance.”

Under ACToday, an index insurance pilot for beans and maize has begun in Guatemala, and planning is underway for an insurance product in Colombia.

The video was produced in conjunction with an international contest highlighting the last 10 years of progress in the index insurance field, and it received runner-up.

A new paper in PLOS Medicine argues that climate change projections are often misused in health impact studies: they are best suited for shaping public health policies, not for triggering operational actions on the ground.

“Recognition that climate change is already underway has led to an increasing focus on adaptation,” write IRI’s Hannah Nissan and her co-author Declan Conway, from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

This recognition has led to a substantial increase in studies that project the impact of future change. But these studies typically rely on information from global climate models, which needs to be carefully interpreted.

“Outputs from these models tell us a lot about the direction of our planet’s climate, but they do so in broad terms,” Nissan says.

“There are many aspects of climate change about which we are confident, but we can’t provide very precise information about future risks on local scales and at specific dates, which is typically what most decision makers in the health sector want to know.”

That doesn’t mean there’s nothing we can do, Nissan adds. “Far from it.”

In general, reports that project the health impacts of climate change are important because they raise the alarm about changes that are happening and that we expect will happen. They can motivate institutional change, cultural attitudes and people’s determination to do something about climate change.

“However, the language used to promote these materials sometimes suggests that they can be used to guide practical decisions,” Nissan says. “They can’t.”

Effective adaptation measures should focus on what we can accomplish today using reliable climate information that we have available.

In Ethiopia, for example, more people are at risk of getting malaria in mountainous areas because warming air temperatures have allowed conditions favorable for malaria transmission to reach higher and higher elevations.

Local temperature trends projected by global climate models have a lot of uncertainty, however, and aren’t very useful for many planning decisions anyway, says Nissan.

“But we can use seasonal forecasts as a way to warn health agencies when above-normal temperatures and rainfall are expected in the months ahead, which would increase the risk of malaria transmission. This is especially useful during El Niño years, when national meteorological services have greater confidence in their forecasts.”

With that information in hand, decision makers can decide if they need to be more vigilant in their malaria surveillance operations, establish temporary clinics or increase public awareness with education campaigns.

“Our main point is that we recognize the importance of studies based on information from climate models to underscore trends and expected challenges,” Nissan says, “But we need to be very careful not to oversell the utility of this information when it comes to triggering actions.”

This paper appears in a special issue of PLOS Medicine dedicated to health and climate change, which is co-edited by IRI’s Madeleine Thomson. Articles in this issue cover a wide range of climate-related health topics, including heatwaves, urban health and vector-borne diseases. Thomson co-authored a paper on the particular vulnerabilities children face from climate change. In another piece, she  writes about how climate change threatens global health more broadly.

Young children are far more vulnerable to climate-related disasters and the onus is on adults to provide the protection and care that children need, according to research by the International Research Institute for Climate and Society, Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and Columbia University Irving Medical Center. In a paper published in PLOS Medicine, researchers set out some specific challenges associated with the impacts of climate change on the world’s 2.3 billion children and suggest ways to address their underprioritized needs.

“Because of their anatomic, cognitive, immunologic, and psychologic differences, children and adolescents are more vulnerable to climate change-related events like floods, droughts, and heatwaves than adults,” says IRI’s Madeleine Thomson, who is also a research scholar at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. Thomson is guest editor for a special issue on climate change and health published by PLOS Medicine.

Because of their small surface-to-body ratio, infants and children are particularly vulnerable to dehydration and heat stress. During heat waves, children are more likely to be affected by respiratory disease, kidney disease, electrolyte imbalance and fever. Heat waves have also been shown to exacerbate allergens and air pollution which impact children more severely than adults because of their underdeveloped respiratory and immune systems and because they breathe at a faster rate than adults.

Thomson and her coauthors write that hotter temperatures may also expand the range of vector-borne diseases, including the Zika virus which, following the 2015 epidemic, has profoundly affected the lives of children and their families across Latin America and the Caribbean. Even children who were asymptomatic at birth may develop problems later in life.

After Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico in September 2017, medical responders encountered increases in gastroenteritis, asthma exacerbations, and skin infections. Children were also at increased risk for mosquito-borne diseases such as chikungunya and dengue, as well as leptospirosis through the drinking of contaminated water. Flood waters from Hurricane Harvey a few weeks earlier dropped record-breaking rain. Most of the Harvey-related toxic releases were never publicized and the long-term implications for children’s health is unknown. Studies suggest that climate change is increasing the intensity of North Atlantic hurricanes and the likelihood that the severe consequences for children’s health will grow.

In rural households, droughts can have significant impacts on child development through increased food insecurity and dietary changes. Droughts may also contribute to conflict and forced migration in resource poor settings, thereby increasing children’s vulnerability to a wide range of health issues.

To begin to address the specific needs of children confronted with climate-change related health disasters, Thomson and colleagues propose the following:

Establish an international consortium of experts to develop adoptable medical and behavioral protocols and to set research agendas to address the unmet child-specific needs that arise from climate-related natural disasters.

Develop best practice guidelines for climate-change related event planning that incorporate strategies for addressing the health-related needs of children.

Fund mechanisms designed to help the most vulnerable nations prepare for and respond to climate related disasters must consider funding the development of responses that specifically address the unmet needs of children’s health.

Co-authors are Lawrence Stanberry, Columbia Department of Pediatrics; Wilmot James, Columbia Department of Pediatrics and School of International and Public Affairs.

Articles in this special issue cover a wide range of climate-related health topics, including heatwaves, urban health, vector-borne diseases and impacts to children. Thomson also co-authored an editorial about how climate change threatens global health more broadly, and IRI’s Hannah Nissan writes about the challenges of using projections from global climate models to inform the development of adaptation strategies and plans.

The Paraguay River is an essential lifeblood for the landlocked country that shares it name. It provides Paraguayans with fishing, irrigation for agriculture and access to shipping. But it’s also prone to seasonal flooding, with especially high consequences for the populations living on its banks, including where it skirts Paraguay’s capital, Asunción.

Flooding in January 2016 along a small river around 50 miles from Asunción, Paraguay. “Most cities in Paraguay are along either the Paraguay or Paraná Rivers, and the populations in riverine cities in Paraguay and downstream countries are growing rapidly, so understanding the drivers of this particular flood is crucial,” said study author James Doss-Gollin. Photo: Lidia Florencia Pérez de Molas/Universidad Nacional de Asunción.

In late 2015, heavy rains gave the region some of its most intense flooding in the last half century. According to the Paraguayan Red Cross, the Paraguay River, Paraná River and at least seven other rivers overflowed their banks, and the BBC reported that more than 150,000 people were evacuated in Paraguay and Argentina. The disaster left 120,000 people in Asunción without power.

Meteorological experts and humanitarian officials at the time cited El Niño as a contributing factor to the heavy rainfall, and seasonal forecasts issued as far back as June 2015 indicated an increase in chances for above-average rainfall in the region for the last few months of 2015, in large part because climate models at the time were predicting the El Niño event.

A new paper in the Journal of Climate provides a closer look at the role of El Niño in the 2015 flooding event, as well as other weather and climate factors that contributed to the heavy rains. The authors of the paper provide an analysis of how well seasonal forecasts predicted the heavy rain and find that forecasting at a subseasonal scale shows promise for the region. They also analyze how climate processes on several different timescales came together for this heavy rain event to manifest.

“We were interested in studying this flood event because while El Niño usually results in above-average rainfall in southeastern South America, we wouldn’t expect El Niño alone to cause flooding of this magnitude on the Paraguay River,” said lead author James Doss-Gollin, a doctoral student at the Columbia Water Center. “We wanted to play detective in order to identify and understand the physical mechanisms that caused this event so that we can better predict them in the future.”

Scientists have shown that El Niño tends to strengthen the flow of moisture coming from both the Amazon and the Atlantic Ocean via a ribbon of winds called the South American Low-Level Jet. In the past that flow of moisture has moved around and has tended to track a little south of Paraguay. But in late 2015, the strengthened flow didn’t meander as it had in the past – instead of a flailing fire hose, unseen forces aimed the hose at Paraguay and kept it there.

But those forces might not be so invisible after all. Doss-Gollin and his coauthors use several methods to try to diagnose why the heavy rainfall occurred when and where it did, including why the track became stuck. One of their approaches is called weather typing, which uses statistics to quantitatively define the different recurring atmospheric wind patterns seen in an area. These wind patterns are the underlying drivers of weather conditions.

“One can think about weather types like building blocks of weather and climate events,” said coauthor Ángel G. Muñoz, a climate scientist at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) and formerly of the Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences Program at Princeton University (AOS). “One sequence and number of weather types can produce floods in a particular region; a different combination would lead to beautiful, sunny days.”

Using the weather types and other methods, Doss-Gollin, Muñoz and co-authors Simon Mason from IRI and Max Pastén from Paraguay’s meteorological service (DMH) found that in addition to El Niño, the heavy rainfall in late 2015 was influenced by the Madden Julian Oscillation and by interactions between the Pacific and Atlantic Ocean basins. While the seasonal rainfall forecasts predicted higher odds for heavy rainfall in the region, they didn’t get the location of this rainfall quite right. The authors concluded that the seasonal models were off in part because they weren’t capturing the influence from the Pacific-Atlantic interaction.

Time series of area-averaged rainfall in the Lower Paraguay River Basin for each day from November 2015 to February 2016. The grey line indicates the rainfall value in millimeters/day. The circles indicate the weather type corresponding to each day. Adapted from Figure 7 of the study.

The authors also used statistical methods to build on and try to improve the outputs of physics-based subseasonal climate models.  They found that adding statistical correction resulted in substantially improved forecasts, suggesting that subseasonal forecasts for heavy rain events might be possible in this region.

Although the research is focused on a time period when an El Niño event was occurring, the authors believe the analysis is applicable to non-El Niño time periods as well. “I’d be surprised to see moisture transport as strong as it was in 2015-16 without an El Niño event behind it,” said Doss-Gollin. “But the primary cause of the flooding was the stationary aspect of the moisture flow, which could potentially happen without an El Niño.”

“We now have a sense of how different sources of climate variability at multiple timescales came together to create this rainfall event, and how experimental subseasonal forecasts can potentially predict similar events in the future,” said Muñoz.

The applicability of these results for use in operational forecasts is not just theoretical. “Here at the Paraguayan Meteorological Office, we are very interested in having an operational forecast system at subseasonal-to-seasonal timescales,” said co-author Pastén, a Professor at the National University of Asunción (Paraguay) who also works at DMH. “This study is showing us a clear path for its implementation, and we expect to do it soon with the collaboration of the Latin American Observatory of Climate Events and the support of my co-authors”.

English version available here.

Volcán de Fuego en Guatemala, fotografiado en Diciembre de 2015. Foto: Marco Verch via Flickr

El Volcán de Fuego en Guatemala entro en erupción a principios de junio, matando a al menos 110 personas, mientras que cientos más permanecen desaparecidos. Las corrientes de lava y las columnas de humo y ceniza han desplazado a miles de guatemaltecos y han destruido aproximadamente 8.500 hectáreas de cultivos.

En las próximas semanas y meses, el clima jugará un papel fundamental para ayudar o dificultar la recuperación de Guatemala de la erupción. Ángel G. Muñoz, científico climático del Instituto Internacional de Investigación para el Clima y la Sociedad (IRI) de la Universidad de Columbia, está trabajando con el gobierno de Guatemala para ayudarlos en la planificación a futuro.

Muñoz ha estado trabajando en Guatemala para ACToday (abreviatura de Adaptar la agricultura al clima hoy, para mañana en ingles), un proyecto de la Universidad de Columbia (Columbia World Projects) que está utilizando información climática para mejorar la seguridad alimentaria en seis países en desarrollo. A través de ACToday, Muñoz está trabajando en cerrar la brecha entre los pronósticos del clima a corto plazo, de una a dos semanas y los pronósticos climáticos estacionales a largo plazo que miran hacia meses en el futuro. A pedido del servicio meteorológico de Guatemala, ha analizado y traducido algunos pronósticos a mediano plazo que podrían ayudar a guiar los esfuerzos de recuperación. Estos pronósticos predicen las precipitaciones en las próximas tres semanas y, por lo tanto, el riesgo de deslizamientos de tierra llamados lahares que pueden arrasar comunidades enteras. En este contexto, las previsiones podrían ayudar a salvar vidas e informar los planes para reconstruir carreteras y otras infraestructuras.

Estos tipos de pronósticos de rango medio (“sub estacional”) son bastante experimentales. “Hasta donde tenemos conocimiento, nadie más en el mundo está utilizando pronósticos sub estacionales para guiar la acción de un gobierno luego de una erupción volcánica”, dijo Muñoz.

Lluvias peligrosas

Mientras el Volcán de Fuego continúa arrojando gases y cenizas peligrosas, las lluvias también están obstaculizando los esfuerzos de recuperación de Guatemala. La amenaza de deslizamientos de tierra, inundaciones y lluvia ácida ha interrumpido la búsqueda de víctimas y retrasado los esfuerzos de reconstrucción.

Lahares son una preocupación particular. Estos son deslizamientos de lodo que se forman cuando la ceniza volcánica y las rocas se mezclan con el agua de la lluvia.

Mapa de áreas en riesgo de lahares (deslizamientos de tierra mortales) alrededor del Volcán de Fuego, en condiciones de lluvia moderada. Fuente: INSIVUMEH

“Los Lahares pueden tener docenas de metros de ancho y pueden tener un poder tremendo, destruyendo todo en su camino hacia las laderas”, explicó Walter Baethgen, co-director del proyecto ACToday de IRI, en un correo electrónico desde Guatemala. “Pueden ser muy peligrosos para las comunidades y la infraestructura ubicadas en las laderas del volcán”. Eso incluye hogares, carreteras y otras estructuras críticas.

Tener una mejor idea de la cantidad de lluvia que se avecina podría ayudar a las agencias de emergencia a prepararse, movilizar recursos y evacuar a las personas si es necesario, dijo Baethgen. Los pronósticos sub estacional también podrían ayudar a dirigir los esfuerzos de recuperación. Por ejemplo, si los pronósticos sugieren que continuarán las fuertes lluvias, sería mejor esperar a reconstruir las carreteras en áreas propensas a lahares.

Una primicia en los pronósticos

Durante mucho tiempo, los científicos pensaron que los pronósticos sub estacionales, que miran de 14 a 90 días en el futuro, eran imposibles. “Ha habido una brecha entre la predictibilidad del clima y el pronostico del tiempo, y honestamente pensamos que era una escala de tiempo de la que no podíamos decir nada”, explicó Muñoz. “En los últimos 15 años, tal vez un poco más, hemos descubierto que hay cierta capacidad de predicción, que hay capacidad para pronosticar en esa escala de tiempo en particular”.

Los pronósticos sub estacionales se basan en las temperaturas del agua y la tierra, los patrones de circulación en la atmósfera y otras variables. No son tan precisos ni específicos como el pronóstico del tiempo, por lo que generalmente no se usan en la toma de decisiones. Sin embargo, algunos de los modelos son lo suficientemente confiables para proporcionar información valiosa.

Muñoz ha estado estudiando en qué medida se puede confiar en varios pronósticos sub estacionales. Usando los pronósticos generados por el Proyecto de Predicción S2S y el proyecto SubX de NOAA, Muñoz y sus colegas calcularon recientemente que los modelos para Guatemala son lo suficientemente buenos como para decir cuál sería el clima con tres semanas de anticipación.

“Eso es básicamente un sueño, porque solíamos decir que no se pueden tener buenas predicciones con semanas de anticipación”, dijo Muñoz. “Hay mucho margen para mejorar, pero tienen potencial”. El director del servicio meteorológico de Guatemala (INSIVUMEH) estaba entusiasmado con las posibilidades y le pidió a Muñoz que realizara el análisis.

Las perspectivas para Guatemala

Las predicciones sub estacionales y los cálculos de Muñoz sugieren que hay una posibilidad razonable de que Guatemala tenga condiciones más secas de lo normal en las próximas tres semanas, especialmente durante la semana del 4 al 10 de julio. Eso significa, con suerte, una oportunidad para que el gobierno guatemalteco reconstruya carreteras e infraestructura en las áreas afectadas por la erupción.

La fila superior muestra predicciones de precipitaciones para 1, 2 y 3 semanas en el futuro; verde significa lluvia por encima de lo normal para esa semana, y marrón significa debajo de lo normal. La fila inferior muestra la confianza de los investigadores en cada predicción, con el azul indicando una mayor confianza. El Volcán de Fuego está marcado con un punto negro en cada mapa. Fuente: Ángel G. Muñoz

Para garantizar la confiabilidad de los pronósticos, Muñoz compara predicciones entre modelos múltiples y entre ensayos múltiples para cada modelo. También evalúa qué tan bien las predicciones de los modelos se han desempeñado en situaciones pasadas.

Las predicciones resultantes proporcionan una idea de qué manera es más probable que las cosas vayan. Nadie puede saber con certeza cuán precisas son las predicciones hasta que hayan pasado las tres semanas.

Estos mapas muestran cuán precisas han sido las predicciones similares en el pasado para las semanas 1, 2 y 3, en base a 17 años de datos. Los colores más rojos indican una mejor habilidad. Fuente: Ángel G. Muñoz

Eddy Sánchez, director de INSIVUMEH, dijo que las predicciones fueron muy útiles porque identifican los cambios que podrían ocurrir a corto plazo. “Nos hace sentir seguros de tener otra herramienta de pronóstico”, dijo. “Es importante que el gobierno tenga este tipo de producto para planificar la construcción de infraestructura y carreteras en el área afectada por el Volcán de Fuego”.

Ahora, agregó la agro meteoróloga de INSIVUMEH, Rosario Gómez, “Estamos interesados en comenzar el proceso de validación, tomando en cuenta los datos diarios de lluvia de la red de estaciones meteorológicas en el país”.

Una mirada más profunda al futuro

Mientras que Guatemala ahora tiene una mejor idea de qué esperar del clima, los efectos a largo plazo de la erupción son más difíciles de prever. La erupción ha dañado miles de hectáreas de cultivos de maíz, frijoles y granos, así como de café, un cultivo económicamente importante para Guatemala. Además, muchas personas que trabajan en el sector agrícola se han visto obligadas a huir de sus hogares.
“Aún se desconoce el impacto general en la agricultura y en los medios de subsistencia de las personas”, escribieron en un correo electrónico Jennifer Bradshaw y Carmen González, ambas estudiantes de la Facultad de Asuntos Públicos e Internacionales de la Universidad de Columbia que trabajan en Guatemala para el proyecto ACToday. “¿Qué tanto impacto económico y social tuvo esta erupción particular en las comunidades? ¿Qué sigue para estas comunidades, especialmente aquellas cuyo sustento giraba en torno a la agricultura, dadas sus tierras destruidas?”

El Volcán de Fuego no ha disuadido al equipo de ACToday de su objetivo de utilizar herramientas de información climática de última generación para mejorar la seguridad alimentaria en Guatemala. “El proyecto puede ayudar a nuestro país a hacer mejores pronósticos y de comunicarlos con las personas que toman las decisiones”, dijo Gómez. “Especialmente ahora, porque en julio tenemos menos lluvia y es muy importante conocer el pronóstico de lluvia”.

Dada el posible trastorno en el sistema alimentario de Guatemala debido a la erupción del Volcán de Fuego, el trabajo de ACToday puede ser más importante ahora que nunca

This story originally appeared on the Earth Institute’s State of the Planet blog.

La version en español esta disponible aquí. 

Guatemala’s Volcán de Fuego, as photographed in December 2015. Photo: Marco Verch via Flickr

Guatemala’s Volcán de Fuego erupted in early June, killing at least 110 people, while hundreds more remain missing. Streams of lava and plumes of smoke and ash have displaced thousands of Guatemalans, and destroyed an estimated 21,000 acres of crops.

In coming weeks and months, the weather will play a critical role in helping or hindering Guatemala’s recovery from the blast. IRI climate scientist Ángel G. Muñoz is working with the Guatemalan government to help them plan ahead.

Muñoz has been working in Guatemala for ACToday (short for Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today, for Tomorrow), a Columbia World Project that is using climate information to improve food security in six developing nations. Through ACToday, Muñoz is trying to bridge the gap between short-term, one- to two-week weather forecasts and long-term seasonal climate forecasts that look months into the future. At the request of Guatemala’s meteorological service, he has analyzed and translated some medium-term forecasts that could help to guide recovery efforts. These forecasts predict rainfall over the next three weeks, and thus the risk of mudslides called lahars that can wipe out entire communities. In this context, the forecasts could help to save lives and inform plans to rebuild roads and other infrastructure.

These types of mid-range (“subseasonal”) forecasts are still quite experimental. “To the best of our knowledge, no one else in the entire world is using subseasonal forecasts to guide government action in the aftermath of a volcano eruption,” said Muñoz.

Dangerous Rains

While the Volcán de Fuego continues to belch dangerous gas and ash, rainfall is also hampering Guatemala’s recovery efforts. The threat of mudslides, flooding and acid rain have disrupted the search for victims and delayed efforts to rebuild.

Lahars are a particular concern. These are mudslides that form as volcanic ash and rocks mix with rainwater.

Map of areas at high (red), medium (orange) and low (yellow) risk from deadly mudslides called lahars around the Volcán de Fuego, under conditions of moderate rainfall. Source: INSIVUMEH

“Lahars can be dozens of meters wide and can have tremendous power, destroying everything on their way down the slopes,” Walter Baethgen, co-lead on IRI’s ACToday project, explained in an email from Guatemala. “They can be very dangerous for communities and infrastructure placed on the slopes of the volcano.” That includes homes, roads, and other critical structures.

Having a better idea of how much rain is coming could help emergency agencies to prepare, mobilize resources, and evacuate people if needed, said Baethgen. Subseasonal forecasts could also help to direct recovery efforts. For example, if the forecasts were to suggest that heavy rains will continue, it might be best to wait on rebuilding roads in lahar-prone areas.

A Forecasting First

For a long time, scientists thought subseasonal forecasts, which look 14 to 90 days into the future, were impossible. “There has been a predictability gap between weather and climate, and we honestly thought it was a timescale we couldn’t say anything about,” Muñoz explained. “Within the last 15 years, maybe a bit more, we’ve discovered that there is some predictability, there is capacity to forecast at that particular timescale.”

Subseasonal forecasts are based on water and land temperatures, circulation patterns in the atmosphere, and other variables. They aren’t as accurate or specific as a weather forecast, so they’re not generally used in decision making. However, some of the models are reliable enough to provide valuable information.

Muñoz has been studying how much various subseasonal forecasts can be trusted. Using forecasts generated by the S2S Prediction Project and NOAA’s SubX project, Muñoz and his colleagues recently calculated that the models for Guatemala are good enough to say what the weather might look like three weeks in advance.

“That is basically a dream, because we used to say you cannot have good forecasts weeks in advance,” said Muñoz. “There is a lot of room for improvement, but they have potential.” The director of Guatemala’s meteorological service (called INSIVUMEH) was excited about the possibilities, and asked Muñoz to run the analysis.

The Outlook for Guatemala

The subseasonal forecasts and Muñoz’s calculations suggest that there’s a reasonably good chance that Guatemala will have drier than normal conditions over the next three weeks, especially for the week of July 4-10. That means, hopefully, a chance for the Guatemalan government to rebuild roads and infrastructure in the areas impacted by the eruption.

The top row shows rainfall predictions for 1, 2, and 3 weeks into the future; green means above-normal rainfall for that week, and brown means below normal. The bottom row shows the researchers’ confidence in each prediction, with blue indicating higher confidence. The Volcán de Fuego is marked with a black dot in each map. Source: Ángel G. Muñoz

To ensure the reliability of the forecasts, Muñoz compares predictions between multiple models, and between multiple trials for each model. He also assesses how well the models’ predictions have performed in past situations.

The resulting forecasts provide an educated guess as to which way things are most likely to go. No one can know for sure how accurate the predictions are until the three weeks have passed.

These maps show how accurate similar predictions have been in the past for weeks 1, 2, and 3, based on 17 years of data. Redder colors indicate better skill. Source: Ángel G. Muñoz

Eddy Sánchez, director of INSIVUMEH, said that the forecasts were very useful because they identify changes that could occur in the short-term. “It makes us feel confident to have another forecasting tool,” he said. “It’s important for the government to have this kind of product to plan the construction of infrastructure and roads in the affected area by the Fuego Volcano.”

Now, added INSIVUMEH agrometeorologist Rosario Gómez, “We are interested in starting the validation process, taking into account the daily rain data of the network of meteorological stations in the country.”

A Deeper Look into the Future

While Guatemala now has some idea of what to expect from the weather, the eruption’s long-term effects are harder to foresee. The eruption has damaged thousands of hectares of corn, bean, and grain crops, as well as coffee, an economically important crop for Guatemala. In addition, many people working in the agricultural sector have been forced to flee their homes.

“The overall impact on people’s livelihoods and agriculture is still unknown,” Jennifer Bradshaw and Carmen Gonzalez, both graduate students at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs working in Guatemala for the ACToday project, wrote in an email. “How much of an economic and social impact did this particular eruption have on communities? What’s next for these communities—especially those whose livelihoods revolved around agriculture, given their wrecked lands?”

The Volcán de Fuego hasn’t deterred the ACToday team from its goal of using state-of-the-art climate information tools to enhance food security in Guatemala. “The project can help our country to make better forecasts and be able to communicate to the decision makers,” said Gómez. “Especially now, because in July we have less rain and it is really important know the rain forecast.”

Given El Fuego’s potential disruption to Guatemala’s food system, ACToday’s work may be more important now than ever.

Shahab Uddin (center), an agronomist from Bangladesh’s Department of Agriculture Extension, and Abdul Mannan (left), a scientist at Bangladesh Meteorological Department, speak to staff from DAE, BMD, CIMMYT and IRI about what was learned and discussed in the training, and what the next steps are for the project. Photo: Elisabeth Gawthrop/IRI

The trainings were sponsored in large part by the USAID-funded project Climate Services for Resilient Development (CSRD) in South Asia and Bangladesh, which focuses on improving climate information tailored to the agriculture sector. The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT)leads the project, which includes Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI), as well as BMD and DAE as major partners.

The most recent training was held for two weeks in March 2018 at IRI’s headquarters in New York. In addition to the CSRD support, contributions to the curriculum for the March training were made through the Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today, for Tomorrow (ACToday) project. ACToday, funded by Columbia World Projects, also connected the participants from Bangladesh to the different groups within IRI, discussing topics such as climate and health, flash floods and index insurance.

The trainings began in November 2017 with BMD staff and included foundational climate science concepts, such as how to verify and calibrate forecasts, as well as tools for improving the efficiency and quality of forecasting. In the extended March training, for example, BMD scientists learned to use a new, automated version of the Climate Predictability Tool.

This software, used by meteorological services around the world and developed by IRI’s chief climate scientist Simon Mason, helps forecasters streamline their forecast production. The automated version increases the quality of the forecasts and saves time, said Abdul Mannan, a BMD scientist. For each forecast issued, a scientist may look at a number of variables and climate model outputs, such as sea-surface temperatures in various regions of the world’s oceans or model wind fields, to be predictors of the coming months’ climate in a certain area. Previously, working on a single such predictor would take at least two hours, said Mannan. “Now we are able to do it in 20-30 minutes,” he said. When considered on a regular basis, this time saved can permit BMD’s climatologists more time to focus on communicating climate information to partners in DAE and other organizations that are in need of climate services.

Bangladesh has a notoriously difficult climate to forecast. Quamrul Hassan, another scientist at BMD, explained that while tropical climates are generally more predictable than climates at the higher latitudes, Bangladesh is an exception. “In the south there is the Bay of Bengal and in the north there are the mighty Himalayas,” he said. “Due to this geographical situation it is very difficult to predict some weather events in Bangladesh. But still we are trying to do better and better day by day.” In other parts of the tropics, sea temperatures have a stronger effect on climate and it is easier to make long-range forecasts.

Hassan is hopeful that based on the work done at the IRI training, they may be better able to predict sub-seasonal (i.e. two-week to two-month) climate for Bangladesh than they have at the seasonal (i.e. three-month) scale. Forecasts at the three to four week timescale are of particular interest because of their potential applicability to the needs of the agricultural sector. Bazlur Rashid, also a BMD scientist, explained that with a sub-seasonal forecast they could provide the agriculture sector with information about which week in the coming month is most likely to have rainfall. This kind of information could be useful for planning planting or harvesting activities, for example.

In addition to gaining technical expertise using IRI tools, BMD scientists also spoke of the usefulness of learning about various applications of climate services from IRI’s experts in the applied fields. “It is a very new dimension,” said Rashid. “In our country, people think that a weather forecast means it is disaster-related event. But we can apply [climate information] not only to the disaster sector but to other sectors as well, such as health and agriculture.”

Like many agriculture extension services, DAE is charged with bringing advances in knowledge, techniques and tools directly to farmers in Bangladesh, using a network of thousands of employees. The department also helps guide where and when seeds and other agricultural inputs will be available to farmers. Staff from DAE attended parts of the November training in Dhaka and the extended March training in New York.

Before coming to IRI, Rahana Sultana, an agricultural economist from DAE, said they did not have a good understanding of how climate information from BMD might fit into programs to benefit farmers. A presentation from Simon Mason about weather and climate forecasting stood out to her as essential. “From this, we now understand how and why, where and when we can collaborate with BMD,” she said.

“If I get a seasonal forecast before a season starts, then a farmer can decide what crops, what variety, and when they cultivate these crops,” Sultana said. She also expressed interest in information at the ‘weather scale’, i.e. the predicted conditions in the range of the next hours to two weeks. In the case of boro rice, which is grown in the drier winter season, three irrigations per week are generally required. “If we get information that the week’s rainfall probability is high, then the farmer can know and can decide not to irrigate the field,” Sultana said. Then the cost of production is lower and the farmer can benefit, she added.

At the March training, DAE participants identified the timing of the activities conducted in the production of several major crops, with the goal of using the resulting calendar to figure out where and when climate information could best be used.

“The crop calendar is the whole cropping structure,” said Shahab Uddin, an agronomist from DAE. “Starting with seed selection, then seed soaking and germination, then putting in the seed bed, then transplanting for rice. Then more management practices and harvesting and post-harvest activities.”

“In all these areas, we need climatic information. In the vegetative growth phase, we need rainfall and temperature information. In the reproductive phase of rice, we need humidity,” Uddin said. “Because if it is hot and humid, then more insects will come. But then farmers will take preparations to protect their crop from attack.” He said DAE plans to use the crop calendar to teach farmers how agricultural activities and climate information are connected.

Moving forward, close collaboration between BMD and DAE will be essential to continue to develop effective climate services for agriculture in Bangladesh. Enhancing this type of collaboration is a goal of the newly created Bangladesh Academy for Climate Services, which grew out of ACToday project consultations with BMD, DAE, CIMMYT and the International Center for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD).

Such collaboration is easier said than done, said Timothy Krupnik, an agronomist at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) and CSRD Project Leader. “There aren’t incentives for cross-ministry, cross-department collaboration in Bangladesh,” he said. “But collaboration can add a significant value that we are working with IRI, BMD and DAE to strategically leverage for impact, ultimately benefiting farmers by merging agronomy with climate and extension science.”

DAE and BMD have been meeting together twice a month to coordinate activities since the November training, and experts from both departments said the joint workshop at IRI in March helped deepen the bond between the departments. “When both departments are involved in a meeting or workshop,” Uddin said, “there is more integration and it is more effective.

A farmer in Nyanza, Rwanda winnowing beans. Francesco Fiondella/IRI.

The Rwanda Climate Services for Agriculture project has won the first Climate Smart Agriculture Project of the Year Award. The Aid & International Development Forum announced the news at its Africa Climate Smart Agriculture Summit in Nairobi earlier this week. The Rwanda project is led by IRI senior research scientist James Hansen, who oversees the Climate Services and Safety Nets Flagship Program of the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS). The United States Agency for International Development is funding the work.

Desire Kagabo, the Rwanda Climate Services for Agriculture Project Coordinator, accepts the 2018 Climate-Smart Agriculture Project of the Year Award in Nairobi. Photo supplied by AIDF.

IRI has helped Meteo Rwanda, the country’s national weather service, produce one of the most advanced suites of online climate information tools and products for agricultural decision makers available in Sub-Saharan Africa. Through its Enhancing National Climate Services (ENACTS) initiative, IRI worked with  Meteo Rwanda to fill gaps in its historical climate records and create a high-resolution data set going back more than thirty years.

Now, the project team is working with other Rwandan partners to integrate the newly available climate products into the country’s national agricultural extension service, by training extension staff and volunteer farmers in a process known as Participatory Integrated Climate Services for Agriculture (PICSA). The trained personnel have so far led 75,000 farmers through the process of understanding local historical and forecast climate information and incorporating it into their farm and livelihood planning.

“Our collective work benefits from a particularly strong set of government and local and international partners and generous support from USAID at the level needed to strengthen Rwanda’s capacity to produce, deliver and use climate services,” says Hansen. “This investment of human and financial resources, and innovative solutions such as ENACTS and PICSA, have made it possible to make things that have previously only been demonstrated a pilot scale work for farmers on a national scale.”

Read more about the work and the award on the CCAFS blog and from Aid & International Development Forum.

The Earth Institute’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society is leading the first of these projects. It focuses on climate threats to food and nutrition in six countries in Africa, Latin America and South Asia and involves a number of institutions and departments across the university.

“IRI is a global leader when it comes to understanding the impacts of climate risks on development outcomes,” says IRI director Lisa Goddard. “Now, with our Columbia colleagues, we’re working directly with global institutions that have far-reaching programs already in place around the world to help countries increase food security and nutrition.”

The new project is called Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today, for Tomorrow, or ACToday.

“Columbia World Projects is an opportunity to take the research university mission to a new place. Everybody is trying to expand the boundaries of what research means and how it connects to the world,“ says Nicholas Lemann, director of the Columbia World Projects. “ACToday fits our model because it’s pure research of a kind only a university can really do but it’s ready to go out and be applied in the field to real significant human benefit.”

Every year, one in nine people in developing countries go hungry for extended periods, according to the United Nations. Most are farmers and their children. Climate variability is one of the most significant threats to food systems in these countries, whose economies are still largely dependent on non-irrigated agriculture to grow their food.

The goal of ACToday is to significantly reduce this threat in two key ways. The first is to increase the production and availability of state-of-the-art climate information products and tools; the second is to improve the way such information is used in development programs, national policy, insurance and other decision making related to food systems.

The project will focus initially on Ethiopia, Senegal, Colombia, Guatemala, Bangladesh and Vietnam. Together, these countries comprise a population of almost half a billion people who face recurring climate-related risks to their food production and economies.

These six countries will be the focus of the Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today, for Tomorrow project.

In order to help these countries achieve their development goals, ACToday will support existing large-scale programs run by the World Food Program, the World Bank and the CGIAR.

“This is a great example of a new way of working on climate change and food systems development,” says Ruben Echeverría, the director-general of the CGIAR’s International Center for Tropical Agriculture. “Columbia is embarking on a key global initiative, and we look forward to being an active partner in its design and implementation.”

Faculty and students from Columbia’s Medical School, Law School, the School of International and Public Affairs and the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology will work with IRI on the four-year project.

SIPA professor Glenn Denning says this is an unprecedented opportunity for students.

“This summer, we’re sending 12 students to Asia, Africa and Latin America to support IRI scientists and partner organizations. They will identify and advance practical ways to influence policies and investments across entire food value chain,” says Denning, an agriculture specialist who leads the MPA in Development Practice program. “This is what every student dreams of.”

A Predictable Problem

Goddard says the causes of hunger are well understood and predictable.

“Repeated cycles of hunger and its nutritional impacts cause large-scale disruptions and they can be multigenerational,” she says. “For example, 315,000 women die each year in childbirth due to low iron levels. These women could be saved if they had dietary access to iron-fortified grain varieties.”

Such crops, like all crops, can be highly susceptible to climate variability. Eighty percent of the world’s agriculture is rainfed, which means billions of people are betting their livelihoods on having a favorable, predictable climate during their growing season.

A single bad drought or flood can destroy years of progress, and not just for the individual farmer. These climate events often affect suppliers, roads, processing plants, storage capacity and markets.

“Successful food producing systems are built to withstand and even to thrive across a range of potential climate events,” says IRI’s Walter Baethgen, whose prior work in Uruguay created much of the inspiration and momentum behind ACToday. “They do this by using good information effectively, combined with financial tools like insurance for added protection against some of the climate risks.”

Baethgen says that climate information is still underutilized in developing countries despite improvements in our ability to monitor and predict climate swings. As a result, poor climate planning not only threatens national investments in years dominated by adverse climate events, but it also prevents countries from taking full advantage of good years, when rains are plentiful, for example.

“At Columbia, we have the scientific knowledge and experience to help our partners reverse this situation, not over the next thirty or forty years, but in the next five,” he says. “If we are successful, we will improve the lives and health of millions of men, women and children.”

Using multimedia and infographics, a new story puts the technical process in the context of its real-world impact. Find out how the International Research Institute for Climate and Society’s Financial Instruments Sector team pulled it off, and how the project could be a model for climate adaptation efforts around the world. Read it here.

Sofia Martínez explains an index insurance game to farmers in southern Honduras, May 2015. Photo: Elisabeth Gawthrop / IRI

Attendees of the Gobeshona 4 Conference in Dhaka, Bangladesh, January 2018. Photo: ICCCAD.

Furlow gave a keynote address (slides available here) and Braun moderated a session on the creation of the first ever Bangladesh Academy for Climate Services, which will be hosted at the Independent University of Bangladesh. IRI is a founding partner of the new academy, which will offer certificate programs and courses for professionals and students.

The audience actively participated in the discussion to help define the role, direction and priorities of the academy. Braun said that the strongest request coming from participants was for it to act as a platform for multidisciplinary dialogue and coordination on climate services.

Day 3 of #Gobeshona4 starts with a Keynote on climate services by John Furlow, Columbia University pic.twitter.com/wtymkBnktW

— Mohammad Nazmul Chowdhury (@cnazmul78) January 10, 2018

“It was extremely exciting to witness the high attendance at the session and the interest from people representing different parts of the economy affected by climate,” said Braun. “What was even more exciting were the follow-up requests for meetings and the many ideas that we have received since.”

Braun and Furlow wrote an article for the Dhaka Tribune on climate services and the new academy. The text of that article is copied below.

Creating Climate Services in Bangladesh

We have a realistic way to curb the impacts of climate change in the concept of climate services

By Mélody Braun and John Furlow

As we recently passed the second anniversary of the adoption of the Paris Agreement at COP21, we have seen leadership on climate action accelerating.

Governments have been increasingly joined by states, cities, the private sector, while the civil society maintains a continuous pressure on their elected leaders. Universities are joining forces around the world to foster capacity building and climate education for the younger generation.

However, the level of ambition remains insufficient, and developing countries are facing two challenges: improving the productivity of their agricultural sector and diversifying their economies, while managing a number of growing additional stresses and constraints, including climate variability and change. Each sector is facing its share of climate impacts, and is mobilizing efforts and funding to respond to it.

With the broad agreement that countries need to adapt, funds are made increasingly available from multiple sources. But a major challenge to adaptation is the gap between climate scientists and the rest of the world.

On the one hand, a great deal of climate information is constantly generated at global, national and subnational scales by climate scientists and national meteorological services, but is often disconnected from concrete applications, and not available at a useful timescale to support decisions that are being made. Of course, tremendous efforts are invested on the ground by agricultural extension officers, NGOs, private sector, donors to better anticipate, adapt and react to climate impacts, but rarely take advantage of the best information available.

Applying appropriate information to the most pressing challenges is a difficult but vital task. Information on the climate expected at the end of the century is useful for some infrastructure projects, but not for farmers trying to make decision for the next growing season. Users and producers of information need to communicate their needs and abilities to each other so that the best information is used for the best outcomes.

What is often missing is a body or platform to help connect two communities that speak different languages. Just like in a multidisciplinary or multicultural environment, each group needs to understand in their own terms how the others think, what they can do, what their needs are and how to best complement each other. The concept of “climate services” seeks to address this information challenge. According to Climate Services Partnership, climate services “involve the production, translation, transfer, and use of climate knowledge and information in climate-informed decision making and climate-smart policy and planning. Climate services ensure that the best available climate science is effectively communicated with agriculture, water, health, and other sectors, to develop and evaluate adaptation strategies.”

Climate service information should be accessible, timely, and relevant to decision-maker needs in order to help societies cope with current climate variability and build resilience to future change.There are four components of climate services, and together they provide: A voice for the users of information to define what information will be useful and in which format; a responsibility for high quality information; a mandate to translate that information into terms that decision makers can understand and use; and, a call for effective communication of information to users.

Ideally, an effort to enhance climate services will create working relationships between information providers — weather agencies — and information users in agriculture, fishing, transportation, energy, construction, etc.

Bangladesh has a talented meteorological service (the Bangladesh Meteorological Department, BMD), is clearly at risk of climate impacts, and is running up a steep learning curve on adaptation. BMD faces greater demand for support than it has the capacity to provide.

To meet this demand and bridge this gap between climate scientists and decision makers, BMD together with the International Center for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD), the Independent University of Bangladesh (IUB), CIMMYT Bangladesh which leads the Climate Services for Rural Development (CSRD) project, and the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) at Columbia University, which leads the Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today for Tomorrow (ACToday) project, are jointly establishing a climate services academy.

The climate services academy is intended to become a dynamic, participatory platform to centralize and coordinate efforts on climate services, that brings together multiple actors and sectors, with various levels of knowledge on climate information.

It will be established as a sub-group of the Bangladesh research Gobeshona umbrella, and as such it will be hosted at the Independent University of Bangladesh. The academy will fill a number of functions, to be shaped by priorities and interests of its members. It can host professional training courses for staff at BMD and certification programs for cross-sectoral training in climate science.

It can facilitate discussions between users and producers of weather and climate information. The academy can help identify specific information needs in specific sectors, and how to best tailor that information to support implementation of Bangladesh’s national adaptation plan and other development strategies.

It can facilitate the co-creation of tools to help decision makers understand and manage risk. It can host tools like the Columbia University’s Data Library, a versatile dynamic online data management system. It can provide a climate science curriculum for a new generation of Bangladeshi experts in climate change adaptation.

The climate services academy was presented and discussed in a Symposium on Climate Services in Bangladesh at the Gobeshona conference 2018, on January 10th.  Next steps will be based upon the outcomes of the discussion.

Climate scientists at Columbia University have developed a new, global hurricane model for estimating the long-term hazard of rare, high impact storms under different climate scenarios. The model uses a novel approach to efficiently simulate a large number of storms around the world, especially those that rapidly intensify, such as Hurricanes Maria, Irma and Harvey. The researchers hope the new system will lead to storm risk and hazard assessments for major cities.

The project team, led by the International Research Institute for Climate and Society’s Chia-Ying Lee, will make the model open source when the work is completed. The scientists describe their methodology in a new paper in the Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems.

The 2017 Atlantic hurricane season was one the most destructive in U.S. history, causing more than $200 billion in damages before it officially ended on November 30. Hurricanes and tropical storms also tore through the Caribbean and Gulf Coast, devastating a number of island nations and territories.

“Events like these cause enormous damage,” says Lee. “It’s important that we have an accurate understanding of how the hazard posed by these events change as the climate changes.”

Like other hurricane models, this new one uses historical conditions to simulate a large number of realistic but synthetic storms–many more storms, in fact, than have actually occurred in the past 30 years.

The top map shows historical tropical-cyclone tracks from 2000 to 2012. The bottom maps shows tracks for this same time period, simulated by the new model. Colors indicate storm intensity, red being the highest and blue the lowest.

“Essentially, we can generate a much longer history in order to visualize things that haven’t happened since the onset of modern observations, but that could happen,” says coauthor Adam Sobel, from Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “This allows us to assess the probabilities of rare events that aren’t present in the historical record.”

Most models that the private sector uses do this through purely statistical means, generating new storms based only on the tracks of historical ones. Such models can’t account for the large-scale environment in which each storm developed and evolved. Global dynamical models, on the other hand – the kind used routinely for weather and climate prediction – can in principle simulate both the large-scale climate and tropical cyclones. Therefore, they can represent storm response to changing environmental conditions such as climate change. However, running these simulations at high enough resolution to represent the storms well is very expensive and time consuming.

So the Columbia team drew inspiration from a hazard model developed a decade ago by Kerry Emanuel, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His is a statistical-dynamical model, meaning that it uses a combination of physics and statistics to simulate each synthetic storm.

The model that Lee and her colleagues have created draws on this hybrid statistical-dynamical approach, but predicts storm intensity in a new way, incorporating a methodology the team developed in 2016 that captures the frequency of major storms such as Hurricane Maria and the way they rapidly intensify. Their modeling method is also very efficient at simulating a large number of storms around the world, which allows for comprehensive hazard assessments.

“Now we can study hurricane risk, globally and in a way that is directly relevant to impacts,” Sobel says. “Up to now, only very expensive dynamical models could do this, so we’re opening up a lot of new possibilities, for us and others.”

Governments, financial institutions, nongovernmental organizations and even individual households stand to benefit from improved hazard assessment. For example, institutions can generate probability maps that show the odds that different places will experience a major hurricane in the next year, says Chia-Ying Lee. “We’ll also be able to generate local hazard assessments centered on individual cities, and these can potentially be put on interactive websites with public access.

When the project ends in 2020, anyone will be able to download and run the model. Sobel hopes that this will stimulate others to help improve on their work.

“As scientists who strive to make our research useful and valuable in the wider world, we wanted to develop a model that would not only allow us to study hurricane risk, but would also empower others to do so, whether for academic research, disaster risk reduction, climate adaptation or any other purpose.”

The group is currently plugging in historical data generated from a range of global climate models to see how well they can reproduce past hurricane seasons. This understanding will allow them to adjust the model to simulate future hurricane seasons. They plan to report these results in an upcoming paper.

The research was supported by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority under the research grant NYSERDA 103862, as well as funding from the Office of Naval Research under the grant MURI (N00014-16-1-2073).

Why do we do what we do? Walter Baethgen, IRI’s head of regional and sector research says it best in our new video: “It’s amazing and exciting when you see scientific work really being applied, really affecting the way a country functions.” Have a look.

As we look back on the year, it is easy to see how critical IRI’s work and mission have become, whether in predicting the next El Niño or La Niña, tackling public health threats around the world or creating new tools to predict wildfires. And now, with direct support from Columbia University, we’re starting our most ambitious project yet: working with our national and international partners in six countries to adapt their food systems to climate now, so that their citizens will have nutritious and sustainable food no matter how the climate changes in the seasons and decades to come. Our approach could transform the futures and improve the lives of billions of people.

You, our partners, donors, and friends, helped us make 2017 an incredible year of successes and new opportunities. Your support has had a positive and measurable impact on people’s lives. Help us continue in our mission by making a gift today.

We are truly grateful for the part you play in addressing some of the greatest climate challenges of our time.

Sincerely,

Lisa Goddard

Director, The International Research Institute for Climate and Society
The Earth Institute, Columbia University

Farmers in El Paraíso, Honduras, are benefiting from climate forecasts produced by Columbia scientists. / Photograph by Elisabeth Gawthrop

Columbia Magazine: IRI is at the forefront of a field called climate services. Can you explain what scientists in your field do?
Lisa Goddard: We collaborate with farmers, public-health officials, water managers, and others to understand how climate conditions affect their work. We then help them make better decisions, based on predictions of what climate conditions will likely occur from a few weeks to several years in the future.

What types of decisions do you help people with?
Well, if farmers know there’s a good chance of a drought occurring in the next growing season, they might plant crops that don’t require a lot of rain, even if those crops are less profitable than ones they’d ideally like to plant. Or if health officials in the tropics know that the next rainy season is likely to be wetter than usual, they might make a bigger investment in malaria-prevention measures, like bed nets. It’s all about helping people use their resources wisely and in a timely manner.

How can you predict the weather so far in advance?
Unlike TV meteorologists, we don’t attempt to say what the weather is going to look like on any specific day. Rather, we offer forecasts that describe the range of total rainfall and average temperatures that a region is likely to experience in a given season. So whereas meteorologists track the movements of particular pressure systems, we study phenomena that may cause a region’s climate to differ from previous years. One of the key factors we consider is the temperature of the oceans. The warmth of water near the ocean’s surface has an enormous impact on climate, because it affects the temperature and humidity of the air above it. And since ocean currents change slowly, they are predictable weeks to months in advance. This enables us to anticipate their effects on the atmosphere. The most important example of a predictable climate phenomenon is El Niño, which occurs when waters in the eastern and central equatorial Pacific Ocean become uncharacteristically warm every few years. El Niño robustly influences weather conditions over nearly 30 percent of all land on Earth, all the way from the western coasts of North and South America to the Horn of Africa and India.

Didn’t Columbia researchers play a key role in discovering El Niño’s global effects?
Yes, Mark Cane, a Columbia climate scientist, was the first one to predict changes in El Niño’s sea-surface temperatures, using a forecasting model that he and Steve Zebiak, his student at the time, created in the mid-1980s.

You could say that their work essentially gave birth to the field of climate prediction, which led to the new endeavor of climate services. While there are many ocean phenomena that influence our planet’s climate, El Niño is the most powerful in influencing annual variations. Over the years, we’ve gotten better and better at predicting El Niño and its effects.

Lisa Goddard / Photograph by Jeffrey Saks

When was IRI founded?
The US government, through its National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, awarded Columbia a major grant to create IRI in the mid-1990s, with the aim of sharing our knowledge of seasonal climate variability and forecasting with the rest of the world. Mark and Steve’s presence here was a huge factor, as was the fact that Columbia is home to many other top climate scientists. We now have a staff of nearly fifty researchers, and we are the world’s preeminent research group dedicated to creating seasonal forecasts and translating our results into actionable information.

Where do your scientists work?
We have ongoing collaborations in dozens of countries. In some, we’re working with government ministries to develop their forecasting systems from scratch. In others, we’re working behind the scenes, providing technical support to local scientists who are seeking to improve their forecasting systems. A big part of what we do is sharing our forecasting technology and decision-making methods with other scientific groups.

We also work with aid organizations. The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, for instance, uses our forecasts to anticipate what parts of the world are most likely to be hit by floods, droughts, and other types of severe weather several months in advance. This enables them to mobilize relief workers ahead of time and respond to emergencies faster and more cost-effectively.

So you are predicting specific weather events.
Not exactly. Not in the sense of saying, “A hurricane is going to hit Jamaica six weeks from now.” But sometimes, in addition to projecting the total rainfall that a region may receive in a given season, we can also predict whether that rain will fall nice and evenly over the course of the season or arrive in a few big bursts. In some cases, we may also be able to say something about the frequency of intense heat waves. This can be just as helpful to know. It can tell farmers the risk that certain types of crops may get washed away or dried out, and if aid agencies should be prepared for the possibility that thousands of people may get displaced by floods or droughts.

Farmers in the village of Diouna in southern Mali listen to weather broadcasts as they prepare their field for planting. / Photograph by Francesco Fiondella

One of the places you’ve done extensive work is Uruguay.
Yes, our scientists have collaborated with the Uruguayan government to build a forecasting system for farmers that is the most advanced of its kind. Today, a farmer in Uruguay can log onto a website that we helped to create and learn what kind of climate conditions are likely to materialize in his specific county. A typical forecast might state: your area has a 50 percent chance of receiving less rain than usual, a 30 percent chance of receiving an average amount, and a 20 percent chance of receiving more rain than usual. He can then use the website to find out how much money he’s likely to earn by planting various crops — say, corn, wheat, barley, or sorghum — under each of those climate scenarios. He can also find out the potential benefits of fertilizing or irrigating. The tool is individualized, sophisticated, and extremely easy to use.

Uruguayan government officials are also using the forecasts to decide where droughts may necessitate the distribution of emergency assistance.

Despite having an agricultural economy, Uruguay is a fairly prosperous country. Don’t you typically work in poorer ones?
Most of our work is focused on helping developing nations. One of the reasons we took on the project in Uruguay is because its agriculture ministry is extremely well run and the country has a vibrant scientific community. This helped us to create a top-notch forecasting system. And our goal was always to create a system that could serve as a sustainable model for other countries.

Developing countries need our help because they’re especially vulnerable to climate variability. Nearly 80 percent of the world’s farmers still depend primarily on rainfall, rather than irrigation, for watering their crops. That means that if little rain comes, they’re completely out of luck. They might not be able to afford to send their children to school, to pay back a loan they’ve taken to buy fertilizer, or to feed their family.

The University recently announced that it will work with your team to replicate and expand this effort in several other countries.
Right. This will be part of an initiative called Columbia World Projects, which President Bollinger launched earlier this year to promote academic endeavors that address pressing global problems. We’re going to be joining forces with faculty from across the University on this, as well as longtime partners in international organizations. We’re still in the process of selecting five to six host countries. But our efforts in each country will aim to accomplish four goals related to agriculture: improving food security, nutrition, and economic livelihoods, and supporting environmental stability.

IRI also has quite a few ongoing projects in Africa, in countries that include Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Zambia. What does your work in these countries look like?
Helping farmers is a major focus of our work in Africa, too. In addition to providing farmers with climate forecasts, we’ve developed a new type of agricultural insurance, called index insurance, that issues payouts to farmers in years when the weather is especially bad. This is different from traditional insurance. Traditional insurance policies pay people in accordance with the losses that they personally experience. But that kind of insurance is prohibitively expensive to administer in some developing countries. That’s because in order to verify losses, insurance adjusters would have to visit every single farm, and they’d be inspecting huge numbers of small farms spread out over vast distances. But if payouts are based on a climate outcome, the administrative costs plummet and insurers are able to sell policies for less. We’ve conducted studies demonstrating the effectiveness of this approach in several African nations. As a result of our work, millions of farmers on the continent now have access to insurance for the first time.

They’re benefiting in some surprising ways. It’s not just a matter of covering their losses in bad years. Insurance can also give farmers the security they need to fully capitalize on good weather. We’ve found that poor farmers who are insured are much more likely to respond to favorable climate forecasts by taking calculated risks that enable them to get out of debt, and even see profits. This might mean getting small loans to purchase fertilizer, high-yield seeds, or additional livestock. We’ve shown that if farmers capitalize on a few good seasons in this way, they can often lift themselves out of poverty.

Is there a certain level of education people need to use your forecasts?
We find that people of all backgrounds are accustomed to dealing with fairly complex choices in their work and that, with a little training, they’re usually able to make use of the information we provide. Farmers in developing countries have to be pretty savvy in order to survive.

IRI scientists are not typically working directly with individual farmers, though. We often provide training to local agriculture officials or humanitarian-aid workers who then translate the forecasts to farmers in ways that make sense to them. In this way, we can help the largest number of people.

But even working with these intermediaries, we face challenges. In some of the places where we’ve worked, the local language has no word for the concept of “probability.” Once, in a meeting in Kenya, a colleague of mine communicated the concept to local aid workers using a paper airplane, which he flew repeatedly, marking all the spots where it landed on the floor to represent the range of possible climate outcomes. The locals got it, and their communities have since embraced our forecasts.

A meeting of farmers in Bagerhat district, Bangladesh, to discuss climate-adaptation strategies. / Photograph by Sari Blakeley

Do farmers in the United States rely on seasonal climate forecasts? 

Not as much as you might think. The National Weather Service generates some seasonal forecasts, but the agency honestly doesn’t have a lot of traction with American farmers. This is partly because major agribusinesses here in the US, as well as in other wealthy countries, have such elaborate irrigation systems and insurance subsidies that they’re somewhat insulated from the variability of climate.

Do you see international support for this kind of work gaining momentum?
Oh, absolutely. Global warming is a driving force behind it. Outside the United States, where discussion about climate change has not been warped by politics, there is little debate about whether global warming is real. Everybody sees it’s real. Farmers can see the effects it’s having. They know that they’re experiencing increasing temperatures and thus more severe droughts, and more powerful storms than their parents and grandparents saw. And city dwellers recognize that they’re becoming more vulnerable to floods and water shortages and deadly heat waves. Just in the last few years, we’ve seen more and more countries willing to invest in climate forecasting systems, as the need to adapt to climate change takes on greater urgency.

What are the challenges of your work moving forward?
You’d think that in an age when weather satellites are continuously orbiting the earth we’d have all the data we need to produce climate forecasts for the entire planet, but that’s not the case. The problem is that in order to produce forecasts that are truly useful to people — that is, those that indicate how an upcoming season’s climate may compare to what people in the region are accustomed to — you also need historical climate data. This typically consists of many years of rain-gauge and temperature-sensor readings that have been digitized and uploaded into global databases. But in some developing countries, this data is incomplete or hasn’t been digitized yet. One of our big initiatives now is to work with African countries to fill in the gaps in their historical records so that we can generate better forecasts for them. In the future, we hope to provide the entire continent with monitoring and forecasts as detailed as those now available in Uruguay.

Wouldn’t it be nice to know now what the weather is going to be for the vacation you have planned next month? Or, if you’re a farmer, whether you’re going to get enough rainfall during a crucial planting time coming up in a few weeks? Weather forecasts help us make decisions about the next few days to a week, and seasonal climate forecasts give us information on the time scale of three months to a year or more. But a significant gap in scientists’ understanding has limited the ability to forecast what will happen two weeks to two months from now, also called the subseasonal scale. Scientists are starting to produce experimental subseasonal climate forecasts, exploring, for example, the prediction of conditions related to the recent hurricanes to strike the United States. Easy public access to those forecasts has been limited, until now.

Two new datasets available in the IRI Data Library allow access to 60 terabytes of climate forecasts containing predictions of rainfall, temperature, winds and other variables at the subseasonal level. Researchers can also take advantage of the computational power of the Data Library, including the ability to visualize and analyze the new data online without having to download it.

One of the datasets makes subseasonal forecasts available from 11 out of 13 of the World Meteorological Organization’s official long-range forecasting centers. This dataset, called the S2S Database, underpins the international Subseasonal to Seasonal (S2S) Prediction Project, said Andrew Robertson, who heads IRI’s climate team and is the co-chair of the S2S Project. The WMO’s World Weather and World Climate Research Programs created the project in 2013 to improve forecasts and understanding on timescales of two weeks to a season, filling the gap between daily weather and seasonal climate forecasts. WMO also wants to promote use of the forecasts for better early warning of high impact weather events such as floods and droughts, and heat and cold waves.

While the S2S Dataset is also available at two official S2S archiving centers (ECMWF and CMA), the IRI Data Library version brings a large subset of the S2S database online so that it is accessible “in the cloud” using any web browser, even on a tablet or smart phone. Researchers can also more easily assess S2S forecast accuracy using the Data Library’s extensive datasets of observed climate conditions.

The set of figures on the left show precipitation forecasts in the four weeks leading up to a heavy rainfall event that happened in southern Asia in the week of July 6-12, 2015. The map on the right shows the rainfall observed during that same event. The forecast maps show weekly precipitation anomalies (in mm/day), starting with a forecast four weeks ahead of the event (June 15 – Week 4), and continuing with forecasts on June 22 (Week 3), June 29 (Week 2) and July 6 (Week 1). The observed rainfall from July 6-12, 2015, uses the same scale of weekly anomalies for easy comparison. Observed rainfall comes from CHIRPS data, and the forecasts use ECMWF ensemble mean.

“The functionality that the Data Library adds will be particularly relevant for researchers who are working on how subseasonal forecasting data might be used in applications for public health, water resources, agriculture, disaster risk reduction and more,” said Robertson. The coding and data skills required for accessing S2S data from other centers is not a problem for many climate science researchers, such as those doing predictability research or studying model errors. But for those with more of an eye toward applying the forecasts, the process of obtaining the most appropriate data can be unwieldy.

Perhaps most importantly, the IRI Data Library allows users to visualize the S2S data before downloading it. For some, said Robertson, viewing the data – such as weekly averages of forecasted daily rainfall during a past flood event – may be all that’s needed. Others are likely to find it useful for exploratory analysis before downloading.

“We want to expand the ability of the user community who may be in interested in developing forecast products,” said Robertson. “The S2S Project is primarily a research project, but it also seeks to demonstrate the potential for significant socio-economic value of forecasts, to develop new tools and to lay the groundwork for future climate services. This dataset is an important first step.”

Significant for applications development, the IRI Data Library allows virtual “Maprooms” to be created using the S2S data. A Maproom – a platform that starts with a map as the entry point for accessing a range of climate information and analyses – can be adapted to specific user groups and expressed in terms relevant to their decision making.

Because of restrictions in place at many operational forecasting centers, the S2S forecasts are only available three weeks after they are issued.

But the other new subseasonal dataset in the IRI Data Library does offer real-time forecasts. The data come from NOAA’s Subseasonal Experiment (SubX) research project, which combines North American global models from NOAA, NASA, Environment Canada, the Navy, and National Center for Atmospheric Research to produce once-a-week real-time experimental sub-seasonal forecasts. The SubX dataset provides similar variables to the S2S Dataset, including a set of forecasts for past dates (also called reforecasts), and is being made available for the research community in the Data Library.

The top figure shows the rainfall prediction made August 3, 2017 for the time period a few weeks later (Aug 25-Sept 4) when Hurricane Harvey hit the southern coast of the United States. The bottom figure shows the observed rainfall that occurred from Aug 25- Sep 4. Although the prediction for the exact location of the heaviest rains was off by about 300 miles, and the overall magnitude of the event was significantly underestimated, the forecast shows promise for predicting regions likely to be vulnerable to coming extreme events. While this example serves as an indication of what might be predictable a few weeks out, scientists will have to examine this and many more events before determining if such forecasts should be operational. Figures created by Ángel Muñoz using the IRI Data Library. Graphics of observed rainfall use NOAA data, and the forecasts use ECMWF.

Between the two datasets, IRI now houses around 60 terabytes of subseasonal climate forecasting data. This much data couldn’t simply be copied to IRI from the S2S archiving center at ECMWF, or from the SubX forecasting centers. A large part of the S2S data was transferred thanks to two Columbia University projects funded by NOAA’s Modeling, Analysis, Predictions, and Projections Program. Members of IRI’s Data Library team then coded special files to translate the forecasts into a format readable by the Data Library. This translation is also what allows for the more user-friendly interface, and for the possibility of deriving forecast products within the Data Library.

“The bookkeeping and constructing of all those files turned out to be quite a job,” said Robertson.

IRI’s Michael Bell and Jing Yuan did most of the data work on the files. For each of the 11 models in the S2S dataset, for example, they created code tailored for each variable in the models, with the number of variables per model ranging from 17 to 44, said Bell. They also had to make sure their “translations” accounted for other eccentricities that differ between the models — such as how many different times the forecasts are run and how many days into the future the forecasts are predicting. And, they standardized naming conventions across all of the forecasts. The team took similar steps to make sure the SubX dataset was compatible with the IRI Data Library.

“The S2S Database and SubX datasets are very complementary,” said Ben Kirtman, lead of the SubX project team. “The focus with the S2S data is forecasts from operational centers, whereas the SubX data includes forecasts from research models.”

Ángel Muñoz, a post-doctoral researcher at Princeton and IRI, said the datasets have already been useful during trainings he’s conducted abroad.

“The in-the-cloud availability of data and computational capacity provided by the Data Library permits the students to focus on the actual problems of interest, instead of spending time downloading data in the lab sessions,” said Muñoz. “This is of special importance in countries where the internet tends to be a bit slower.”

The new additions are also already making it more efficient for researchers based in the U.S. to get their work done. Kathy Pegion, an assistant professor at George Mason University who is a lead researcher with the SubX project, said that her work involves evaluating models to improve forecasting, especially at the three to four week timescale.

“It’s not always easy to get access to the global models from around the world,” said Pegion. With both the S2S and SubX datasets in the Data Library, she said, it makes it easier to compare more models, and lead to a better understanding of large scale climate drivers and sources of climate predictability.

Housing the S2S and SubX data at IRI was made possible through grants from NOAA Research’s Modeling, Analysis, Predictions, and Projections Program, and the National Weather Service Next Generation Global Prediction System program. Collaboration with Suzana Camargo, Shuguang Wang and Haibo Liu at Columbia University through their NOAA MAPP (NA16OAR4310079; NA16OAR4310076) and NSF (#1543932) projects is gratefully acknowledged.

SOS Children’s Villages Drought ERP programme in Kenya. Image: SOS Children’s Villages/ Rory Sheldon

SOS Children’s Villages has launched a collaboration between its Global Emergency Response team and the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) at Columbia University’s Earth Institute. The goal of the partnership is to improve global disaster preparedness and management, focusing on the risk-management tool Resilience360.

Currently, it is extremely challenging for humanitarian workers at the scene of a disaster to get access to satellite information, or to even know what information is useful. The goal of the new partnership is to provide real time satellite data to people working on the ground. It will also ensure that the usefulness of that information improves over time by soliciting feedback from those employing it to make decisions.

By transforming current emergency management procedures – which offer solutions predominately in the aftermath of disasters – the collaboration promises a proactive approach to emergency preparedness through research-based feedback.

“The SOS Children’s Villages-Columbia University collaboration equips us with science-based information to better prepare for and respond to natural disasters and humanitarian emergencies,” said Andreas Papp, International Director of Global Emergency Response at SOS Children’s Villages.

Implementing or improving actions based on elevated levels of risk can save both lives and resources; for example, evacuating before floods hit or preventing malaria in areas facing a probable outbreak.

“We now have the means to jointly develop modelling that gives us a better idea about how to protect SOS families and programmes, and the tools to react more quickly and effectively in our emergency relief programs for children,” said Papp. “We’re drawing on SOS Children’s Villages global experience in protecting children and Columbia University’s vast research capacity.”

The synergy will help address crucial knowledge gaps at the field level, providing information to prepare for the increasing intensity of disasters around the world.

Markus Enenkel, a post-doctoral research scientist at IRI, serves as the liaison for the collaboration. He and Dan Osgood, a research scientist also at IRI, discuss the new partnership in the following interview, edited for clarity.

Q: What brings SOS Children’s Villages and the IRI together?

MARKUS ENENKEL: We both want to see change in the current system and better approaches to translate climate data into usable information for people on the ground. Science can provide data from satellites, models and other sources that are relevant to disaster preparedness, but if nongovernmental organizations and other potential users don’t find it relevant or find it too hard to interpret, then there is no added value to that data. First, we need to effectively translate data into information, and then information into something that’s useful for decision support. IRI has the capacity and 20 years of experience to do that. However, there remains a crucial gap in translating data to knowledge on the local level.

DAN OSGOOD: Closing this gap requires the experience SOS Children’s Villages has on the village level, along with the expertise that we bring.

ME: Everybody involved has the same objective – to protect children, staff and local communities and to ensure that the infrastructure vital to SOS Children’s Villages services remains intact.

Q: What link is needed between scientific data sets and information from the field to ensure effective disaster management and preparedness?

DO: Deutsche Post DHL Group has a disaster risk information interface called Reslience360 with a lot of the global data needed for effective disaster response. SOS Children’s Villages can use Resilience360, but the question remains: What do they use the data set for? There is a crucial disconnect between what science can provide and what decision makers need. For example, satellite information may or may not be relevant to the people on the ground. We can’t know what the implications of our data sets are. Science alone doesn’t know.

We as scientists also need people in the SOS villages and programs to establish what kind of information is relevant to them and what kind of response is required in a particular situation. Only then can we use tailor climate information in an effective way.

Q: How can local SOS Children’s Villages staff bridge the information gap from the satellite data set to information that reflects the situation on the ground?

DO: We can look at historical data sets and assess with people on the ground whether those data match their actual experiences. Essentially, we need to know if the data makes sense and is helpful to the person solving problems on the ground, or if there’s a disconnect. For that, we need to work with people who are experiencing these changes. With decades of experience on the ground, SOS staff is very suitable for this. We are building and guiding this ship together.

ME: Usually any form of emergency assessment from a humanitarian perspective is done in a one-off assessment on a household level. In contrast, we are establishing a continuous feedback loop with local SOS staff to validate early warnings, weather and climate data, but also to record critical incidents that the global Resilience360 platform might miss. This allows us to establish the necessary socioeconomic baseline information.

In other words, by knowing what’s “normal” during times without any kind of disruption, we can better estimate the deviation from normal in times of crisis. At the core of this collaboration is building trust and a long-term relationship.

DO: This combination of bottom-up and top-down systems working with both satellite and ground-based data — nothing like it has ever been done before in active crisis decision-making. But it needs to be done, if the world is going to survive the intensity of disasters as the world becomes more vulnerable.

Q: How will this collaboration work to ensure the current approaches to emergency-management are being transformed from the bottom-up?

DO: The status quo is that we have some information, but it isn’t being well communicated or used. We’ve been locked in a cycle where we’re not moving forward.

ME: A top-down and bottom-up feedback spiral can transform this outdated cycle. We don’t want to make the same mistakes over and over again, but learn from them and avoid them in the future. Local knowledge is therefore indispensable to estimate the relevance of early warnings for a particular SOS village and to respond with early action.

Q: How will the improved tool ensure successful decision making and thereby facilitate effective emergency preparedness?

DO: We have some of the most sophisticated satellite technology, which is pushing out detailed information. By establishing exactly what pieces of information are relevant to affected people on the ground, we can facilitate the communication tools that are needed to make the decisions and actions that need to be taken to manage – and prepare for – disasters.

# # #

About SOS Children’s Villages

SOS Children’s Villages is the largest non-governmental organisation focused on supporting children without parental care and families at risk. Founded in 1949, the organisation today runs 2,300 programmes reaching more than a million children and adults in 135 countries and territories. SOS Children’s Villages adheres to the principle that every child grows best in a family environment, with loving parents or caregivers, living together with their siblings, in a place they can call home. SOS Children’s Villages works with communities, local partners and authorities to support disadvantaged families, thus preventing family breakdown. We aim to influence decision-makers to promote the well-being of children, especially of those without parental care. SOS Children’s Villages also helps care for and protect at-risk children and families in more than 20 humanitarian emergencies.

About the International Research Institute for Climate and Society

The International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI), part of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, aims to enhance society’s ability to understand, anticipate and manage the impacts of climate in order to improve human welfare and the environment, especially in developing countries. Visit iri.columbia.edu and follow @climatesociety on Twitter.

New studies released today in a special supplement of the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene add to the evidence that over the last decade, global malaria control efforts have saved millions of children’s lives in areas most affected by malaria.

Some of the studies, including one conducted by the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI), present new methods for evaluating large-scale malaria control programs.

Malaria remains a major cause of preventable death, killing an estimated 429,000 people and causing more than 212 million illnesses in 2015, according to the World Health Organization. Hundreds of millions of people have benefited from protective measures, such as insecticide treated bednets and spraying of homes with insecticides, and have been appropriately diagnosed with rapid diagnostic tests and treated with effective anti-malarial drugs.

The September 2017 supplement includes nine novel contributions on evaluating the impact of malaria control interventions in sub-Saharan African countries, where the majority of malaria deaths are among children under the age of five years.

The IRI-led study assesses the likely impact that changes in climate have on the assessment of the effectiveness of national malaria interventions in ten of these countries.

“Malaria is a climate-sensitive disease, meaning that natural fluctuations in rainfall and temperature conditions from one season or one year to the next can have a significant impact on the suitability for transmission of the disease,” said IRI’s Madeleine Thomson, who led the research.

“The mosquito that carries the parasite that causes malaria flourishes in the tropics,” said Julie Wallace, who is the head of the malaria division at the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Global Health Bureau. “Warm temperatures, rainfall and humidity determine the geographical distribution, seasonality and prevalence of the disease.”

​“It is important for the President’s Malaria Initiative to ensure that when we evaluate the impact of country malaria control activities, we consider climate in our analysis to make certain that all aspects that influence malaria prevalence are considered,” said Wallace.

Thomson and her colleagues found that out of the ten countries they examined, three—Tanzania, Zanzibar and Uganda—may be overestimating the impact of malaria control efforts. Unusually wet conditions during the baseline (or control) period and droughts during the intervention period may have contributed towards the observed malaria decline. In general, wet conditions increase the likelihood of standing water and higher humidities, which leads to upticks in mosquito populations that transmit the disease.

In contrast, the researchers found that Mali, Senegal and Ethiopia may be underestimating the impact of their control efforts. In these countries, the intervention periods faced wetter conditions than the baseline periods.

In the remaining four countries–Rwanda, Malawi, Mozambique, and Angola—Thomson and her colleagues could find no strong difference in climate conditions between the pre- and post-intervention period.

Green areas indicate times when rainfall was above average in Tanzania. Brown areas indicate when it was below average. Knowing how climate conditions during the time of national malaria control efforts compare to a baseline period before those efforts started is critical to evaluating success of these programs.

The United States contributes to effective malaria prevention and control for over half a billion people from the Sahel to the Horn to Southern Africa. Between 2000 and 2015, malaria deaths declined by 60 percent, and almost 7 million lives were saved. Many children are alive because of work to scale up proven malaria interventions. The reports presented here provide further evidence of the impact that has occurred in many African countries.

“This supplement is the first published collection of impact evaluation papers designed by the interagency team with PMI and implemented in partnership with national malaria control programs and country partners,” said Irene Koek, Acting U.S. Global Malaria Coordinator. “The U.S. purposefully and systematically invested in rigorous, scientific country malaria program evaluation to document the impact of malaria control investments.”

The authors present real-world evidence of declining trends in malaria infection and illness and improved child survival across sub-Saharan Africa. Further, the studies present new methods for evaluating the impact of large-scale malaria control programs in resource-poor settings with simultaneous scale-up of other maternal and child health interventions.

“The progress we’ve seen in malaria-endemic countries is inspiring and shows us the impact of our global malaria control programs and investments,” said CDC Director Brenda Fitzgerald. “Conducting evaluations like these is critical to inform us of what is working and how we can save more lives from this preventable disease.”

Taken together, the articles in the supplement represent a conceptual and practical framework for planning and executing impact evaluations for malaria. The framework builds on previous impact evaluation models and offer lessons for evaluating the impact of control programs for other health conditions in challenging settings.

The papers in this supplement and the accompanying editorial and commentaries all indicate the need to strengthen national capacity for generating strategic information through improved routine health information systems for program monitoring and malaria surveillance.

For the IRI led study, a significant new development that supported the results is the availability of much higher quality climate data through the Enhancing National Climate Services Initiative.

“Working directly with national meteorological agencies we are able to significantly improve the quality of the rainfall and temperature data available to the national malaria control programs,” said Thomson.

The analyses conducted in the new IRI-led study take advantage of new high resolution data made available through the ENACTS initiative in some countries. Here, we see rainfall gauge data that the Ethiopian National Meteorological Agency provides to (A) the Global Telecommunications System of the World Weather Watch, (B) Enhanced National Climate Services products (ENACTS) monitoring products, and (C) ENACTS historical products.

The articles also identify critical considerations for ensuring strong, informative evaluations, including country ownership, engagement of stakeholders, tailoring evaluations to each setting, and using standard methodology. As comprehensive malaria control strategies continue to make inroads along the continuum from malaria control to elimination, approaches to pursuing impact evaluation will also need to evolve. Malaria deaths will not indefinitely decline in countries that have successfully controlled this disease, and a shift to tracking malaria infection and illness rates will be necessary to guide programs toward elimination.

From the tremendous accomplishments documented in these papers, global malaria partners are challenged to continue refining their approaches based on responding to the best possible data with minimal delay—anticipating that, as Dr. Richard Cibulskis from WHO states: “…enhanced use of information can itself act as a powerful intervention and…further accelerate declines in malaria.”

Media contact: Francesco Fiondella, francesco @ iri.columbia.edu, +1646-321-2271

When your child has a fever, you probably visit the doctor, pick up a prescription, and in no time, your kid is back to normal. When a population is suffering a disease outbreak, experiencing a food shortage, or reeling from a natural disaster, the remedies are not so simple.

That’s why Columbia University is setting up a new program called Global Health Security and Diplomacy (GHSD). GHSD aims to “educate and train the next generation of leaders to understand the complexities of dealing with global health security and diplomacy in an increasingly interconnected world.” These leaders will be trained to prevent, detect, and respond to pandemics, food crises, natural hazards, forced migration, and chemical, biological, cyber, and climate-related threats.

Tackling public health problems requires working across governments and disciplines, which is why the program will draw on expertise from the Columbia University Medical Center, the School of International and Public Affairs, and the International Research Institute for Climate and Society.

President Lee Bollinger announced the new program on Tuesday evening at the World Leaders Forum, before welcoming Tedros Adhanom to the stage. Adhanom is the director general of the World Health Organization, who greeted the program as ‘a gift’ to the organization and a partner in the fight against infectious disease.

Former South African politician Wilmot James, who is now a visiting professor at Columbia University, will be the programs executive director. IRI’s Madeleine Thomson will be its co-director.

Read the full story on the State of the Planet blog.

But inevitably, Americans want to know just how ‘natural’ this disaster really was, and what role climate change may have played. IRI’s Chia-Ying Lee and Adam Sobel, who runs the Columbia Initiative on Extreme Weather and Climate, explain what we can and can’t conclude about climate change and Harvey in this video:

Climate scientists are fairly certain that climate change will, on average, make hurricanes stronger. “We know the atmosphere is getting warmer, and the oceans are getting warmer,” explains Lee, who is also a fellow at the Center for Climate and Life.

Hurricanes are driven by ocean heat, and some scientists have pointed out that the Gulf of Mexico was warmer than average this year. Hurricane Harvey rapidly transformed from a tropical storm to a Category 4 behemoth as it sucked energy off those particularly warm waters. Making matters worse, warmer air is able to hold more water, and more water vapor can lead to more rain, so scientists expect that a warming world will have more heavy downpours.

For now, that’s about all that anyone can say with much certainty. It sure seems as if climate change contributed to Hurricane Harvey, but it’s not certain yet, and if it did, scientists would want to know by how much? “It’s just very hard to say much without more study,” says Lee. Climate scientists will never be able to say that climate change “caused” a particular extreme weather event. A popular analogy is a baseball player on steroids: we know doping makes the player stronger, but we can’t say for sure whether any particular home run was the result of the steroids. What climate scientists can do is calculate the likelihood that climate change made an extreme weather event stronger.

Find out how by reading the full story on the Earth Institute’s State of the Planet blog.

Tony Barnston provides an overview of the briefing

What’s New

Since last month’s briefing, sea-surface temperatures (SSTs) have cooled in the area of the central equatorial Pacific Ocean that define El Niño and La Niña events, called the Nino3.4 region (see first image below). The weekly SST anomalies in the last month have ranged from -0.5ºC to +0.2ºC; their average is on the cool side of a neutral ENSO state.

Atmospheric variables, including tradewinds and convection patterns, also show no signs of a La Niña or El Niño event developing in the coming months. Sub-surface ocean temperatures, another potential signal of upcoming ENSO activity, are now just slightly below average and don’t indicate looming La Niña or El Niño conditions.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center’s ENSO alert system status is currently listed as Not Active.

The sea-surface temperatures in the Nino3.4 region (approximated here) serve as a primary metric of El Niño and La Niña conditions. Data from the IRI Data Library. Image: IRI/Elisabeth Gawthrop

ENSO Forecasts

To predict ENSO conditions, computers model the SSTs in the Nino3.4 region over the next several months. The plume graph below shows the outputs of these models, some of which use equations based on our physical understanding of the system (called dynamical models), and some of which use statistics, based on the long record of historical observations.

The SST anomalies indicated by most of the models in last month’s forecast fell in the 0.0ºC to +0.5ºC range for the entire forecast period. Some models went above +0.5ºC, and even fewer dropped below 0.0ºC.

This month, models are split more evenly below and above the 0.0ºC marker, particularly for the period up to the end of 2017. In early 2018, models indicate a bit more warming, but with most still staying below the +0.5ºC El Niño threshold. The dynamical models’ mean especially shows this warming trend, while the statistical models’ mean stays more consistently around +0.1-0.2ºC.  

This graph shows forecasts made by dynamical and statistical models for SST in the Nino 3.4 region for nine overlapping 3-month periods. Note that the expected skills of the models, based on historical performance, are not equal to one another.

The IRI/CPC probabilistic ENSO forecast issued mid-August 2017. Note that bars indicate likelihood of El Niño occurring, not its potential strength. Unlike the official ENSO forecast issued at the beginning of each month, IRI and CPC issue this updated forecast based solely on model outputs. The official forecast, available at http://1.usa.gov/1j9gA8b, also incorporates human judgement.

Based on these model outputs, neutral conditions are solidly the most likely ENSO outcome in the coming months, with odds over 50% for the entire forecast period. Odds for La Niña are around 25% or less for the rest of the year, and then drop to around 5% in the new year (see bar graph above). El Niño odds increase to just over 20% to close out 2017 and then increase further to just over 30% at the end of the forecast period.

ENSO in context: Resource page on climate variability

The official probabilistic forecast issued by CPC and IRI in early August indicates a similar overall outlook, the main difference being equal chances of El Niño and La Niña at the end of the forecast period. This early-August forecast uses human judgement in addition to model output, while the mid-month forecast relies solely on model output. More on the difference between these forecasts in this IRI Medium post.

IRI’s global seasonal forecasts

Each month, IRI issues seasonal climate forecasts for the entire globe. These forecasts take into account the latest model outputs and indicate which areas are more likely to see above- or below-normal temperatures and rainfall.

Despite the neutral ENSO forecast, some areas still have a tip of the odds towards drier- or wetter-than-average seasons. For the upcoming September-November season, odds are tipped in favor of above-normal rainfall across much of Indonesia, as well as northeastern Russia. Northeastern South America and parts of southern Africa show the strongest probabilities of increased chances for drier-than-normal conditions. All forecast maps, including temperature in addition to precipitation, are available on our seasonal forecast page.

As of April of this year, these seasonal forecasts use a new methodology. The IRI probabilistic seasonal climate forecast product is now based on a re-calibration of model output from the NOAA’s North American Multi-Model Ensemble Project (NMME). The output from each NMME model is re-calibrated prior to multi-model ensembling to form reliable probability forecasts. The forecasts are now presented on a 1-degree latitude-longitude grid. More on this change on the seasonal forecast page, as well as in this Q&A with three of our climate scientists.

Learn more about El Niño and La Niña on our ENSO resources page, and sign up here to get notified when the next forecast is issued. In the meantime, check out #IRIforecast.

In the United States, extreme heat events have killed more people in the last 30 years than has any other weather-related phenomenon. In Europe, at least 136,835 people died due to heat-related health complications between 2000-2016, which represents more than 87 % of all disaster-related deaths in that area.

Because of heat’s danger, the U.S. and many other countries in the mid-latitudes have invested in warning systems, awareness campaigns, cooling centers and other measures to lessen the human health toll.

However, the thresholds that trigger such actions can vary by country, state or even city. A threshold incorporates temperature and sometimes other climate variables, such as humidity. In order to avoid the threshold being triggered solely by high temperatures, it’s also often based on how conditions have affected people in the past by incorporating mortality data. This ensures that warning systems — and the resources spent to enact them — target the exact conditions that put people’s lives at risk.

Dhaka, Bangladesh. Flickr: mariusz kluzniak.

In tropical countries such warning systems are rare, in part due to the assumption that people living in the tropics are more acclimated to hot weather and thus less likely to be affected by extreme heat events. However, heatwaves are also likely taking a high toll in developing countries and not getting the attention they deserve, according to international disaster reporting. This is partly because quality health data are harder to come by in countries with fewer resources.

The health data constraint also affects the warning systems themselves: most warning systems that do exist in developing countries are based solely on weather data.

Hannah Nissan, a postdoctoral research fellow at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society, is trying to fill in this information gap. Nissan is the lead author on a new paper that proposes a heat wave definition Bangladesh – a first step towards the creation of a heat warning system in a country that currently doesn’t have heat wave forecasts.

Before defining a heat wave, however, Nissan and her colleague Katrin Burkart at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health first examined the health impacts of heat in Bangladesh. They found that heat waves do indeed lead to more deaths in the country. They estimated that during an eight-day heat wave in 2008, for example, at least 3,800 people died from the excess heat. Two-thirds of those killed were 65 or older, indicating that the elderly are especially vulnerable to heat waves.

Heat-related illnesses are also a significant issue, but they are much harder to investigate because of a lack of health data. Evidence from around the world points to a suppression of economic productivity during heat waves, and to occupational heat health problems in sectors working outdoors as well as in industry. Similar research has so far largely been lacking in Bangladesh, but nearly half of Bangladesh’s workforce is employed in the agriculture sector and many work in factories, with the garment industry employing 4 million people — over half of whom are women.

Once the relationship between heat and human health is established for an area, as Nissan and Burkhart have recently done in Bangladesh, climate scientists can look for opportunities to predict extreme heat events in a way that can be useful to decision makers.

In their new paper, Nissan, Burkart and other colleagues from IRI and the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre propose a heat wave definition for the country and assess the potential for heat wave forecasts across various timescales. Using their definition, the authors calculate that death rates rise by about 20% on the days that meet or surpass the threshold. Their threshold definition is also based on the ability of the heat wave conditions to be predicted. In this case, the paper’s authors found potential for predicting heat waves a few days to a few months ahead of time by looking at wind conditions, precipitation and soil moisture.

If an early warning system is in place, decision makers can take actions with timing that makes sense given the forecast period, as shown in the graphic below.

Examples of preparedness activities to reduce the health risks of extreme heat in response to short range (up to 1 week), mid-range S2S (1 week to 1 month) and seasonal (3 months or longer) forecasts.

Recognition of the enormous human cost exacted by heat waves underpins a growing momentum in the international community to support the development of heat action plans and early warning systems worldwide. IRI is partnering with the Global Heat Health Information Network (GHHIN), which will launch later this year with South Asia as a key focal region. The GHHIN will provide coordination and support to governments, professional partners and researchers to build such policies and to develop the evidence needed to enable them.

Ahmedabad, a city in Gujarat province in western India, has been developing a heat early warning system for the last five years, with actions including keeping gardens and parks open all day to increase shade access, public messaging using a variety of traditional and creative formats, identifying areas to install water dispensers and implementing longer-term initiatives such as those to install cool roofs.

While no such early warning system exists yet in Bangladesh, the work of Nissan and colleagues could help pave the way for one, particularly given their finding that heat wave predictability exists from a few days to several weeks in advance. Weather forecasts can be used to forecast if a heat wave is imminent in the next few days or week, and climate timescales could give increased lead time for actions that are hard to do with just three days notice, such as retraining medical professionals and public awareness campaigns. Forecasts for heat on the sub-seasonal scale are still mostly in the experimental realm, but some scientists have assessed heat wave predictability at this timescale in Europe, said Nissan. They found that high mortality could be foreseen in some areas up to three months ahead of time.

Nissan and her colleagues can also now use the climate-timescale predictors they identified for heat wave frequency to investigate how heat wave risks could be changing under climate change, and to develop seasonal forecasts.

“In a changing climate, heatwaves are among the most rapidly rising risks, especially affecting the most vulnerable,” said Maarten van Aalst, director of the Climate Centre, an adjunct researcher at IRI and a co-author of the study. “There are many simple actions we can take to reduce the impact heatwaves have on people, but we rely on good warning systems, and public awareness. Studies like these are critical to fill these gaps, especially in highly vulnerable countries such as Bangladesh, where the need is highest.”

“In lots of places, health data are unavailable to do the type of analysis we’ve been able to do in Bangladesh,” said Nissan. “In other areas, we might know that heat is dangerous but not be able to predict heat waves with any skill. But we have the chance in Bangladesh to develop useful forecasts to enable early action and reduce the number of deaths. There is an opportunity here for Bangladesh to become a pioneer in the region for evidence-based climate services that improve public health.”

Support for this research provided by:

NOAA – International Research and Applications Project 

The Earth Institute

UK Fulbright Commission

German Research Foundation

Pietro Ceccato remembers his first trip three years ago to a Maasai village located a two hour’s drive south of Arusha, Tanzania. He was there with a team of public health researchers to learn more about the dynamics of trypanosomiasis, a parasitic disease carried by tsetse flies which threatens millions of people in communities across sub-Saharan Africa.

What he remembers most from that trip, however, was what some of the community members held in their hands.

“Smart phones, which I thought was remarkable given the remoteness of the location and the minimal infrastructure,” he says.

Ceccato is a remote sensing expert at Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society. He develops tools based on IRI’s Data Library and Google Earth Engine to visualize massive climate and environmental data sets derived from satellites along with on-the-ground disease surveillance data. His goal is for these tools to improve public health decision making and thereby lower the risks of infection and transmission of trypanosomiasis and other diseases.

Tsetse fly. Photo courtesy International Atomic Energy Agency.

Human African trypanosomiasis, better known as sleeping sickness, occurs in 36 sub-Saharan countries, disproportionately affecting those who live in remote rural areas and base their livelihood on raising animals, such as the pastoralist Maasai. People get sick primarily from the bites of certain tsetse fly species. Symptoms of those infected can initially be flu-like, but if left untreated the disease progresses to the central nervous system and is fatal. (Another form of trypanosomiasis known as Chagas disease occurs in Latin America, but it’s transmitted by a different bug.)

According to the World Health Organization, trypanosomiasis infections have decreased sharply in the last decade. WHO estimates the number of annual cases now to be well below 20,000. However, the distribution of tsetse flies overlaps with land that 65 million people call home. Population displacement, wars, poverty and perhaps changing climate conditions keep the threat of infections and epidemics a concern to health officials.

Trypanosomiasis also occurs in forms that infect animals, including cattle, the primary source of food and income for the Maasai, for whom milk is a staple food. Infected animals are weaker, have a reduced growth rate and produce less milk. Most eventually die as a result of infection. Locally, this causes financial and nutritional hardship in Maasai communities. Across the whole of sub-Saharan Africa, cattle deaths from trypanosomiasis can cause billions of dollars of production and economic losses.

In those smartphones, Ceccato recalls, he saw the potential to bring powerful information directly into the hands of the Maasai, so they could take action to reduce their chances of coming into contact with infected flies.

“My goal was to see if we could bring the monitoring power of NASA satellites in space down to a village level,” he says.

Three years later, thanks to funding from NASA-SERVIR, the World Health Organization and the International Development Research Centre, Ceccato and his collaborators have achieved that goal.

In 2014, WHO’s Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases (WHO-TDR) asked Ceccato to see how climate and environmental information could be used in the effort to reduce infection risk of trypanosomiasis.

As with mosquito-borne malaria, Zika and dengue, the trypanosoma parasite depends on an insect vector to survive and spread.

“We were fairly sure that temperatures and other environmental conditions have an impact on tsetse populations,” Ceccato says. “And so we set out to understand how changes in these variables as well as habitat might affect the transmission of trypanosomiasis.”

Such an understanding, the reasoning went, would lead to better targeting of spraying with insecticides and other measures to control the fly population.

Ceccato worked with researchers at the Nelson Mandela African Institute of Science and Technology (NMAIST) in Arusha, Tanzania, who travel regularly to rural areas to locate and trap flies and look for the presence of the parasite in order to determine infection rates.

He mapped their data along with Landsat images and other information using a prototype platform that he developed using Google Earth. The satellite images allow him to see changes in vegetation and water bodies at extremely high resolution. He and his colleagues can then compare these changes to changes in tsetse fly locations.

Animal herds will travel to areas where there’s water, and, unfortunately, where the tsetse flies are waiting. “The flies seek shade and shelter in trees during the hottest parts of the day,” Ceccato says. “They fly to the water bodies in the morning and evening to bite animals that are drinking, as well as any people who are there with them.”

Ceccato also incorporated rainfall and temperature data as well as a vegetation index to analyze the impact of these variables on the movements and distribution of the flies over many months.

In this video, Ceccato gives a demonstration of the new tool:

“When we first discussed this project, we were excited about the idea of having a mapping interface product for decision making and for preparedness programs that addresses vector-borne diseases and climate change,” says WHO-TDR’s Bernadette Ramirez. “It’s great to see that this idea is now a reality!”

Using this platform, members of the Maasai community will be able to identify grazing and drinking areas free from populations of infected tsetse flies. This is especially critical during the dry season, when drinking holes are scarce.

The fly data will also help authorities target where to spray insecticides to control the population of these biting insects.

“Now the research communities, pastoral Maasai communities, and any other interested parties can access environmental and health information easily in way that was never before possible,” Ceccato says.

This summer, his research partner Paul Gwakisa, from NMAIST and the Sokoine University of Agriculture, revisited that original Maasai village to demonstrate the tool to community leaders and discuss the various kinds of decisions they could make based on the online maps. The short video below captures part of his trip (closed captioning recommended, as some of the audio is difficult to understand).

Cole Porter romanticized the phrase in his 1936 song, but the probable origin of having someone — or something — under one’s skin is much less pleasant to consider. An early usage of the phrase by author Bayard Taylor in 1864 illustrates: “The idea was like a tropical sand-flea. It had got under my skin, and the attempt to dislodge it opened the germs of hundreds of others.” Today, in some water bodies, the possibility of going in for a swim and coming out with a disease-causing parasite lodged under the skin remains all too real.

One such parasite is the flatworm belonging to the genus Schistosoma, commonly known as a blood-fluke. The flatworm is responsible for schistosomiasis, a disease that occurs in areas with poor sanitation where humans can come into contact with freshwater contaminated with the parasite. Schistosomiasis causes a range of symptoms including anemia, stunted growth, malnutrition, fibrosis, kidney failure, gastrointestinal illness and lesions to the central nervous system. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that in terms of impact of parasitic diseases, schistosomiasis is second only to malaria and is the most deadly of the neglected tropical diseases.  More than 700 million people, mostly Africans, live in areas where the disease is endemic. Around 240 million people are infected with schistosomiasis and more than 200,000 die from it every year.

Muhubiri Kabuyaya of the University of KwaZulu-Natal scooping for snails at Nsunduza dam in Ndumo area, uMkhanyakude, KwaZulu-Natal Province, South Africa in May 2015.

Scientists from Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society and the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) in South Africa are trying to put a dent in these numbers. They have developed a new model based on data from satellites that helps identify areas likely to contain species of freshwater snails that serve as host to Schistosoma larvae. They published the results in a recent paper in the journal Parasites and Vectors.

 “This could enable health workers to target areas that are especially likely to have an outbreak and make efforts more effective where resources are limited,” says Pietro Ceccato, who led the work at IRI.

Schistosoma larvae use the snails to develop and multiply, and eventually re-enter water bodies to seek out human hosts and burrow into their skin. After a person is infected, the parasites enter the blood stream and travel to the liver, where they mature into adult worms and reproduce. Many of the resulting eggs will be release with feces and urine and make it back to a water body where snails live, and so the cycle continues.

Without the presence of these snails, any Schistosoma in a body of water will die before fully maturing, thus essentially eliminating the risk of humans contracting schistosomiasis.

The researchers focused on an area in the uMkhanyakude district of South Africa. They discovered that the snails are most likely to be found where there is slow moving surface water with slightly higher-than-normal temperatures. But the snails can also hibernate when the pools get dry and then repopulate during and after the rainy season, said UKZN’s Tawanda Manyangadze, the lead author of the study. Such pools are often those people enter and then come into contact with the parasite, he said.

The study area – Ndumo area of uMkhanyakude district, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.

Using the new model, the researchers tested variables such as air temperature, rainfall, water velocity (as estimated by the slope of ground) and soil pH, among others, to try to predict where the snails would be found, and then compared those findings with sampling of snails in the field. They found that the best predictor of where snails are present is a measure called the Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI), which estimates the presence of surface water bodies based on satellite data and a mathematical formula.

NDWI is one of the methods for mapping water bodies that Ceccato and his team designed using images from LANDSAT and MODIS, which are both NASA satellites. The funding for their work came from a NASA SERVIR project, and the methods they’ve developed are now used in various applications — from monitoring breeding reservoirs to the impact of floods.

The mapping techniques are particularly useful in areas with distinct dry and wet seasons, where temporary bodies of water may form in some years but not others, and sometimes in different locations. Ceccato, a co-author on the study, said they were able to successfully map the seasonality of the water bodies at a high spatial resolution, and thus map the corresponding suitability of the habitat for snail development.

The maps produced by the model can help health workers narrow-in on where the risk of schistosomiasis may be high. With that information, they can take actions such as stockpiling medications that interrupt the parasite’s cycle, controlling snail populations and launching awareness campaigns. Without such a model, much more time and resources must be spent to send surveyors to identify areas of probable risk.

Seasonal suitable and not suitable habitats for two snail species in Ndumo area of uMkhanyakude district, South Africa. (a) and (c) are the species Bulinus globosus and (b) and (d) are the species Biomphalaria pfeifferi. (a) and (b) are for the cold and dry season of June to August, and (c) and (d) are for the hot and dry season of September to November.

Manyangadze’s team is promoting the model to local decision makers. “We are working toward improving our model and applying it to the whole of the uMkhanyakude health district by collaborating with the Department of Health in South Africa. This is promising to be a useful tool for planned large-scale distribution of medication,” he said.

The World Health Organization estimated that out of the 218 million people who required preventive treatment in 2015, only 66.5 million received it.

Manyangadze noted that other variables not tested in this study could also be important for snail habitat suitability, such as the chemistry of the water and whether or not plants are present in the water. Incorporating these variables could help them narrow down the risk areas even further.

“Through our collaboration with IRI, we are planning to do further work on the use of satellites to detect water levels, aquatic plants and turbidity as that information relates to the presence and abundance of snails,” he said.

Highlands in Ethiopia. Photo from Flickr.

The highlands of Ethiopia are home to the majority of the country’s population, the cooler climate serving as a natural buffer against malaria transmission. New data now show that increasing temperatures over the past 35 years are eroding this buffer, allowing conditions more favorable for malaria to begin climbing into highland areas.

That is the conclusion of a new study by researchers from the University of Maine and the International Research Institute for Climate and Society, part of Columbia University’s Earth Institute.

Malaria is a climate-sensitive disease, and while the biology of malaria transmission is complex, sufficiently low air temperatures inhibit the development of parasites that cause the disease.

“Air temperatures below approximately 18°C and 15°C (64.4°F and 59°F) stop the development of the Plasmodium falciparum and P. vivax parasites, respectively, which are responsible for the majority of malaria cases in Ethiopia,” write the authors, led by Bradfield Lyon, a research professor at the University of Maine and adjunct research scientist at IRI. Low temperatures also impede the development rates and population density of the Anopheles mosquito, which transmits the disease.

The researchers examined how these elevational thresholds for malaria have been changing over time. Their study, published in Environmental Research Letters, utilized a new national temperature dataset developed by IRI and Ethiopia’s weather agency. The dataset was one of the first to come out of IRI’s Enhancing National Climate Services (ENACTS) initiative, which partners with African countries to improve the availability, access and use of climate data.

“ENACTS combines data from hundreds of ground stations with climate-model outputs that use satellite data and other information,” says co-author Tufa Dinku, who leads the initiative at IRI. “It provides a detailed view of maximum and minimum temperatures across Ethiopia going back to 1981.”

“Until quite recently, undertaking this type of study was not possible owing to a lack of quality controlled and sufficiently high spatial resolution climate data,” says Lyon, who is also an adjunct research scientist at IRI. “These new data allow us to examine the climate of the highlands in much more detail and confirm some of the anticipated changes of a warming Earth.”

The study identified statistically significant increases in elevation for both the 18°C and 15°C thresholds in highland areas between 1981 and 2014. The elevation where the temperature thresholds are met rose by more than 100 meters since 1981.

“We estimate that more than six million people currently live in areas with statistically significant increases in threshold temperature,” the researchers write. However, they stress that exceeding the minimum temperature thresholds necessary for malaria transmission does not in itself point to an increase in the prevalence of malaria.

“While the dynamics of malaria transmission are complicated and control efforts may significantly limit the impact of these temperature changes, our study shows a clear softening of the climate barrier to transmission in the Ethiopian highlands, potentially putting more people at risk,” says study co-author Madeleine Thomson, an IRI senior research scientist.

“For the first time, we are able to see which parts of the mountain are warmer or have been warming faster than others. Previously, the Ministry of Health used a standard elevation—1750m—to demarcate the epidemic zone, regardless of geography. The thinking was that above this, temperatures were too cold for malaria,” Thomson says. “Now, we can use the actual temperatures themselves to demarcate the zone, and we see that in some cases the elevation is much lower than 1750m. This will allow much more detailed, sophisticated assessment of climate related risks for malaria surveillance and interventions.”

Acknowledgements by the authors:
We are grateful to the National Meteorology Agency (NMA) of Ethiopia who provided the ENACTS and station data. This study supported in part by the National Institutes of Health (Award No: 5R21TW009537-02). Additional support provided by the National Science Foundation (Award No: AGS 12-52301).

This spring, IRI implemented a new methodology for our seasonal temperature and precipitation forecasts around the world. We asked Simon Mason, Andrew Robertson and Tony Barnston, three of our senior climate scientists who lead the development and tailoring of IRI’s forecasts, to answer some fundamental questions about the new forecast. If you use our forecasts and have further questions, or if you have feedback about the new forecasts, please send an email to info@iri.columbia.edu. 

Why is there a new forecast? 

Simon Mason: When the IRI started making forecasts in the 1990s it used climate models that represented only the atmosphere. More sophisticated models that included the oceans were available, but these models could not easily generate more than a short history of forecasts (called “hindcasts” — see sidebar) because of poor data availability for the oceans. We needed data from these hindcasts to cover a longer period of time to develop an accurate assessment of how well these models work and what corrections might be needed to produce a reliable forecast. Two decades on, these “coupled models” — the ones that include ocean and atmosphere — can now generate a sufficient history of hindcasts. The models have also undergone improvements, and are now routinely used in operations by most global forecasting centres, including NOAA’s North American Multi-Model Ensemble (NMME) project. 

Andrew Robertson:  Until a few years ago,  data from an ensemble of coupled forecast models were not easily and freely accessible in real time, both because of data policy restrictions at the various global forecasting centers, as well as the lack of coordinated data infrastructure to share the data. For the first time, NOAA’s NMME project has made real-time and hindcasts from up to nine coupled models from US institutions (NCEP, NASA, GFDL, NCAR, COLA/University of Miami) and Environment and Climate Change Canada freely available through the IRI Data Library. This makes it straightforward for us to now base our forecast on the output of these NMME models. And, due to funding decreases, IRI was no longer able to run the older atmospheric global climate models in-house as it previously could. 

SM: While the IRI no longer has the funding to run climate models in-house, we are able to set up a fully automated forecasting system that takes advantage of the coupled model forecasts from the NMME project, as well as the two decades of experience IRI has in generating forecasts from such systems.

Has the method of creating the forecast changed, and would that affect how the forecast can or should be used?  

SM: There are two categories of changes in the methodology of the new forecasts — we are using new climate models, and we are using new methods to turn those model outputs into reliable forecasts. 

The new climate models represent the climate systems better than the old ones did, but the basic principles of how those models work are unchanged – or, if you prefer, the physical basis for making the seasonal forecasts remains the same. The new forecast methodology is designed to make corrections to the climate models based on their ability to predict previous years accurately. We are also producing information with more spatial detail than before.

In principle there should be no reason to change how or when the new forecasts are used, because in both the new methodology and in the old, the forecasts were made to be taken at face value – i.e., the probabilities are supposed to give a reliable indication of what the season will be like.

AR: For those who would like more information about our new methodology, we’ve put together a page here. 

Can we make comparisons with old forecasts? For example comparing forecasts from moderate El Niño event years to this year’s forecast? 

SM: To be clear, there has been no change in the El Niño and La Niña (or ENSO) forecast products, it is only our rainfall and temperature forecasts that have been modified. But, in terms of comparing the rainfall and temperature forecasts — as I mentioned in the earlier question about whether the forecast can still be used in the same way, the forecasts are meant to be taken at face value. So if this year the forecast indicates a stronger probability than in previous years, then that does reflect greater confidence. 

But what we cannot conclude is that the impact is likely to be stronger. For example, if there is a 60% probability of above-normal rainfall during moderate El Nino conditions in our new system, and only a 50% probability during similar conditions with the old system, then we are indeed more confident that above-normal rainfall will occur; but it is invalid to conclude that we think there will be more rainfall than in previous years with moderate El Nino conditions.

Tony Barnston: It’s true that our ENSO forecast materials have not changed. But the ENSO forecasts (in fact, forecasts of the entire sea-surface temperature field) used in the process of making the climate forecasts have now changed, and likely for the better, since they are based on the eight or so state-of-the-art coupled models instead of on just three models, one of which was statistical and one of which was a simplified dynamical model that covered only the tropical Pacific Ocean. So, only one of the sea-surface temperature forecast models used to be state-of-the-art, while now all of them are.

Side-by-side comparison of IRI’s old (left) and new (right) seasonal climate forecast for precipitation. Note that the forecasts do not show the same time period.

Why does the forecast look different? 

AR: The new models run at a higher spatial resolution. They are at about 1-degree latitude-longitude resolution (i.e. about 100km), compared to about 2.8 degrees for the old ones (i.e. about 300 km), so we are providing the forecasts at 1-degree resolution, compared to 2.5 degrees before. 

What are the implications of the higher resolution for a user? 

AR: The improved resolution may or may not translate into more skill on smaller scales. We have noticed that the forecast maps sometimes look noisier at small scale, and the user should be aware of it. We are looking into improving our post-processing calibration method to reduce the noise. 

Does this affect any IRI products other than the standard, tercile-based seasonal forecasts? 

SM: Yes. The new forecast methodology feeds into some of our rainfall and temperature forecast products. These include the seasonal forecasts in the IFRC Maproom and the Flexible Forecast Maproom.

Is it more accurate than the old forecast?

AR: The answer to this question is not as simple as it may sound. There are many measures of forecast skill, and the old and new systems are different which makes them difficult to compare directly. We expect the new system to be at least as good because it is based on a newer generation of models and forecast initialization methods. We are in the process of fully verifying the new system to provide as full an answer to this question as possible.

TB: With the exception of the above-normal temperatures, the new forecast output has more areas that are not the climatology forecast (i.e., more colored areas on the maps; the models “have more to say”) than the old forecast output, and this greater sensitivity presumably reflects higher accuracy, but confirmation of this will come with our verification now in progress. With regard to the probabilities for above-normal temperature, we’re investigating whether the new forecasts underestimate the tilt toward above-normal due to the models’ possibly inadequate sensitivity to CO2 increases.

As you were developing the new forecasts, did needs/input from users play a role?

SM: The most important and the most difficult question!

There are many reasons why IRI started making seasonal forecasts in the late 1990s. In part it was a response to the 1997/98 El Niño, which was expected to have major impacts around the globe. Although that is only 20 years ago, there were very few countries and centers producing seasonal forecast information at that time – which perhaps shows how far we have come in the last two decades. At that stage the climate community had a very poor awareness of potential users of seasonal forecasts, but we could at least advise many of the national meteorological services, which may have their own communication channels. So, during the late-1990s and early 2000s our main dissemination channel was to attempt to inform governments via these meteorological services. In addition, as countries and regional and global climate centers started to produce their own forecasts we wanted to provide a good example that could be emulated and adapted as appropriate.

However, as the IRI’s Applications Research Division (as it was then called) and the broader climate service community began to develop experience in identifying and working with user communities, our forecasts have become of interest to an expanding range of users. In some cases we have worked directly with such communities to co-develop tailored seasonal forecast information. This tailored information is presented in custom-designed Maprooms, examples of which include those for the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) and the World Food Program (WFP).

When the new forecasts were redesigned, we took into account inputs from some of our main partners, such as the IFRC and WFP, and also from some of the many Meteorological Services around the world that consult our products. Of course, everybody has been requesting higher levels of certainty in the forecasts (which translates to more and deeper colours on the maps), and using the state-of-the-science climate models should help with that objective. Many users have also been requesting more detailed spatial information, which we have addressed in the new forecast too, although for some applications – especially those concerned with flooding – less spatial information may provide better quality information. In such cases, forecast tailoring is required – the development of customized products such as those in some of our Maprooms. We hope to work with our partners and other potential users to explore what works best for them.

Each time we make a forecast we do not think about how specific users will respond to the information. In fact, it is important not to, because otherwise we end up hedging the forecast. It is important for the forecaster to communicate what (s)he thinks will happen, rather than thinking about how to affect the users’ responses. Holding such a detached attitude, however, is a very different question to that of how to communicate a forecast so that it facilitates users’ decisions. That interaction is important for ensuring that the forecast is clearly understood and provides relevant information.

Tony Barnston provides an overview of the briefing

Since last month’s briefing, weekly sea-surface temperature anomalies have increased slightly to +0.4ºC to +0.5ºC in the area of the central equatorial Pacific Ocean that define El Niño and La Niña events, called the Nino3.4 region (see first image below). These sea-surface temperatures (SSTs) point to a borderline neutral-weak El Niño ENSO state, although these weak anomalies are not enough to constitute an El Niño event, especially given the short period of time. Another key ingredient for an El Niño event is the weakening and even reversal of tradewinds in the central equatorial Pacific, and we’ve not yet seen consistent evidence of this atmospheric El Niño component.

Also in the last month, the convection (i.e. clouds and thunderstorms) that was lingering over Indonesia in a La Niña-like pattern has now faded (see second image).

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center’s ENSO alert system status is currently listed as Not Active.

ENSO Forecasts

To predict ENSO conditions, computers model the SSTs in the Nino3.4 region over the next several months. The graph in the first image of the gallery below shows the outputs of these models, some of which use equations based on our physical understanding of the system (called dynamical models), and some of which use statistics, based on the long record of historical observations.

Despite the warming sea surface temperature since last month, the future temperatures predicted by the mean of the models have decreased since last month’s forecast. This decrease stems in particular from results of the dynamical models; the dynamical model mean for the rest of the year is around +0.75ºC — down around 0.25ºC from last month’s mean, but still in the weak El Niño range. The mean of the statistical models is similar to that of last month; the statistical models call for SSTs to remain right around the El Niño threshold of +0.5ºC through the year. 

This month’s forecast extends past what’s known as the spring predictability barrier — a function of ocean dynamics that makes it hard to predict ENSO conditions past June of each year. While uncertainty is still high, the spread of the model predictions has tightened some since last month. All but one model falls within a 1.5ºC range, compared to a nearly 2.5ºC spread of model predictions last month.

Based on these model outputs, odds for La Niña are at 10% or less for the rest of the year (see second graph in gallery above). El Niño is the most likely ENSO outcome for the rest of the year, but the odds are slightly down compared to last month, topping out at around 60%. Note that the probabilities in this figure don’t give an indication of the potential strength of an El Niño event, only the odds that Nino3.4 SSTs will be at least 0.5ºC above average.

ENSO in context: Resource page on climate variability

The official probabilistic forecast issued by CPC and IRI in early May indicates comparatively somewhat less likelihood for an El Niño event, with similar odds for both neutral and El Niño conditions for the rest of the year. This early-May forecast uses human judgement in addition to model output, while the mid-May forecast relies solely on model output. More on the difference between these forecasts in this recent IRI Medium post.

Effects of La Niña on global seasonal forecasts

Each month, IRI issues seasonal climate forecasts for the entire globe. These forecasts take into account the latest model outputs and indicate which areas are more likely to see above- or below-normal temperatures and rainfall.

For the upcoming seasons, the forecasts show some signal from ENSO, such as increased chances for drier-than-normal conditions in northeastern South America, central Africa, Indonesia and Australia (see August-October season above). All forecast maps are available on our seasonal forecast page.

Learn more about El Niño and La Niña on our ENSO resources page, and sign up here to get notified when the next forecast is issued. In the meantime, check out #IRIforecast.

Note: Beginning last month, the IRI probabilistic seasonal climate forecast product is based on a re-calibration of model output from the NOAA’s North American Multi-Model Ensemble Project (NMME). The output from each NMME model is re-calibrated prior to multi-model ensembling to form reliable probability forecasts. The forecasts are now presented on a 1-degree latitude-longitude grid. More on this change on the seasonal forecast page.

Coming soon: look for a Q&A with our climate scientists about the new forecast.

Hannah Nissan, a postdoctoral fellow at IRI who was not on the paper, also sees promise for S2S applications in public health actions related to heat. “Heat waves would be a great test case for an S2S early warning system,” said Nissan. “Increasingly, we are seeing evidence of predictability for heat waves on S2S timescales. Plus, there are many common sense, low-cost and no-regret adaptation options for extreme heat, making it easier to justify taking early action.”

Nissan also noted, however, that a forecast can only be effective when paired with a coordinated awareness campaign and engagement from a range of institutions and individuals. “In many places, particularly in developing countries, we still need to raise awareness of the dangers of extreme heat and build the capacity to respond to a forecast (on any timescale),” she said. “I see these obstacles being the main challenges to getting the most out of skillful forecasts on S2S timescales.”

The below article, written by the lead author, provides more details about the study. It originally appeared on OzEWEX.org.

Finding a middle ground on hydrological forecasts

By Chris White, University of Tasmania

Long-range monthly and seasonal outlooks have been operational for many years. However, the extended-range timescale, which sits between the medium to long-range forecasting timescales, has received minimal attention until recently. Our new study aimed to review the potential for applications of forecasts in this range, and found tangible and realistic opportunities for many sectors to systematically plan on this new time horizon.

This timescale has in recent years become referred to as the ‘subseasonal-to-seasonal’ (or ‘S2S’) forecasting range, and is generally regarded as bridging the gap between weather forecasts and monthly or seasonal outlooks.

Once seen as a ‘predictability desert’, recent advances have been made with at least ten international weather centres now having some capability for issuing experimental or operational S2S forecasts. As Dr Debra Hudson from the Bureau of Meteorology noted in a study last year, there is increasing demand for skilful forecasts on the S2S timescale. This interest has been triggered by a combination of growing demand from the applications community, progress in identifying and simulating key sources of S2S predictability, and the recent availability of multi-model S2S forecast datasets such as the WWRP-WCRP S2S database co-hosted by ECMWF and CMA and the NMME.

In our recent cross-disciplinary study, we conduct the first comprehensive review of the potential applications of S2S forecasts. Focusing on potential user applications across a range of sectors, including public health, disaster preparedness, energy, agriculture and water management, the study draws on recent advancements to demonstrate the status and prospects of S2S prediction, highlighting how they can be utilised and where the key challenges remain.

A key to the uptake and usage of S2S forecasts is data availability. The new databases of S2S forecasts – delayed behind real time by three weeks but including hindcasts – present a significant resource that will allow model output to be more widely assessed to identify when and where there is skill, better understand the underlying processes and model weaknesses, and develop applications that can support decision-making on the S2S timescale.

The study also shows how social sciences should be integrated with S2S development – from communication to decision-making and valuation of forecasts – to enhance the benefits of ‘climate services’ approaches for extended-range forecasting. To achieve this, decision-makers and forecasters need to collaborate to determine essential S2S forecast attributes, including identifying appropriate thresholds and their usefulness in decision-making, as well as their economic value. This involves the inclusion of realistic and unbiased messages on forecast skill (or lack thereof), potential usefulness and quantified uncertainties to manage expectations, as well as the continued integration of S2S as a key component in the concepts of seamless prediction and co-production.

The paper concludes that while the uptake and integration of S2S forecasting into decision-making is neither easy nor straightforward, there now exists a growing repository of untapped predictive information that presents tangible and realistic opportunities that can be explored for application-ready capabilities that could allow many sectors to systematically plan on this new time horizon.

Article: ‘Potential applications of subseasonal-to-seasonal (S2S) predictions’, White, C.J., Carlsen, H., Robertson, A.W., Klein, R.J.T., Lazo, J.K., Kumar, A., Vitart, F., Coughlan de Perez, E., Ray, A.J., Murray, V., Bharwani, S., MacLeod, D., James, R., Fleming, L., Morse, A.P., Eggen, B., Graham, R., Kjellström, E., Becker, E., Pegion, K.V., Holbrook, N.J., McEvoy, D., Depledge, M., Perkins-Kirkpatrick, S., Brown, T.J., Street, R., Jones, L., Remenyi, T.A., Hodgson-Johnston, I., Buontempo, C., Lamb, R., Meinke, H., Arheimer, B. and Zebiak, S.E., Meteorological Applications, doi:10.1002/met.1654

Poster presentation: The paper will also be presented as a poster in ‘CL3.01 Climate Predictions – from monthly, seasonal to decadal time scales’ at the EGU General Assembly in Vienna, Austria, 23-28 April 2017

A new paper published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, shows that rising temperatures have increased the risk of fires even during non-drought years in Indonesia, possibly making mild fire seasons in the country a thing of the past. The study was conducted by scientists at IRI, the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), Temple University and the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR).

Lead author Kátia Fernandes, explains more about the findings and their implications in the following Q&A.

What do we know about climate and fires in Indonesia?

We know that El Niño events increase the likelihood of drought in Indonesia, and with that, the risk of wildfires. Uncontrolled fires, like those which occurred in 2015 and 1997-1998 can destroy vast swaths of diverse tropical forests, release billions of tons of carbon dioxide and create public-health emergencies across the region.

More recently, we have observed spikes in fire activity in years not associated with El Niño, when the dry season is not particularly dry. Such a spike occurred in Sumatra in 2013.

The question we set out to investigate was whether other climate variables beside rainfall could be playing a role in determining the level of fire activity during times when seasonal droughts were not severe.

What were the main findings of your study?

We found that atmospheric temperature, whether it happens to be warmer- or cooler-than-normal, is not significantly  relevant to fire occurrence during drought years in Indonesia. In other words, once droughts are established we should expect to see more fires regardless of temperature. The reason why fire activity goes up during drought years is because there’s increased water stress and flammability in vegetation–the plant matter dries out.

However, in years during which rainfall is normal or above average, above-normal temperatures increase both evapotranspiration rates and vegetation water stress, which leads to a higher risk of fires.

In addition, our simulations show that precipitation is projected to remain unchanged in the coming decades in Indonesia, but temperatures are expected to continue increasing. So understanding temperature’s effect on fire occurrence is going to be extremely relevant.

How can this knowledge be used? 

Efforts to prevent fires in Indonesia focus on drought years, and this may be addressing only part of the risk. Prevention and mitigation measures can benefit from a deeper understanding of how fire behave in non-drought conditions as well.

In addition, strategies to reduce greenhouse-gas emission through forest restoration and conservation programs should take into account the effect of warmer environment on fires. Mild fire seasons in Indonesia are currently  associated with wet and cool conditions, but these conditions are expected to become less frequent in the coming decades.

The United States Agency for International Development funded this research (grant agreement #MTO 069018). 

Small farms are vulnerable to climate risk, but most smallholder farmers around the world don’t have access to insurance and other financial tools to manage fluctuations in climate. Over the past decade we’ve put a great deal of effort into a new kind of insurance–index insurance–that may have the potential to reach these farmers. Unlike more traditional forms of insurance, which require individual verification of losses, index insurance works by providing payouts when a measurable index flags a major problem that the farmers face, such as a widespread drought or flood. In theory, this should allow insurance coverage to reach many more farmers.

A farmer in Ethiopia records the rainfall collected in a rain gauge provided by the R4 project.

At the International Research Institute for Climate and Society, researchers provide technical support to some of the largest and most successful index insurance projects across the Horn of Africa, individually protecting hundreds of thousands of farmers. In Ethiopia, for example, the IRI is supporting the R4 project, led by Oxfam America and the United Nations World Food Programme. R4 is also coordinating with key Ethiopian partners such as the Relief Society of Tigray, the Ethiopian National Meteorological Agency, and a team of NGOs, financial players, and government agencies. Sales began with a few hundred Ethiopian farmers in 2009, and the scaled-up R4 project now serves tens of thousands of farmers across many African countries.

There are some major challenges, however, in further scaling index insurance across Africa. One key hurdle is identifying rainfall datasets that accurately reflect and substantiate the extreme weather that a farmer faces. In the index insurance business, payouts can only be provided in the years that are among the most extreme for rainfall (i.e. anomalously wet or dry). Insurance designers and companies require adequate rainfall data from previous droughts to analyze drought probabilities and calculate index insurance prices. This process is not only about measuring the rainfall in one particular year — local and high quality rainfall data going back decades are necessary to differentiate and compare anomalous and normal rainfall years. For farmers, it is important that critical droughts are not missed in the index being used to trigger insurance payouts.

But in many areas of the world, quality rainfall data going back 15-30 years is nearly impossible to get. Rain gauges offer one solution to acquiring rainfall data, but most farmers do not live near a rain gauge. Even new rain gauges present some challenges in creating index insurance because they haven’t been around long enough to capture rainfall data from past major droughts. Satellites are another solution. Rainfall estimates from satellite data can cover a wide area, but their accuracy isn’t quite good enough to rely on them alone. However, by integrating satellite and rain gauge datasets, we can generate the necessary, comprehensive historical data from the last few decades. This is exactly what the Enhancing National Climate Services (ENACTS) initiative, led by IRI, has been doing.

ENACTS is a unique, multi-faceted initiative designed to bring climate knowledge into national decision making by improving the availability, access and use of climate information. Scientists first improve the availability of climate data by combining quality-controlled data from national rain-gauge networks with satellite estimates for rainfall, elevation maps, and reanalysis products for temperature. Access to information products is enhanced by making the climate-related information products derived from the improved data available online through ENACTS ‘Maprooms’ – like this one for Tanzania. 

Farmers in Ethiopia receive rain gauges as part of a monitoring program with the R4 project.

ENACTS was first implemented in 2009 in Ethiopia, and has since been initiated in Gambia, Ghana, Madagascar, Mali, Rwanda, Tanzania, Zambia, Kenya and Uganda. ENACTS has also been implemented at a regional level in West Africa in collaboration with the Agriculture, Hydrology, and Meteorology (AGRHYMET) Center and in East Africa via the IGAD Climate Prediction and Application Center (ICPAC).

ENACTS and R4 were both born in Ethiopia at about the same time, and together have been overcoming parallel challenges in climate services. R4 presents an excellent example of how ENACTS is improving the use of climate information in Ethiopia – the project has relied on the unprecedented historical data that ENACTS provides to validate and design the insurance project. But the ability to monitor rainfall data during the growing season using ENACTS has also been a pillar of the R4 project, and one of the most practical uses of the ENACTS Maproom by insurers is to compare ENACTS data with rain gauges recently installed in villages. R4 has provided hundreds of farmers in the project with manual rain gauges – i.e. measuring cups mounted on a post – and each day or so the farmers report the amount of water in the cup.

Because the farmer rain gauge information takes a month or so to be delivered, the ENACTS dataset is the fastest way to get rainfall data from local, ground-based sources. Farmers’ measurements from the manual rain gauges and ENACTS rainfall monitoring data (see animations below) are particularly useful in determining whether the rainy season warrants any action–an adjustment in production practices, for example, or the gathering of more information from farmers about their experiences These two datasets are also used to evaluate the accuracy of the insurance payouts as they rainy season unfolds. As previously mentioned, rainfall data from new rain gauges alone are not yet sufficient to understand if a modern drought’s severity merits a payout. But with the combined data, we can make comparisons between the magnitudes of current and past drought.

This animation shows both the farmer reported rainfall data (blue) and the ENACTS data (yellow) over Ethiopia in 2014. It’s really cool to see the rainfall sweep across the area, what the different villages experience and how the story evolves by the time it is reported by the farmers on the ground. Given that one dataset come from someone going to a cup in a field and measuring, and the other comes from satellite measurements of clouds, we wouldn’t expect the datasets to exactly match each other. But for index insurance, it is important that the major rainfall patterns (and more specifically droughts) are evident from both datasets. It’s nice to see the beginning and end of the season and big rain storms, both of which are key for index insurance, agree between each other.

In the past, these comparisons were made using weekly rainfall totals. But because farmers are now gathering daily rainfall data for validation and tracking, we now know which days the rain actually fell. When it comes to validating the data, the daily timescale makes it much easier to troubleshoot a data source – i.e. you can ask if it rained on specific days, compared to asking about total rainfall over a week. The newly incorporated ‘Daily Rainfall’ ENACTS Maproom page in Ethiopia, financially supported by the Department of International Development’s Weather and Climate Information Services for Africa (WISER) initiative, has taken seasonal tracking to another level and allows insurers to relate ENACTS daily rainfall estimates with farmers’ measurements across hundreds of villages.

This animation uses the same data as the one above, but with a selection of a few weeks from July of 2014 and at a slower pace. You can almost get a sense of the personalities and schedules of the people reporting for the different villages — how often they visit the gauge, if a storm passed the night before or if a single day’s rain was not enough to be able to measure.

The Agriculture and Climate Risk Enterprise (ACRE) insurance project in Kenya is another example of success in index insurance for which IRI provides technical support. Since 2009, ACRE has reached hundreds of thousands of farmers across East Africa, using technologies such as cell-phone based sales. Originally, the project relied on automated weather stations and the installation of dozens of private weather stations. As would be expected, one of the limits to scaling up was the restricted spatial extent of the weather stations. ACRE initially had an interest in working with the Kenya Meteorological Department (KMD), but the necessary tools were not in place for the massive amounts of data sharing and analysis needed to connect historical ground observations with gridded satellite projects. As a result, insurance companies began to independently use satellite datasets to scale up their services. Having better local and quality-controlled data would be extremely valuable to further improve the accuracy of these services.

Fortunately, the WISER initiative supported IRI and KMD to launch ENACTS March 2017. Catalyzed by the ENACTS initiative, ACRE and other insurance companies are now starting efforts to understand how to utilize ENACTS datasets. The ENACTS initiative has truly been transformative—mobilizing the launch and scaling of some of the most successful index insurance projects that exist across Africa.

These farmer-level projects index insurance projects are complemented by major innovations in country-level insurance contracts that have been purchased by national governments. Ethiopia was one of the earliest to explore this, and Kenya has bought into a more recent, Africa-wide product known as the African Risk Capacity (ARC). This insurance is bought by national governments across Africa, to help them manage large scale problems. The farmer-level and country-level products complement each other, not only in offering different scales of coverage, but also in validation, product design and scaling. For example, IRI is working with the UN World Food Programme to integrate ground-truthing and satellite technologies between R4 and ARC, with the ENACTS platform again providing the vital, high quality data to allow these projects to move forward.

The current scaling of ENACTS is especially valuable as the farmer-level projects expand to new countries, and ARC’s national level coverage extends across Africa. Together, they could bring a new kind of integrated information and climate risk protection previously impossible.

By Kevin Krajick, Earth Institute

Two scientists who untangled the complex forces that drive El Niño, the world’s most powerful weather cycle, have won the 2017 Vetlesen Prize for achievement in earth sciences. The $250,000 award will go to S. George Philander of Princeton University and Mark A. Cane of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. The men laid out the cyclic interaction of winds and currents that sweep the tropical Pacific Ocean every two to seven years, affecting weather across the world. Their work led to practical forecasts of such swings; institutions worldwide now monitor warning signs to help prepare for crop planting, disease control, and floods or droughts.

El Niño was long thought to be just an abnormally wet season in arid coastal Peru; often peaking around Christmas, it was dubbed in Spanish El Niño, the Christ child. But by the 1970s, modern observations suggested that El Niño was actually part of an irregular weather cycle in the tropical Pacific that affects vast land areas. Through the work of Cane, Philander and colleagues, scientists now understand that on one end of the cycle, strong winds blow east to west, pushing sun-warmed surface waters toward Asia, making way for deeper, colder water to well up near South America. On the other end—the part known as El Niño—winds abate, and more warm water collects in the east. Warmer water means warmer air, thus more evaporation, and more rain. This helps crops in parts of Peru, but can bring concurrent drought to Australia, weakening of Southeast Asia monsoon rains, and myriad other weather shifts as far off as Africa, Brazil and the United States. Each time the cycle reverses, so do the effects, depending on how far the pendulum swings.

When Cane and Philander began working in the 1970s, scientists were still vague on what caused such swings, and had no way to predict them. But research ships were by then collecting piles of marine data, and ever-more powerful computers were enabling scientists to analyze it—trends that both men took advantage of.

Philander, born in 1942, grew up the child of schoolteachers near Cape Town, South Africa. His family, classified as Colored under the apartheid system, sat near the bottom of the racial pyramid. As he recalled in an oral history, among other things, Coloreds received half the salary as whites for the same work; he was not even allowed to attend movies with whites. A brilliant student, he escaped by gaining admission to Harvard University. In 1970, he earned a PhD. in applied mathematics, based on his research into equatorial ocean currents. He carried out postdoctoral research into fluid dynamics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and soon moved to Princeton, where he is now a professor of geosciences.

Cane, born in 1944, grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y.; his father was principal of a vocational public high school, his mother a school attendance officer. He also studied math at Harvard, graduating with a master’s in 1966. Deeply involved in liberal social causes, he took a long hiatus, attending civil-rights rallies, protesting the Vietnam War, and traveling the U.S. South to organize black voters. He took jobs as a computer programmer and a math teacher. After returning to school, he earned a PhD. at MIT in 1975, based on studies of equatorial winds and currents. He moved to Lamont in 1984.

Working separately but in synergy, Philander and Cane explored the idea that El Niño is just one manifestation of a permanently unstable balance of Pacific Ocean weather that swings seesaw-like between extremes. Philander said, “Once, oceanographers thought only about water, and atmospheric scientists only about the air.” He and Cane developed a key insight: The two work tightly together. Modern observations showed them that in the tropical Pacific, there is little distance between warm surface water and the colder abyss. Their calculations then showed how shifts in wind can alter shallow currents to warm or cool the surface−and, as surface temperatures change, how this in turn alters winds. “This circular argument—the winds are both the cause and consequence of surface temperature changes—[gives] rise to phenomena such as El Niño,” said Philander. It was Philander who popularized the term “La Niña,” the state opposite El Niño, when winds pick up again, causing rains to slacken in the Americas, and swell in Asia. Philander also came up with numerical explanations for related phenomena, including why it is rainier immediately north of the equator than to the south.

Cane went the next step. Using marine weather observations leading up to a strong El Niño in 1982-83, he and his then student Stephen Zebiak designed a computer model that they believed could forecast El Niño months in advance. When they predicted another El Niño in 1986, elder scientists scoffed, but it arrived later that year. The model, since tweaked and adapted by others, has predicted almost every event since then, including the powerful El Niño of 2015-16. This advance has led to a network of Pacific buoys that register ocean heat and atmospheric conditions, and the establishment of forecast centers in a half-dozen nations.

In 1994, Cane and a student showed that maize yields in Zimbabwe declined in tandem with El Niño-connected dryness. Research by others quickly showed crop effects elsewhere, leading to efforts in many countries to project which crops to plant or not. Cane led the 1996 establishment of Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society, which forecasts El Niño and related climate swings, and helps developing nations apply the forecasts. Zebiak would later become IRI’s second director-general. In addition to agriculture advice, IRI consults with the International Red Cross on stockpiling of relief supplies ahead of potential floods or droughts; public-health authorities on preparations for weather-influenced outbreaks of diseases such as malaria; and hydropower authorities on water management. In California, where El Niño can cause flooding, authorities clear out storm drains when it is forecast.

Philander has since returned to South Africa periodically to teach. In 2007, he began organizing workshops to introduce South African undergraduate students, particularly those from poor families, to the earth sciences. He is also the founder of the Applied Centre for Climate and Earth Systems Science, an interagency organization in South Africa that promotes education and research opportunities for students. In 2007, the University of Cape Town awarded him an honorary doctorate. In addition to more than 100 peer-reviewed papers, he is the author of four books, including Our Affair With El Niño, and The Encyclopedia of Global Warming and Climate Change.

How might global warming affect El Niño? “The models are all over the place,” says Cane. But he assumes that both droughts and floods on either end of the cycles will grow more intense, and the results may not be good. In 2011, he and two students published a paper suggesting that civil wars are already more likely to break out in much of the tropics during El Niño events, perhaps due to the pressures of extreme weather. And in 2015, he coauthored a widely discussed study suggesting that the Syrian civil war may have been sparked in part by a drought intensified by overall global warming. Philander’s take: “Global warming is a serious issue, but science has its limits. Our highest priority should not be doom and gloom, but addressing poverty and environmental justice. Earth is an amazing place−every time we make a new discovery about another planet, this one looks more exceptional. The only real prediction I can make is that we will be surprised.”

The Vetlesen Prize was established in 1959 by the New York-based G. Unger Vetlesen Foundation.  Awarded for “scientific achievement resulting in a clearer understanding of the Earth, its history, or its relation to the universe,” the prize was designed to be the Nobel Prize of the earth sciences. The prize is administered by Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, one of the world’s leading earth-science research institutions, which convenes a committee from both its own ranks and those of other major institutions to judge nominations. Former recipients have included geologist J. Tuzo Wilson, a key figure in the theory of plate tectonics; astronomer Jan Oort, who elucidated the architecture of galaxies and the outer solar system; geochemist Wallace Broecker, a father of modern climate science; and geologist Walter Alvarez, who linked the extinction of dinosaurs to an extraterrestrial impact. The most recent recipient, in 2015, was British volcanologist Stephen Sparks. Cane and Philander will receive this year’s prize in April in a ceremony at Columbia University.

More information: Kevin Krajick   kkrajick@ei.columbia.edu  212-854-9729

Live presentation of ENACTS in Zambia. Dan Osgood/IRI

In mid September, IRI staff helped launch an innovative new data platform in Lusaka, Zambia that combines satellite rainfall estimates with the country’s existing network of rain gauges. The platform, developed with the Zambia Meteorological Department and through funding from NASA, is the latest to come out of IRI’s Enhancing National Climate Services (ENACTS) initiative which aims to address the persistent problem of data scarcity and lack of access to climate information products in many African countries.

Coinciding with the launch of the ENACTS product, IRI’s financial instruments sector team then led a training on how to design agricultural index insurance and how to use different data sources throughout the process, including the newly available data.

Misheck Lungu, the Permanent Secretary of Zambia’s Ministry of Transport and Communications, spoke to the audience about the transformative impact of the new dataset on the climate and agriculture field.

“The ENACTS initiative has created an opportunity for developing reliable climate information that is suitable for national and local decision making,” said Lungu. “This initiative has improved data availability for our communities.”

Agriculture contributes about 20% of Zambia’s gross domestic product and accounts for 70% of the country’s labor force, according to the Zambia Development Agency. Almost all farming is rainfed, making the sector highly vulnerable to seasonal climate variability. Index-based insurance is one way to protect farmers against crop losses during times of drought or poor rainfall during the growing season.

The World Bank Group’s Global Index Insurance Facility (GIIF) funded the event, which brought together participants from the Zambia Meteorology Department, R4, World Food Program and the country’s insurance sector. They used the new ENACTS platform to solve index insurance design problems and identified how previously untapped expertise, products and capacities could improve each step of the index design process, including data collection, analyses and comparison of various data sources, index design and validation and index performance assessment.

The training participants highlighted some challenges, including the need for understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of different data sources available for index insurance. The training also identified new potential pathways to help existing projects scale massively.

The new data offers exciting new opportunities for future index insurance projects in Zambia as well as existing ones, including GIIF-funded projects with Focus and Mayfair, two Zambian insurance companies. GIIF provided grants to both insurers for scaling up of their index insurance offerings to maize, soya, and cotton producers in Zambia.

“The training highlighted the need for us to further get involved in the design process in order to better understand any new insurance products we will be selling, and make informed changes to products that already exist,” says Bwalya Namwawa, from the Lusaka-based Mayfair Insurance Company.

Dan Osgood, who leads IRI’s index insurance work, says the newly available data will ultimately lead to better insurance products. “This is a huge leap-having African climate service platforms this sophisticated will really unlock the scaling of index insurance, in a way that will truly help farmers.”

Learn more here about IRI’s work on using financial instruments for adaptation and climate risk reduction around the world.

About GIIF
Supported by the European Commission; ACP Group of States; the Netherlands; and Japan, GIIF works to provide access to finance to smallholder farmers and microentrepreneurs, primarily in Sub-Saharan Africa, through the development and implementation of index-based insurance.

This animation shows eight months of high-resolution rainfall data for Zambia, reconstructed using newly available ENACTS data sets produced by IRI and Zambia’s Meteorology Department.

As an artist and an environmentalist, Rogers has drawn inspiration from events of international significance. For example, she attended the launch of the Laudato si’ by Pope Francis at the Vatican in 2015 and was invited by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon to sketch during the signing of the Paris Climate agreement in New York earlier this year.

Rogers first had the idea of a science-art collaboration in 2014, when she attended a panel on “Visualizing Climate Change“, organized by the International Center for Photography  in collaboration with IRI and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. There, she met IRI communications director Francesco Fiondella, and Rebecca Fowler, who at the time was a science writer for LDEO. Fiondella and Fowler had partnered with ICP to organize a series of science talks and gallery tours for ICP’s exhibit of Sebastiao Salgado’s Genesis.

As one of the few attendees who were not part of the research community, Rogers sensed a large gap between the scientific and cultural worlds. “The scientific data felt locked away from our daily culture, our general public,” she says. “Is it possible that the people with the most information about our climate need more help in reaching as many others as possible about what the future will bring?” Two years later, Rogers is painting at IRI, talking to researchers, finding connections in their work and sharing her perspectives.

Visual art has the power to spark conversations, to envision ideas and concepts, to make the intangible tangible, to inject the issues into our mainstream culture. The science community is trained to find answers and solutions in numbers and figures, but it also faces the challenging task of communicating and relaying scientific findings to policy makers, stakeholders, voters and other nonscientific communities who can pursue policies and actions based on the information. This art-science collaboration comes at a crucial time, when many parts of the world are already feeling the impacts of climate variability and change, yet many are still unable to connect to the problem at hand, much less derive solutions to address it.

During her time at IRI, Rogers hopes to work with scientists at IRI and LDEO to help get scientific messages out in creative and engaging ways. It is no coincidence that her training and artistic visions are rooted in Italian Renaissance, a grand period of scientific and artistic collaborations. She believes we could use some of that inspiration to bring us forward in facing the climate-related challenges confronting humanity.

Columbia’s Lamont community is just as curious and enthusiastic to engage with the visiting artist. During the first few days of her stay, the sight of the large painting and the artist at work caught the attention of many researchers, sparking a number of conversations and ideas. Joaquim Goes, a Lamont Research Professor in the Department of Marine Biology and Paleoenvironment, was one of the first to invite Rogers to tour his lab and learn about his team’s research, particularly on the rise of green Noctiluca scintillans. Toxic blooms of this unusual dinoflagellate are linked to massive fish and marine invertebrate die-offs. Goes expressed his excitement to interact with an artist and find the many similarities between scientists and artists—particularly in the capacity to see beyond the obvious—as well as the difference in their approach to creativity or communicating ideas.

Lamont’s Joaquim Goes discusses his work with artist Michelle Rogers. Photo by Dannie Dinh/IRI.

Rogers says her visit to the marine biology lab gave her many ideas, which she plans to incorporate into the Eco Venus painting and her other works. And it seemed she was not the only one teeming with new ideas. “After [our] meeting, I pondered on what Michelle said, that she saw parallels between Noctiluca and our planet—something that I had not even thought about. So you see, the inspiration traveled both ways,” says Goes.

Although the artist’s visit is a new experience for IRI, Fiondella hopes it will be the first of many such collaborations in the future between the art and science communities. “The pursuit of science and art has led to profound understanding and appreciation for both the natural world and the human condition,” he says. “It makes sense that we encourage active collaboration between these two groups in communicating the risks that climate poses, which cross borders and cultures and span generations.”

Dannie Dinh is the Special Assistant to the Director of IRI and Communications Officer for the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS)’s flagship on climate risk management. She believes that art and design can be powerful ways to help make complex scientific concepts like climate change more personal and tangible. Dannie is a contributor to The Chromatic Watch art blog and a volunteer for the Civic Art Lab summer workshop series.

Every day, weather services help people decide what to wear, how to how to get to and from work and how to spend our weekends. We take such services for granted – they’re ubiquitous and often just a tap or click away.

Some decisions, however, require us to consider time frames that go beyond a day or a few days of weather—siting a dam, for example, or building a new highway, or planning food production to meet a country’s growing population. These decisions are best served by understanding the potential climatic changes that may play out over months, years and decades.

The relatively new field of climate services aims to inform decision making, policy and planning through the production, translation, transfer and use of climate information.

In a commentary published in this week’s Science, Lisa Goddard writes that while robust climate services are crucial to help societies successfully adapt to current and future climate conditions, “considerable confusion remains about what climate services are or what they should provide.”

To bring some clarity to the issue, Goddard, a climate scientist and the director of Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society, outlines three considerations that are necessary for the making of good climate services:

Clearly define the role of climate. Climate is often one of many factors influencing decisions and actions, even in sectors such as agriculture, which have a strong climate connection. And in some cases, the climate information needed to address the problem is simply too uncertain to justify its use.

Know your data. Reliable meteorological observations enable us to understand past, present and future changes. They form a critical foundation to any climate service. As Goddard writes, “not all observational data sets are created equal.”

Understand the relevant time scales. The relative importance of climate on different time scales depends on the variable (e.g., temperature vs. rainfall), location and time of year. Understanding the magnitudes of climate variations and trends  and their relative influences can help guide what information is most needed for planning and resilience.

“What is clear is that climate services require more than just climate science,” writes Goddard. “To work, they depend on a solid understanding of how climate fits into the broader decision context as well as the political will to foster multidisciplinary research and practice.”

Interested reporters should contact Francesco Fiondella.

Learn more about IRI’s work in climate services

Special Issue: Shaping the Landscape of Climate Services

Climate Services Partnership

Innovative Weather Model Helps Millions in Caribbean Prepare for Drought

New Climate Services Program in Rwanda Aims to Reach One Million Farmers

INFOGRAPHIC: What are Climate Services?

A model for improving climate services in Africa

About IRI
The International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI), part of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, aims to enhance society’s ability to understand, anticipate and manage the impacts of climate in order to improve human welfare and the environment, especially in developing countries. Visit iri.columbia.edu and follow @climatesociety on Twitter.

Satellite products could give index insurance projects the scaling power they seek, but challenges remain. A workshop held earlier this year addressed these challenges head on.

Index insurance is innovative, but can it reach a critical mass? Until recently, many have doubted that index insurance could scale to the large numbers of farmers needed to address poverty. This is partly because of the sparse coverage of weather station networks in many parts of the tropics. Seasonal rainfall can vary over very short distances, so it is difficult for index insurance to sustainably scale if it only works in areas covered by existing rain gauges with long, continuous historical records. Rain-gauge based insurance design continue to face many challenges, including:

• How to make gauges tamper proof
• Creating back up plans in case of malfunction
• Addressing missing or corrupted historical data
• Installing new mobile technology installed to receive rainfall measurements quickly
• Offering insurance only to farmers whose on-farm weather conditions are represented by the weather at the gauge.

Satellites are addressing some of these challenges, allowing index insurance to reach a much wider audience. In recent years, many projects have turned to satellites to solve these problems. There are many remotely sensed products available, using custom scientific sensors on board satellites to determine rainfall, soil moisture and even plant health. An advantage of using satellite products is that they provide detailed coverage over a large area often going back more than 30 years. Satellites products are also generally freely available and are a tamper-proof, independent data source.

Farmers in Silika Village, Malawi discuss low rainfall years and compare their recollections with low rainfall years estimated by satellites. Photo: Bristol Powell/IRI.

Hundreds of thousands of farmers in Africa are now insured under indices based on satellite-derived rainfall estimates. For example, the R4 Rural Resilience Initiative currently insures 32,000 poor smallholder farmers using satellite based rainfall and vegetation information. Commercial companies such as ACRE, the Ghana Agricultural Insurance Pool and PlaNetGuarantee are also investing heavily in satellite-derived indices, covering hundreds of thousands of farmers. 

Despite these advantages, using satellites for index insurance is not without challenges. Which dataset should we choose to best link with farmer’s losses? How do we deal with missing data? How do we understand the spatial variability of the satellite measurements and find ways to computationally process the large amount of data provided by a satellite? To complicate the situation further, remote sensing has many roles within insurance design. Some products are useful for creating the index directly, whereas others are more useful for validation, or for monitoring an agricultural season in real time.

Satellite-derived estimates of rainfall, soil moisture or vegetation are complicated products. They are typically created and curated by the academic research community.

The research and business communities can’t go it alone. In order to address all of these issues, we need an unprecedented collaboration between researchers and the private sector. Building effective communication and a shared language between these two groups is an essential step in making sure that satellites are used properly within index insurance.

With this in mind, remote sensing data providers, international reinsurance companies and index insurance project leaders held a workshop in February at the University of Reading, U.K. The event was hosted by the TAMSAT satellite rainfall group and the International Research Institute for Climate and Society. Participants highlighted exciting new developments in satellite datasets, built a shared vocabulary and language between different groups, fostered new collaborations and discussed crucial issues of satellites within index insurance.

Artist’s rendition of the MeteoSat-8 satellite. A Meteosat geostationary satellite has been active over Africa since the year 1980. The current satellite is Meteosat2, which takes infrared images of clouds over Africa every 15 minutes. These images lie at the heart of all satellite rainfall estimates for the tropics. You can see the images in real time here. (Image: EUMETSAT)

Representatives from major reinsurance companies HanoverRe and SwissRe attended as did those from large-scale insurance projects such as the R4 Rural Resilience Initiative, Pula Consulting and the Ghana Agricultural Insurance Pool. They were joined by remote sensing scientists from the University of Reading, the University of California Santa Barbara, Columbia University, the University of Maryland and others. As many of these remote sensing products are already being used in operational insurance programs, it was a great opportunity to share experiences.

We discussed several topics in detail, including:

• The most important roles and characteristics of a remote sensing product for index insurance and the common language that could be used to describe them
• The creation of a common protocol for missing data in insurance design
• Issues surrounding spatial and temporal scale. For example, as highlighted by the Ghana Agricultural Insurance Pool (GAIP), an insurance project attempting to use satellite observations to capture high severity, low frequency events (i.e. drought) may require a satellite which reports less frequently than a project insuring for floods, because the spatiotemporal characteristics of the event itself affect the requirements from the data.

What became very clear through discussions at the workshop is that a wide variety of satellite datasets could provide useful information to the index insurance industry. In addition to knowing how to select the best dataset to design an insurance contract, actors in the index insurance community must understand the characteristics of different satellite products and therefore, how different approaches to observing environmental information can inform the design, validation, and seasonal monitoring required for weather-based index insurance programs. The workshop is discussed in more detail in this Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society article. Outputs from the workshop have also been crucial in the development of an upcoming practitioners guide to satellites for index insurance

An agreed-upon, shared language is absolutely essential. Because multiple perspectives were represented at the workshop, the sessions were able to find a common vocabulary and begin a relationship of increased mutual understanding. This will foster future communications between data providers and the greater user community.

The workshop was co-funded between the CCAFS Theme 2 Flagship Programme, CASCAID, the National Centre for Atmospheric Science (NCAS) and the TAMSAT-led SatWIN-scale project, funded by the UK Natural and Environmental Research Council (NERC) PURE programme.

Further Reading

Report: Using Satellites to Make Index Insurance Scalable

For Farmers, Insurance is an Investment in the Future

25,000 Insured Ethiopian Farmers Receive Payments for El Niño Droughts

Using satellite data to insure camels, cows, sheep and goats: IBLI and the development of the world’s first insurance for African pastoralists

The Caribbean Climate Outlook Forum, also known as CariCOF, brings together climate scientists and meteorologists with decision-makers who may be able to use climate information. During the meeting, now held twice a year — once at the beginning of the dry season and once at the beginning of the wet season — the scientists present forecasts to experts in climate-sensitive sectors such as health, agriculture and water resources. The Caribbean Institute for Meteorology and Hydrology organizes the event.

A new multimedia feature story from IRI highlights the Dry Season 2015-16 CariCOF, held in the height of the recent El Niño event. El Niño typically reduces the odds of precipitation for much of the eastern and southern Caribbean. In fifteen videos featuring organizers and participants of the event, people explain why the forecasts are important, the value of bringing together scientists and decision makers, recent innovations in forecasting and communication of forecasts and the unique challenges of drought in the Caribbean, among other topics.

CariCOF is one of many regional Climate Outlook Forums held around the world. The forecasts presented at COFs are usually seasonal forecasts for precipitation, though some regions present forecasts at other timescales, and some regions include other forecast products like temperature and outlooks for drought or food security.

The Dry Season 2015-16 CariCOF was held in St. Kitts in late November 2015, in the height of the 2015-16 El Niño event. It was sponsored in part by the Programme for Building Regional Climate Capacity in the Caribbean (BRCCC Programme), a three-year project made possible in part by the United States Agency for International Development. Other sponsors included Environment Canada and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Previous CariCOF coverage:

Wet season CariCOF 2015: Minds on the Information Gap: Climate in the Caribbean

Dry season CariCOF 2014-15: One Size Fits None: Drought forecasting in the Caribbean

Wet season CariCOF 2014: Live from Kingston: It’s CariCOF | Videos 

May 2014: Q&A – Why care about CariCOF?

Tony Barnston provides an overview of the briefing

Neutral conditions remain in the central equatorial region of the Pacific Ocean that define El Niño and La Niña events, called the Nino3.4 region. Recent weekly sea-surface temperature anomalies dipped just below the -0.5º threshold used to define La Niña, but those anomalies will have to persist before an update is made in the ENSO alert system. While ocean temperatures are indicating a La Niña event could be imminent, atmospheric conditions consistent with La Niña (i.e. stronger-than-average trade winds) are not yet present. The La Niña watch issued by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center in June is still in effect. 

Changes from last month’s briefing

In June, the monthly average sea-surface temperature anomaly in the Nino3.4 region dipped below the 0ºC mark for the first time since March of 2014. At -0.12ºC below average, the temperature was squarely within ENSO-neutral conditions. In the last several weeks, the weekly-averaged sea-surface temperatures have dropped further, hovering around the -0.5ºC mark. See the latest SST measurements in the first image below.  [Note: For many reasons outlined in this NOAA blog post, comparison of SSTs between datasets (and sometimes even within the same dataset!) should be cautious, largely due to variation in data collection methods and resolution of the datasets. Further, the dataset used for the above statistics (called OISSTv2) is not the one used in NOAA’s records for official peak strength (called ERSSTv4), though OISSTv2 is the one used in initializing models.] 

To predict El Niño, computers model the SSTs in the Nino3.4 region over the next several months. The graph in the second image of the gallery shows the outputs of these models, some of which use equations based on our physical understanding of the system (called dynamical models), and some of which use statistics, based on the long record of historical observations.

The dynamical model mean calls for a weaker La Niña event compared to last month’s forecast, while the statistical model mean, forecasting a borderline La Niña event, is similar to last month’s statistical forecast. The model means are within about 0.25ºC of each other — the closest agreement they’ve had since March of this year. The spread of the model outputs overall is narrower than the June forecast’s spread, but still has a range of 2.0ºC. 

Sea-surface temperature and wind means and anomalies in the equatorial Pacific for the period July 14-18. In the Nino3.4 region, SSTs are overall below average, while zonal winds are close to average. Image: NOAA.

Based on these model outputs, chances for La Niña development in the latter half of 2016 are down slightly from last month, with odds topping out at just under 60% for the December-January-February period (see third graph in gallery above).

The probabilistic forecast issued by CPC and IRI in early July shows slightly higher odds for La Niña conditions. This early-July forecast uses human judgement in addition to model output, while the mid-July forecast relies solely on model output.

Effects of El Niño on global seasonal forecasts

Each month, IRI issues seasonal climate forecasts for the entire globe. These forecasts take into account the latest sea-surface temperature projections and indicate which areas are more likely to see above- or below-normal temperatures and rainfall.

For the upcoming August-October period, the forecast shows some likelihood of drier-than-normal conditions over areas of the southeastern and northwestern United States (first image in gallery above, click to enlarge). The forecast also shows a slightly elevated chance of above-average precipitation in Indonesia. 

El Niño in context: Resource page on climate variability

The impacts listed above are specifically for the August-October season. For the later seasons, see forecast maps in the image gallery and on our seasonal forecast page.

Learn more about La Niña on our ENSO resources page, and sign up here to get notified when the next forecast is issued. In the meantime, check out #IRIforecast or use #ENSOQandA on Twitter to ask your La Niña questions.

At about 250 lightning flashes per square kilometer per year, the Lake Maracaibo Basin in northwestern Venezuela has the highest annual lightning rate of any place in the world.

Lightning activity is so common there that it has a proper name, Catatumbo Lightning, named for the Catatumbo region located in the southwest corner of the basin. A person is three times more likely to be struck by lightning in Catatumbo than in the entire continental United States.

Besides the implications for human safety and well-being, lightning strikes also kill or maim cattle and other livestock in the region, and can frequently interrupt oil and natural gas exploration in a country that holds the world’s largest proven oil reserves.

In January  this year, a team of researchers led by Ángel Muñoz published a seasonal lightning forecast for Catatumbo — the first of its kind for the region and for the globe. The team recently won the ‘Orden de la Zulianidad’, an award given by the state government of Zulia in Venezuela for outstanding contributions to society.

Muñoz, who is now a postdoctoral research affiliate at Princeton’s Atmospheric and Ocean Sciences program, explains the research and its applications in a detailed interview below.

What makes Catatumbo such a flashpoint for lightning?

Warm and moist low-level winds coming from the Caribbean Sea, and the presence of the Andes and the Perijá mountain ranges surrounding Lake Maracaibo, produce ideal conditions for thunderstorms, especially in the southwestern corner of the lake basin. The tall mountains can lead to the development and persistence of clouds with large vertical profiles when sustained winds bring moisture to the area. This is important because lightning frequency increases very rapidly with cloud height.

Incidentally, we’ve helped corroborate that there is not one, but two lightning hotspots in the southwestern quadrant of the basin: one close to the mouth of the Catatumbo River and another at the border between Venezuela and Colombia.

What are the main variables that you used to make the lightning predictions?

Our team explored the role of many physical variables, including sea-surface temperatures, winds, moisture transport and convective available potential energy (a.k.a. CAPE, a measure of the potential for storminess in a region). We did this in both the observational data and our own high-resolution, numerical simulations. We found that CAPE and winds had the most direct influence on lightning in Catatumbo, so we developed an index from these two climate variables to use as a basis of our prediction model. We’re not ignoring the other climate variables, however. Ultimately, since they all have an impact on CAPE and winds, our index captures variability from many climate processes. This is why the lightning forecasts we developed for the region base on this index had high skill, about twice the typical skill for rainfall forecasts there.

We made extensive use of both IRI’s Climate Predictability Tool and its Data Library in our research and analysis.

Do other climate timescales play a role? What causes lightning rates in the region to fluctuate?

Our research identified the role of what we’re calling the Maracaibo Basin Low-Level Jet — an ebbing and flowing ‘tide’ of winds present between the ground and the base of the clouds that blow from the Caribbean to the southern part of the basin, and then in the opposite direction— as the main regulator of lightning activity at daily scale. The interaction of these winds with the mountain range surrounding the basin explains the location, timing and high frequency of events. The intensity and moisture transported by this low-level jet change along the year, depending on the influence of seasonal-scale climate drivers such as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, the Caribbean Low-Level Jet and the Atlantic Meridional Mode.

The dangers that lightning pose are so localized. Why is a seasonal lightning forecast over an area as large as Catatumbo useful?

Lightning is arguably the most dangerous natural hazard, due to its unpredictability and the frequency of strikes. A recent review of annual fatalities in 23 countries cites deaths rates ranging from 1 to 84 per million people. Overall, developing countries show higher lightning-related death rates than developed countries, especially in cases where a large percentage of the population is found in rural areas.

Developed countries are vulnerable when lightning occurs in areas with a high concentration of expensive infrastructure. In the U.S., for example, lightning is estimated to account for $8-10 billion in losses to the U.S. economy each year.

The Lake Maracaibo Basin has characteristics of both developing and developed countries. There’s a rural population of farmers and fishermen with mostly no protection from extreme weather. There’s also very expensive infrastructure, including approximately 13,000 oil wells that produce 1.95 million barrels a year of crude oil, or about 50% of Venezuela’s export capacity. In addition, lightning in the lake basin is also responsible for $400,000 in average losses per electric power plant every year.

Improving our ability to predict lightning activity in the region would spare Venezuela some of these losses. The work also has potential application in neighboring Colombia, with shares similar statistics.

The sensor you built for this work also has an interesting backstory – can you tell us about it?

The Center for Scientific Modeling in Venezuela designed and built the set of microsensors we’re using in our Catatumbo expeditions. We launched these iCaro sensors, as they’re called, using tethered balloons. The sensors help us characterize the evolution of the planetary boundary layer, which is the the part of the atmosphere between the ground and the base of the clouds, and study conditions conducive to lightning. Since April 2015, we have had five field campaigns occurring about every 3 months. We acquire data every 30 minutes continuously for 2-3 days. We also use the data to calibrate our prediction models.

What’s next in this research?

We are designing a lightning early warning system named SIVIGILA for the Lake Maracaibo Basin. This involves real-time monitoring using a new network of detectors, short-term forecasts using a calibrated high-resolution model and the seasonal forecasts using the models we previously reported on. Our team is following IRI’s ‘ready-set-go’ approach in which action-oriented information at multiple timescales is provided to the user to facilitate decisions.

We are still looking for funding to continue the field campaigns that will keep the models calibrated, and to buy and maintain the lightning detectors.

For more information

http://cmc.org.ve/Catatumbo
http://cmc.org.ve/ExpedicionesCatatumbo

Drainage area of the Bicol River. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

The Bicol River Basin in the eastern Philippines is home to more than 5 million people, most of whom rely on agriculture and fishing for their livelihoods. The area is vulnerable to many climate and weather events, including typhoons, floods and dry spells. Each of these can have major impacts on local agriculture, and the strong 2015-16 El Niño intensified drought conditions in the region, while tropical cyclones caused flooding in certain locations. These impacts as well as those from long-term climate change pose uncertainty in the region’s agriculture sector. The development of accurate models that can forecast weather trends and water availability are becoming a key component in climate-related decision making that could impact the majority of Bicol residents’ food and economic security.

Starting in 2012, IRI partnered with the University of the Philippines Los Baños, the country’s Department of Agriculture and the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration to tackle these climate-related challenges with the aim of improving water and food security in a region plagued by extreme weather. Central Bicol State University of Agriculture, Bicol University as well as local provincial governments and irrigators associations are also collaborating on the project, which is being supported by the US Agency for International Development. Food security is a particularly complex issue, as productive agriculture relies on favorable weather conditions and enough available water to sustain growing crops. The project aims to develop, test and apply decision-support tools for water use and allocation in the Buhi-Barit and Quinale A watersheds, and provide clear information about water availability in the region to farmers and local water managers.

Models developed by the IRI rely on climate and local hydrological data, and can calculate water supply available to users in the watershed. Understanding this data can help users understand how potential water availability will affect crop choices, for example, and make sure all farms receive their share of water.

But simply designing these models isn’t enough to ensure proper water management in the region.

On the ground, nearly 900 farmers have already attended 14 Climate Field Schools, where they learned how to use climate forecast and water availability information provided by the IRI. Project partners plan to run additional field schools in 2016.

An agricultural technician talks about integrated pest management to farmers at a climate field school in the Philippines.

While farmers are trained by local partners how to use the available climate information, the IRI is working closely with stakeholders to design-decision support tools that link water availability information and climate information to make detailed maps that help local stakeholders understand the possible outcomes of proposed plans. Refining these tools remains a part of the project, which runs through 2017. Additionally, working to integrate these tools into regular risk-management strategies–a shared responsibility among local irrigation specialists, hydropower managers, fishery managers and farmers–is key to the project’s success.

The project has involved a number of researchers and staff from IRI. Brad Lyon worked with PAGASA on a climate analysis that ultimately led to improved forecasts for the region. This improved climate information allowed Amor Ines and Eunjin Han to develop more sophisticated agricultural crop models that take into account expected climate conditions. Han, Kye Baraong and Erica Allis worked on a water management and allocation model for the Quinali A and Buhi-Barit watersheds. The information and outputs from all these activities are served via the IRI Data Library through a custom map room developed by Rémi Cousin.

The Bicol Agri-Water Project is working to develop, test, and apply agro-climate tools to support decisions for managing climate risks at the farm level and for managing water resources at the watershed level. This is a screenshot of the custom map room IRI developed with partners for the project.

“This project is an example of an integrated approach to climate risk management,” says Ines, the project’s principal scientist, now at Michigan State University. “Multiple actors – academics, policy makers, local government units, NGOs and farmers came together to address the challenges posed by climate change and variability to agriculture and water management.”

Increasing resiliency among populations vulnerable to growing climate risks is a challenging task, requiring dedication from a wide range of stakeholders to ensure risk management is integrated at all decision levels—from farmers deciding which crops to use each year to local water managers deciding how to allot resources.

Megan Helseth is completing her Master’s in Climate and Society at Columbia University. She is interested in long-term strategies for fighting and adapting to climate change, resource management strategies, and the politics of sustainability.

Banner photo: Farmland in the Bicol region, Philippines by Erica Allis

That’s one major reason that the International Research Institute for Climate and Society and Mailman are hosting a Health and Climate Colloquium June 8-10 at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory campus.

A woman hangs a mosquito net in the temporary dwelling in the fields (champka) that she and her husband are clearing to farm, Cambodia. Photo: WHO/S. Hollyman.

The purpose of the three-day event is to help build a global community of health practitioners and policymakers that understand and can use climate information to support health delivery and improved outcomes in the context of a changing climate. The meeting will focus on infectious diseases, nutrition and the public health outcomes of meteorological disasters.

“In North America, changing weather patterns in both hemispheres are causing alarming disruptions,” Fried wrote in the Huffington Post. “A relatively dry El Niño winter and a warm spring that melted snow earlier-than-normal created forest firesthat forced the evacuation of 80,000 Alberta residents and destroyed more than 702,000 acres—about 1,096 square miles. The Zika virus is entering the United States from the Caribbean, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control estimates that at least 20 percent of Puerto Rico’s 3.5 million residents will become infected with the mosquito-borne virus this year. … The climate shocks associated with natural variability, such as El Niño, are being compounded by longer-term climatic trends—particularly in temperature—which facilitate further spread of the disease.”

To find out more about the connections between climate and public health, check out the recent report by the interagency U.S. Global Change Research Program titled “The Impacts of Climate Change on Human Health in the United States: A Scientific Assessment.”

There is limited space for media. Journalists interested in attending should contact Francesco Fiondella (francesco-at-iri.columbia.edu).

IRI Climate and Health News

• Climate Remains a Question in Zika Virus Spread
• 2015 El Niño: Notes for the East African Malaria Community 
• Global Nutrition Report Highlights Role of Climate 
• Climate Change: A Global Public Health Issue
• World Malaria Day: What’s Climate Got To Do With It?

The Health and Climate Colloquium is sponsored by:

The IRI has developed a forecast maproom that characterizes the expected fire activity in the Amazon based on climate conditions for the upcoming dry season. Kátia Fernandes, along with Walter Baethgen and Lisa Goddard, have been researching how the Amazon fires are influenced by large-scale ocean phenomena and how sea surface temperature (SST) forecasts can predict fire occurrence for the upcoming dry season. Here, Fernandes shares the team’s findings for 2016 and some of her thoughts on the topic. In the video above, she gives a detailed overview of the maproom.

1. What is the forecast for wildfires in the Western Amazon for this year? (2016)

We’re forecasting the July-September fire season to be more active than normal because we expect weather conditions during this same time period to be drier-than-normal.

2. What are they key driving forces resulting in these fires?

Schematic of the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone. The exact location of the ITCZ varies and is not always directly over the equator.

Fires in the Western Amazon occur primarily as a result of dry conditions triggered by anomalously warm sea-surface temperatures in the Northern Tropical Atlantic. Warm waters in this region often cause the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), the area near the equator where tradewinds converge (see figure), to shift northward. These trade winds typically bring moisture from the Atlantic to the Central and Western Amazon. The migration of the ITCZ causes trade winds north of South America to weaken, and when they weaken, less moisture is transported to the Amazon. The team at the IRI is forecasting that the upcoming July-September season in the Amazon will be anomalously dry. Consequently, they are expecting the upcoming fire season to be above normal.

Sea-surface temperature anomalies over the North Atlantic during the period of Feb-Apr 2016. Data source: NOAA. Figure created with the IRI Data Library.

On a longer time scale, the El Niño-Southern Oscillation also influences the climate of the Western Amazon. For example, as researched by IRI’s Alessandra Giannini, surface waters of the North Tropical Atlantic tend to warm up approximately 2-4 months after the peak of an El Niño. The figure at right is a map displaying SST anomalies over the North Atlantic during the period of Feb-Apr 2016, which is the period that follows the peak of the 2015 El Nino. It shows that most parts of the tropical North Atlantic are experiencing warmer than normal conditions during the months after the 2015 El Nino.

Decadal variability in both the North and South Atlantic also exerts influence on the Amazon’s climate. For example, in a study conducted with the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), we found that higher frequency of Amazonian droughts are observed when sea-surface temperatures in the North Atlantic are warm relative to those in the South Atlantic during April-September, and that has been the case since 2004..

Climatologically speaking, all signs point towards a significant uptick in the intensity and frequency of fires in the Western Amazon this year.

3. How does the Amazon situation compare to the 2015/16 forest fires in Indonesia?

First, it’s important to note that the fire forecast we make is based solely on climate indicators. There are other factors that determine the extent of fires in the Western Amazon, including vegetation cover, burn practices and the effectiveness of fire management. A full comparison between the Indonesia fires of 2015/16 and the Amazon fires of 2016 can be reliably made only after the Amazon season ends in September.

Another aspect that differentiates the two cases is that fires in Indonesia can occur in drained peatlands, and these can burn underground for months, as we observed in 2015/16. Such fires are also one of the biggest contributors to hazardous pollution in Southeast Asia.

In the Amazon, peatlands fires are non-existent and vegetation fires do not last nearly as long. Nonetheless, during very dry years higher frequency of fires is related to an increase in cases of respiratory illnesses.

4. Discuss briefly the impacts of the last major fire season in the Amazon.

The last major fire season in the Western Amazon occurred in 2010. The resulting smoke pollution from that event affected nearly 500,000 people in Brazil alone. We saw an increase in respiratory illnesses, especially among children. Relating to climate change, it is interesting to observe how net carbon emissions of the Western Amazon differs during years of extreme droughts. In most years, carbon emissions from deforestation in the Amazon, biomass burning and decomposition of organic matter is mostly balanced by the forest’s CO2 uptake by photosynthesis. However, in years of extreme droughts such as that of 2010, the increase in frequency and intensity of the fires turns the Amazon into a source of CO2 to the atmosphere.

Geraldine Tham is completing her Master’s in Climate and Society at Columbia University. She will then work for the Ministry of Education in Singapore. Her research interest is on how climate information can be better taught and communicated.

In November 2015, the International Research Institute for Climate and Society at Columbia University, in collaboration with the World Meteorological Organization, the U.S. Agency for International Development and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, convened the El Niño 2015 Conference. The report from this conference is now available. In addition to recordings and summaries of the talks and panels, the digital version of the report features participant interviews, social media interactions and conference feedback. Other supplementary material from the conference can be found on our El Nino 2015 web page.

About the Conference: Since early 2015, experts have monitored the development of one of the largest El Niño events of the last 50 years, and notably, the largest since the 1997-98 El Niño that shocked global food, water, health, energy and disaster-response systems and erased years of development gains. The El Niño 2015 Conference brought together physical scientists, social scientists, forecasters, development professionals and journalists from governments, academia, humanitarian agencies and the private sector to share perspectives on the transformation of climate forecasts to climate services in the past two decades. The two-day gathering provided a platform for strategic dialogue to evaluate the big picture and ask questions related to El Niño, extreme events and variability on multiple time scales, including long-term climate change.

Fresh beans on sale in a Rwandan market. Credit: Stephanie Malyon / CIAT

(Kigali, Rwanda) 23 March 2016. To build a more climate-resilient agriculture sector, the Rwandan government and partners are taking action to provide nearly a million farmers timely access to essential climate information services. The Rwanda Climate Services for Agriculture project will ultimately help transform Rwanda’s rural farming communities and national economy through improved climate risk management. The project builds on ongoing innovations made by IRI’s  Enhancing National Climate Services initiative (ENACTS), which filled in a 15-year gap in Rwanda’s historical meteorological records.

Agriculture contributes to one-third of Rwanda’s gross domestic production and remains the main source of subsistence for the majority of the country’s population. Farming employs eight out of ten Rwandans. Despite its importance, the sector remains highly vulnerable to current and projected climate and weather variability. Severe flooding in 2007, for example, caused an estimated US$22 million in two districts alone. Recurrent hail and wind storms, heavy rains and prolonged droughts take frequent tolls on agricultural productivity. Such weather events are expected to become more frequent and intensive with climate change, posing a threat to food security.

“In this context, it becomes critical that farmers can access and use reliable climate and weather forecasts,” said Innocent Bisangwa, an environmental and climate change specialist in Rwanda’s Ministry of Agriculture and Animal Resources (MINAGRI). “Through this work, we will help them make the best decisions about when and what to plant, how much fertilizer to apply and when to harvest,” he said.

The new project addresses two critical issues: reconstructing Rwanda’s incomplete meteorological data record using cutting-edge climate science, and developing climate information products and services based on the expressed needs of farmers and other end users.

The work is carried out by the Rwanda Agriculture Board (RAB) and Meteo Rwanda, in collaboration with the the CGIAR Research Program on Climate, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS), the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) at Columbia University, the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF), and the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), with funding from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

“We’re very excited about this project and what it plans to achieve in the next 4 years,” said Malick Haidara, the director of USAID Rwanda’s Economic Growth Office, during the official launch. “We believe it’s transformative.”

A Generation of Missing Data

This chart shows the number of operational weather stations in Rwanda

The missing data traces its origins in tragedy. The 1990-1994 civil war and genocide in Rwanda led to a catastrophic disruption of Rwanda’s meteorological observation network. Most of the country’s weather stations had been destroyed, looted or rendered inoperable. A decade later, only few stations had been brought back online. It was not until 2010 that Rwanda’s National Meteorological Agency restored its pre-1994 number of stations.

“We had to address this 15-year gap in our meteorological records,” said Didace Musoni, from Meteo-Rwanda. “This was not an abstract problem: the absence of such data has had significant impact on society here,” he said.

“A lack of historical data means we cannot get an accurate baseline definition of weather in a ‘normal’ season, which means seasonal forecasts are going to be less accurate,” said Tufa Dinku, a research scientist at IRI who leads the ENACTS work. “For example, if forecasts call for ‘above-normal’ rainfall for the growing season, what does that really mean? The scale of the data problem in Rwanda is something we hadn’t encountered in other countries,” Dinku said.

Dinku lists a number of questions that are difficult to answer without solid historical data: How is climate change unfolding in the country? Are there certain areas seeing more impacts than others? What is the year-to-year variability in rainfall and how has that changed? What has been the trend between climate and agricultural productivity? Even the impacts of El Niño would be poorly known.

The 1997/98 El Niño had massive, wide ranging consequences over eastern Africa. At that time, Rwanda had only 3 or 4 weather stations measuring data. Even in a small country like Rwanda—which is the size of Massachusetts—the effects of El Niño vary.

When countries in the region were trying to prepare for the 2015 El Niño, they naturally looked at the rainfall and temperature patterns of 1997 for comparison. “Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia all did that,” says Dinku. “But it would have been difficult in Rwanda, because there was so little information.”

ENACTS changed the situation by bringing in global satellite technology and climate-model products. For decades, satellites have been continuously monitoring rainfall, temperature and other climate variables over most of the world at high resolution.

Using that ENACTS approach, Meteo-Rwanda has filled in the missing data by blending whatever on-the-ground measurements existed with the global products. As a result, Rwanda now has more than 30 years of rainfall and temperature data every 5-km across the whole country.

“There are now no gaps in the record, and this opens up a whole world of opportunities for us,” said Musoni.

Dinku adds that the focus of ENACTS isn’t just on improving quality of the data, but also on improving access to data and its use. He has worked closely with Meteo-Rwanda, organizing trainings to ensure its staff understand how to work with the new data. Members of the IRI’s Data Library team have also helped install maprooms that allow anyone to visualize and download the products.

Robust, Science-based and User-informed Climate Services

“Rebuilding the data sets the foundation for developing the kinds of information products we know are useful to farmers and other decision makers,” explained James Hansen, Program Leader for the CCAFS flagship on managing climate risk. “These include forecasts by SMS and radio, which now reach millions of rural people in countries such as Senegal,” he said.

The new Rwanda Climate Services for Agriculture project will build on the ENACTS innovations to improve agricultural planning and food security management in the country at all levels.

“The goal is to develop the government’s capacity to provide location-specific, climate information that is relevant for decision makers, while also developing the capacity of agriculture extension workers to bring that kind of information to farmers and assist them in incorporating it into their planning,” says Bisangwa.

“We had to address this 15-year gap in our meteorological records. This was not an abstract problem: the absence of such data has had significant impact on society here.”

-Didace Musoni, Meteo-Rwanda

A key success factor is involving farmers from the beginning, and ensuring their knowledge is built into these initiatives. The project will use a tried and tested approach known as PICSA—Participatory Integrated Climate Services for Agriculture – to help farmers understand how climate information could impact their own decision making.

The project aims to deliver four specific outcomes:

• Climate Services for Farmers. Farmers across Rwanda’s 30 districts will have decision-relevant, operational climate information and advisory services, and be trained to use the information to better manage risk.
• Climate Services for Government and Institutions. Agricultural and food security decision makers in the Ministry of Agriculture and other national and local government agencies and institutions will use climate information to respond more effectively to risks.
• Climate Information Provision. Meteo-Rwanda will design, deliver, and incorporate user feedback into a growing suite of weather and climate information products and services tailored to the needs of decision makers.
• Climate Services Governance. A national climate services governance process will oversee and foster sustained coproduction, assessment and improvement of climate services.

“Rwanda is showcasing what can be done with climate services, even when you have an enormous gap in observational records,” said Hansen. “It’s the only country in Africa as far as we know with an official ‘open data’ policy and it’s poised to lead the continent in making not just forecasts but data a public good and a resource for development.”

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The International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI), part of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, aims to enhance society’s ability to understand, anticipate and manage the impacts of climate in order to improve human welfare and the environment, especially in developing countries. Visit iri.columbia.edu and follow @climatesociety on Twitter.

The CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS), led by CIAT, brings together the world’s best researchers in agricultural science, development research, climate science and Earth System science, to identify and address the most important interactions, synergies and tradeoffs between climate change, agriculture and food security. Visit www.ccafs.cgiar.org and follow @cgiarclimate on Twitter

A tornado near Elk Mountain, west of Laramie Wyoming on the 15th of June, 2015. The tornado passed over mostly rural areas of the county, lasting over 20 minutes. John Allen/IRI.

Most death and destruction inflicted by tornadoes in North America occurs during outbreaks—large-scale weather events that can last one to three days and span huge regions. The largest outbreak ever recorded happened in 2011. It spawned 363 tornadoes across the United States and Canada, killing more than 350 people and causing $11 billion in damage.

Now, a new study shows that the average number of tornadoes in these outbreaks has risen since 1954, and that the chance of extreme outbreaks —tornado factories like the one in 2011—has also increased.

The study’s authors said they do not know what is driving the changes. “The science is still open,” said lead author Michael Tippett, a climate and weather researcher at Columbia University’s School of Applied Science and Engineering and Columbia’s Data Science Institute. “It could be global warming, but our usual tools, the observational record and computer models, are not up to the task of answering this question yet.” Tippett points out that many scientists expect the frequency of atmospheric conditions favorable to tornadoes to increase in a warmer climate—but even today, the right conditions don’t guarantee a tornado will occur. In any case, he said, “When it comes to tornadoes, almost everything terrible that happens, happens in outbreaks. If outbreaks contain more tornadoes on average, then the likelihood they’ll cause damage somewhere increases.”

“When it comes to tornadoes, almost everything terrible that happens happens in outbreaks.”

The results are expected to help insurance and reinsurance companies better understand the risks posed by outbreaks, which can also generate damaging hail and straight-line winds. Over the last 10 years, the industry has covered an average of $12.5 billion in insured losses each year, according to Willis Re, a global reinsurance advisor that helped sponsor the research. The article appears this week in the journal Nature Communications.

Every year, North America sees dozens of tornado outbreaks. Some are small and may give rise to only a few twisters; others, such as the so-called “super outbreaks” of 1974 and 2011, can generate hundreds. In the simplest terms, the intensity of each tornado is ranked on a zero-to-five scale, with other descriptive terms thrown in. The lower gradations cause only light damage, while the top ones, like a twister that tore through Joplin, Missouri, in 2011 can tear the bark off trees, rip houses from their foundations, and turn cars into missiles.

The effect that changing the mean and variance of a distribution has extremes, using temperatures as an example. Source: IPPC.

As far as the tornado observational record is concerned, the devil’s in the details.

For this study, the authors calculated the mean number of tornadoes per outbreak for each year as well as the variance, or scatter, around this mean. They found that while the total number of tornadoes rated F/EF1 and higher each year hasn’t increased, the average number per outbreak has, rising from about 10 to about 15 since the 1950s.

The study was coauthored by Joel Cohen, director of the Laboratory of Populations, which is based jointly at Rockefeller University and Columbia’s Earth Institute. Cohen called the results “truly remarkable.”

“The analysis showed that as the mean number of tornadoes per outbreak rose, the variance around that mean rose four times faster. While the mean rose by a factor of 1.5 over the last 60 years, the variance rose by a factor of more than 5, or 1.5 x 1.5 x 1.5 x 1.5. This kind of relationship between variance and mean has a name in statistics: Taylor’s power law of scaling.

“We have seen [Taylor’s power law] in the distribution of stars in a galaxy, in death rates in countries, the population density of Norway, securities trading, oak trees in New York and many other cases,” Cohen says. “But this is the first time anyone has shown that it applies to scaling in tornado statistics.”

The exponent in Taylor’s law number—in this case, the exponent was 4– can be a measure of clustering, Cohen says. If there’s no clustering—if tornadoes occur just randomly–then Taylor’s law has an exponent of 1. If there’s clustering, then it’s greater than 1. “In most ecological applications, the Taylor exponent seldom exceeds 2. To have an exponent of 4 is truly exceptional. It means that when it rains, it really, really, really pours,” says Cohen.

(a) Number of tornado outbreaks per year. The rate of decline is not statistically significantly significant. (b and c) Annual mean number of tornadoes per outbreak and annual variance of the number of tornadoes per outbreak. Vertical axes are on a logarithmic scale, so the rate of increase in the annual mean is expressed as a percentage per year. (d) The annual mean number of tornadoes per outbreak versus the annual variance of the number of tornadoes per outbreak. Both axes are on a logarithmic scale. The solid line represents Taylor’s power law of fluctuation scaling. The two-digit number next to the plotted symbol gives the calendar year in the second half of the twentieth century or first half of the twenty-first century.

Extreme outbreaks have become more frequent because of two factors, Tippett said. First, the average number of tornadoes per outbreak has gone up; second, the rapidly increasing variance, or variability, means that numbers well above the average are more common.

Tippett was concerned that the findings could be artifacts of tornado observational data, which are based on eyewitness accounts and known to have problems with consistency and accuracy. To get around this, he re-ran his calculations after substituting the historical tornado data with environmental proxies for tornado occurrence and number of tornadoes per occurrence. These provide an independent—albeit imperfect—measure of tornado activity. The results were very nearly identical.

As for whether the climate is the cause, Tippett said, “The scientific community has thought a great deal about how the frequency of future weather and climate extremes may change in a warming climate. The simplest change to understand is a shift of the entire distribution, but increases in variability, or variance, are possible as well. With tornadoes, we’re seeing both of those mechanisms at play.”

Insurance and reinsurance companies and the catastrophe-modeling community can use this information.

“This paper helps begin to answer one of the fundamental questions to which I’d like to know the answer,” says Harold Brooks of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Severe Storms Laboratory. “If tornadoes are being concentrated into more big days, what effect does that have on their impacts compared to when they were less concentrated?“

“The findings are very relevant to insurance companies that are writing business in multiple states, especially in the Midwest,” says Prasad Gunturi, senior vice president at Willis Re, who leads the company’s catastrophe model research and evaluation activities for North America. “Overall growth in the economy means more buildings and infrastructure are in harm’s way,” said Gunturi. “When you combine this with increased exposure because outbreaks are generating more tornadoes across state lines and the outbreaks could be getting more extreme in general, it means more loss to the economy and to insurance portfolios.”

Insurance companies have contracts with reinsurance companies, and these contracts look similar to the ones people have for home and car insurance, though for much higher amounts.  The new results will help companies ensure that contracts are written at an appropriate level and that the risks posed by outbreaks are better characterized, said Brooks.

“One big question raised by this work, and one we’re working on now, is what in the climate system has been behind this increase in outbreak severity,” said Tippett.

This research was also supported by grants from Columbia’s Research Initiatives for Science and Engineering, the Office of Naval Research, NOAA’s Climate Program Office  and the U.S. National Science Foundation.

How are Zika virus and the climate related?

We know that virtually all vector-borne diseases have a climate dimension. Temperature drives the rate at which vectors and pathogens [things that cause disease, such as viruses and bacteria] develop, while rainfall often supports the creation of sites for the vectors to breed.

A lot of work has already been done on the relationship between dengue and climate, looking at rainfall and temperature and at how El Niño and La Niña have an impact. The vectors for dengue are Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus mosquitoes. This is a starting point for Zika, as it shares the same vectors. A. aegypti is an urban mosquito that breeds in containers where fresh water might collect, from flower vases to water drums to broken coconut shells. It is found only in tropical and subtropical regions. A. albopictus has the potential for a slightly broader geographic range as its eggs can survive long periods in a dormant state.

How easy is it to predict what and where the next big epidemic will be?

The recent expansion of the A. aegypti and A. albopictus mosquitoes is very much associated with globalisation – things like the movement of shipping containers around the world, air travel, population movement, forest clearing and urbanisation.

We have to expect more of this type of emergence: new diseases that were historically isolated (and therefore didn’t have a big impact) which can spread very rapidly and have a huge impact on a large community. Zika is not the last. There’ll be others, but predicting exactly what, where and when is really difficult. Instead we need to prepare ourselves to be able to respond rapidly to a broad range of possible threats.

How can climate scientists help the world prepare better for future epidemics?

Climate scientists have to be interested in how their science can benefit society in a practical way. Then they have to really look at the timeframe of decisions. Climate variability, which includes the impact of El Niño and La Niña, has a significant short-term impact on global temperatures and regional rainfall. Longer-term trends in climate (including those associated with human-induced changes) interact with this variability, meaning that, while likely changes in 50 or 100 years’ time are well-understood for some regions, making predictions for the next 5 to 15 years is very difficult. And this is the timeframe often requested by decision makers.

People are often asked questions around climate change, but if you are down in the weeds as a malaria, dengue or Zika control person, you are really largely dealing in the timeframe of climate variability. What is happening now? What happened last year? What might happen next year in this particular locality? However, policy makers still need to be aware of what the longer-term trends might be so they can build the institutional capacity needed to respond effectively down the line. You need climate scientists who are able to support decision makers across a range of time and spatial scales.

What’s the one change you’d make in the world to make us better prepared for epidemics?

I would incorporate some fairly straightforward information on climate and environmental disease drivers in all epidemiological training that happens around the world. Outbreak response people can work with partners in countries to get the best data, but if the health sector doesn’t understand the issues, particularly around climate variability and change, then it’s very hard for them to use the information effectively.

Read the full text and a Spanish translation of the interview here on the Wellcome Trust blog.

This week, the Pan American Health Organization is hosting a meeting in Washington, DC, to consult with experts about the Zika virus. Attendees will discuss the implications of the virus on public health as well as priorities for Zika research going forward.

Countries and territories with autochthonous of Zika virus circulation 2007-2016. Source: PAHO.

The influence of climate and weather on the virus is an important component. Thomson, a senior research scientist at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society, will be among those attending. IRI is a PAHO/WHO Collaborating Centre on Early Warning Systems for Malaria and other Climate Sensitive Diseases, which Thomson directs. Also attending the meeting is Ángel Muñoz, a recent Columbia University doctoral graduate and adjunct researcher at IRI, who is currently a postdoctoral research associate at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory.

Thomson and Muñoz will be lending their expertise based on previous research and application of that research, including that of dengue fever, which is transmitted via the same mosquito as Zika.

Hurricane Patricia. NOAA

In studying climate and tropical cyclones, researchers find a weather phenomenon at play

In October 2015, Hurricane Patricia became the strongest storm ever measured by the National Hurricane Center. But what really worried authorities was the speed at which Patricia amassed her strength. The storm’s sustained winds increased from 85 miles per hour to 200 in 24 hours– the greatest 24-hour rise in intensity ever observed in the satellite era.

While forecast models have made huge strides in the last 30 years predicting the tracks of hurricanes, they still have a difficult time predicting the rate at which a storm will intensify and become dangerous. Luckily, Patricia landed in a sparsely populated area of Mexico and quickly lost strength, sparing communities there much of the catastrophic destruction many had anticipated.

Now, a new study in the journal Nature Communications shows that Patricia is the rule rather than the exception—the most intense storms are those that undergo rapid intensification during their lifetime. Moreover, the study shows that tropical cyclones which undergo rapid intensification are responsible for extreme storms being more frequent than expected.

The results may have implications for climate model projections. They may add a new dimension of uncertainty to climate models that aren’t able to distinguish between storms that might intensify rapidly and those that don’t, according to the team of researchers at Columbia University who conducted the analysis.

Using data from 3,000 tropical cyclones that tore through the world’s ocean basins between 1981 and 2012, the researchers first organized the storms according to their lifetime maximum intensity—the highest category strength they achieved. In doing so, they noticed something odd.

“Normally, when we group natural events like this, we expect to see a distribution where more extreme events are less frequent,” says lead author Chia-Ying Lee, a postdoctoral research scientist at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society. “The extreme events should occur less frequently than everything else.”

Earthquakes, tornadoes, and most other types of natural hazards behave this way. But instead of a ‘normal’ distribution, one with a single peak, the tropical cyclone data showed two. On the right side of the distribution, where the frequency of the more intense storms should slide lower and lower, it rises first before dipping back down again.

These charts show the distributions of lifetime maximum intensity, in knots, for tropical cyclones in major ocean basins from 1981–2012. Black lines show the distributions for all storms that occurred in a particular basin. Red lines show the distributions for only those storms that underwent rapid intensification, and blue lines for those that did not. It is clear from these plots that tropical cyclones that quickly grew in strength are responsible for extreme storms being more frequent than storms of moderate intensity. This makes tropical cyclones stand in stark contrast to most other kinds of extreme events, for which stronger events are uniformly rarer than weaker ones.

“While other tropical-cyclone researchers have previously pointed out this odd behavior, no one has really tried to explain it in a satisfying way,” says coauthor Adam Sobel, the director of Columbia’s Initiative on Extreme Weather & Climate and a professor at Columbia Engineering.

“When we saw the second bump in the distribution, we wondered if  it could have anything to do with rapid intensification, which is such a well-known issue and comes up often in tropical-cyclone research,” says Suzana Camargo, of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

Here’s how they showed the link to rapid intensification. The researchers split the tropical cyclones into two groups: those that rapidly intensified and those that didn’t. Sure enough, when they plotted the data the results clearly showed that the double-humped, or bimodal, distribution was really a combination of two normal ones, and that the group of rapid intensifiers was actually responsible for that extra bump.

“It’s provocative,” says Michael Tippett, from Columbia Engineering. “We have this very important climatological feature—the frequency of the most intense storms—which turns out to depend on rapid intensification, a short term weather-scale phenomenon that is really hard to forecast.”

Exploring this relationship is going to be important, says Lee. The vast majority of intense storms, like hurricanes Patricia and Katrina, Typhoon Haiyan and Cyclone Nargis, are rapid intensifiers and ones we worry about most from a risk perspective, she says.

Why this matters for climate models. Most models project that climate change will lead to a small annual increase in the frequency of intense storms along with a small reduction in the total number of storms worldwide. But modeling storm frequency on a climate scale is extremely difficult, so the projections already have some uncertainty built in. The new study may add some more, says Tippett.

“Our paper shows that the part of the tropical cyclone  distribution which corresponds to the most intense storms, the ones that typically cause most of damage, is connected to physical processes that occur on a weather timescale. If these processes aren’t resolved in the climate simulations, it may imply a broader problem we need to address,” he says.

Sobel cautions that the study doesn’t make any conclusions about the usefulness of model projections. “I don’t think we’ve proven anything about how well climate models can simulate tropical cyclones, good or bad, right or wrong or indifferent, but it certainly raises a bunch of questions we want to think about now,” he says.

Simulating tropical cyclone intensity well requires a lot of computational power, says Camargo. Even state-of-the-art weather forecasting models that have super high resolution struggle with rapid intensification. Climate models have much coarser resolution. “Very few can simulate the category 4 and 5 storms,” she says. “Most climate models just don’t have the capability to do that yet.”

Some of those that can are run by the NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory.

“The observational results in this paper are coming at a great time because our technology is taking us to the point where we can simulate some of these very intense storms in our models, at least in a climate context,” says GFDL’s Gabriel Vecchi, who authored a recent paper on one such model.

“Now I think a big question will be what controls the statistics of rapid intensification. We have theories as to what determines the strongest that a storm could be—the storm’s speed limit—but it may that speed limit isn’t really the most important thing to think about when storms are strong, but rather how fast they accelerate,” Vecchi says.

Answers from insurance research

La version en español esta disponible aquí. 

During the first of the two growing seasons of 2015, grain farmers in El Paraíso, Honduras faced one of the worst droughts in history, with losses ranging from 60 to 100% of the maize planted.

As part of an engagement with CGIAR’s Research Programme on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security, the International Research Institute for Climate and Society and local Honduran partners have been working to identify and implement farmer-driven, development-focused climate risk solutions. Through interactive exercises, grain farmers have worked together with the team of experts since 2014 to design and tailor index insurance in the pilot region of El Paraíso, Honduras.

Scientists from IRI and Zamorano University led interactive, experimental activities in May 2015, with the purpose of understanding farmers’ preferences about insurance. The exercises also serve as a test for the index designed with the farmers in 2014. The index determines whether farmers will receive a payout from the insurance product based on CHIRPS satellite precipitation estimates for two distinct growing seasons: primera (mid-May to mid-June and late-July to mid-August) and postrera (mid-September to mid-October).

Photo: Elisabeth Gawthrop/IRI

In November 2015, as part of the final round of the experimental activities in the region, farmers were given payouts corresponding to how they chose to allocate income between savings and insurance in the May 2015 activities. Whether a farmer receives an insurance payout – and if so, how much he or she receives – is based on the climate conditions of this year’s seasons.

Most of the participating farmers in El Paraíso received insurance payouts for the primera season, but even within this small region drought intensity varied enough for differences in payouts. Of the 10 communities, 3 received a full payout, 4 received moderate payouts and three did not receive any payouts. However, those three also experienced losses in the first season’s production of maize.

Therefore, this event helped stakeholders better understand how drought risks can impact farmers at different times throughout the season. From these activities we were able to refine the index in a way that is capturing most, if not all, of the drought risk that remains after implementing climate risk management tools.

Donate today to help us continue these activities.

• More on how we work with farmers around the world to design insurance, and why it works, in this video.
• How do satellites help rural farmers? Learn more about remote sensing and index insurance.

Climate resilience: it’s the ability for communities to recover from the impacts of climate events. It’s the difference between weather being manageable…or a catastrophe. But for many parts of the world, where livelihoods depend so much on the climate, critical weather and climate information is unavailable or unusable.

The International Research Institute for Climate and Society and its partners are working in some of the most impoverished areas of the world to increase food security, decrease vulnerability to disasters and predict outbreaks of diseases such as malaria. We learn from the past, by bringing historical climate data online, we monitor present conditions, and look to the future, through forecasts and models. We’re giving experts the access and training they need to be able to use this information and develop different climate services, such as:

• Early warning systems for disasters, that save both lives and recovery costs.

• Rainfall predictions, that help farmers better plan their crops and increase food security.

• Historical data that allows companies to issue more reliable and affordable weather-based crop insurance.

• Surveillance systems that use satellite information to help malaria control managers anticipate and control epidemics.

• Seasonal climate forecasts to help communities better understand and manage water systems, pushed to their limits by rapid urbanization and food production demands.

Every situation is unique. Scientists, development partners and policy makers like elected officials, must work together to generate the right data and information that meets the needs of farmers, disaster managers, city planners and other users. They must also solicit and incorporate user feedback. This iterative collaboration ultimately helps technical experts refine tools to deliver better climate services.

When we build up capacity to use climate information and help implement decision support systems, decision makers can act, knowing that the climate information they use is based on sound science.

If the world learns to cope with the climate of today, we’ll be better informed, better prepared and more resilient for the climate of the future.

The IRI was established as a cooperative agreement between NOAA’s Climate Program Office and Columbia University. It is part of The Earth Institute, Columbia University, and is located at the Lamont Campus.

One of the strongest El Niño events ever measured is now underway. It is already causing droughts and flooding in different parts of the world, and affecting food production, water availability, public health and energy supplies in a number of countries.

The last major El Niño occurred in 1997/98, wreaking widespread havoc and erasing years of development gains. The world is much better prepared for this year’s El Niño, but the socio-economic shocks will still be profound.

In an effort to increase scientific understanding of this event and help boost resilience, a high-level El Niño conference will take place on Nov. 17 and 18, 2015. It is jointly organized by the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI), the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the U.S. Agency for International Development and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The conference will:

• Provide an overview of the 2015 El Niño and its potential impacts
• Explore the connection between the current El Niño and global change
• Foster dialogue between climate scientists and development practitioners to strengthen action for climate resilience and sustainable development
• Examine the progress, and lessons learned, over the last 20 years in international, national and regional climate services, with a focus on El Niño

Confirmed speakers include Jerry Lengoasa, WMO Deputy Secretary-General, Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute, Colombia University, and Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University. Senior experts from meteorological services and research institutes around the world will present national case studies about the current El Niño, and representatives of development agencies, academia and the private sector will lead discussions on the impacts on health, water, disaster management, energy and agriculture and food security.

They will discuss issues such as lessons learned since the 1997/98 event, connecting research to operational communities, and defining adequate and appropriate El Niño response strategies and public messaging. They will also help define future priorities for enhancing climate resilience and sustainable development.

The conference takes place at Columbia University’s Lamont campus in Palisades, N.Y.

The event is invitation-only, but will be live streamed, and Twitter users can get updates in real time by following the #ElNinoConf hashtag.

Details and a full agenda are available at http://iri.columbia.edu/elnino2015conference/

Space is extremely limited. Journalists interested in attending should contact Francesco Fiondella (francesco@iri.columbia.edu).

This post contains excerpts from a story published by IRI on Medium.com. View the full story, including data and additional graphics, here. 

Written by staff from the International Research Institute for Climate and Society and NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Media can contact Francesco Fiondella.

Much of western Indonesia is currently burning, producing enormous amounts of smoke-haze, and disrupting large parts of society in the region. Scientists are suggesting that this is not ‘normal’ seasonal burning and could end up ranking among the worst on record. This is one of the first severe impacts of the strong El Niño that has been developing over the last year.

September 24 image from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite. Thick gray smoke from fires hovers over the islands of Sumatra (left) and Kalimantan (right) and has triggered air quality alerts and health warnings in Indonesia and neighboring countries. Visibility has plummeted.

There will likely be little relief through October and possibly into early November, according the most recent seasonal climate forecasts issued by IRI. These forecasts show a very strong chance that most of western Indonesia will see below-normal rainfall for the remainder of the dry season. Allan Spessa of the Open University in the United Kingdom has shown that these types of forecasts can, on average, be reliable predictors of severe fire years.

“Critically, the strong El Niño translates into a delayed onset of the rainy season,” says Andrew Robertson, who heads IRI’s Climate Group.

“Our research shows that the severity of the fire season is related to the onset date of the rainy season. If it’s delayed, fires will burn longer and intensify the environmental and social impacts.” – Andrew Robertson.

The smoke contributes to enhanced concentrations of multiple pollutants, most notably particulate matter and ozone, which have a significant negative impact on air quality and people’s health. Miriam Marlier, of the University of California in Los Angeles and Columbia University, has studied how these fires affect regional mortality. “These fires not only impact Indonesia but also conditions nearby in Singapore and Malaysia.”

According to her previous work, about 11,000 adults in the region died prematurely in 1997 due to cardiovascular diseases related to poor air quality attributable to fires.

This post is an excerpt from a story published by IRI on Medium.com, where we are updating the post each month with the latest forecasts. View the full story and forecast maps here. 

October 1st marks the first day of the new “Water Year” for California, which is like the state’s fiscal year for water management. Most of the rain during the water year falls in the first half. Water stored in those six months is used during the second half, when much less rain falls. California is in the midst of what scientists say is the driest spell in 500 years. The 2015 water year, which just ended, was the fourth consecutive dry year, with 2014 being the 3rd-driest year since records began 120 years ago. Moreover, the 2015 water year was the warmest on record in California, beating the previous record in 1995–96 by almost a degree and drying out soil and increasing evaporation of the water that did make it to reservoirs.

…

So, what does the current forecast reveal about California’s wet season? While there are many ways to statistically skin the climate cat, we’re going to use the IRI Data Library to show average and forecasted seasonal precipitation over California as the water year progresses. We’ll also show the seasonal observations from the last two years, for comparison. And, we’ll update with this year’s observed precipitation, as those numbers come in.

The top left image shows the forecast for the season (in this case, Jan-Mar 2016) relative to the season’s average. Much of the state has at least a 60% chance of getting more precipitation than average, with the southern quarter of the state having at least an 80% chance. The top right image shows the average precipitation (rain and snow) for the January to March season based on 1981–2010 data. The numbers overall are higher than those from October to December, but you can still see the trend of more precipitation in the northern part of the state. These are some of the most critical months for California to receive precipitation that can be used in the rest of the year. The two bottom images show the precipitation from the last two January to March seasons. 2015 was drier than 2014, but both were below average, as indicated by lighter shades than those seen in the map of average precipitation.

A woman weights her child with malnutrition in a clinic in North Darfur. Photo: Albert González Farran, UNAMID

According to the Global Nutrition Report released this week, there are actions leaders of every country should be taking to end malnutrition in all its forms.

Among the report’s key findings: One in three members of the global population is malnourished, and the problem exists in every country on the planet—yet the strategies available to resolve it are not being implemented due to lack of money, skills, or political pressure. Another finding is that climate change affects nutrition by influencing people’s food security, disease levels and patterns, water and sanitation environments, and choices about how to allocate time to their livelihoods and to caregiving.

Seasonal changes can have big impacts on food availability and disease patterns, and these in turn dramatically affect children’s survival and development. This means, for example, that babies born in India in November and December are taller on average at 3 years of age than those born in April through September.

“We wanted to highlight that it isn’t just about how climate will have an impact on nutrition in 50 years time, but on the way climate impacts nutrition today,” said Madeleine Thomson, from the International Research Institute for Climate and Society, part of Columbia University’s Earth Institute. Thomson was the lead author of the report’s chapter on the role of climate in global nutrition. “For the poorest communities, seasonal fluctuations in food access and drivers of infectious disease remain a reality and have a profound effect on nutrition,” said Thomson. “This vulnerability to weather cycles and climate phenomena such as El Niño is a stark indicator of the vulnerability of certain populations to the weather extremes that climate change could unleash.”

Download the report

“When one in three of us is held back, we as families, communities and nations cannot move forward,” said Lawrence Haddad, lead author of the study and senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute. “This not only jeopardizes the lives of those who are malnourished, but also affects the larger framework for economic growth and sustainable development. Simply put: People cannot get anywhere near their full potential without first overcoming malnutrition.”

The report will be officially launched on Sept. 22 at an event in New York. More information can be found here: http://globalnutritionreport.org/.

The International Research Institute for Climate and Society is also a Collaborating Centre on Early Warning Systems for Malaria and other Climate-Sensitive Diseases for the Pan American Health Organization/World Health Organization. Learn more about its research on climate and public health.

The Sahel is a semiarid region south of the Sahara Desert that stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea. In the 1970s and 1980s it was hit by a series of persistent droughts and recurring famines that killed more than 100,000 people. The region remains one of the poorest and least developed in the world. It’s also one of the most vulnerable to climate change and variability.

Since the mid-1980s, average rainfall in the Sahel has partially recovered, possibly contributing in places to a ‘re-greening’ of vegetation so widespread that it can be observed from space.

Recently, a paper published in Nature Climate Change argued that climate change from rising greenhouse-gas emissions can explain most of the increase. The paper made global headlines like this one.

IRI climate scientist Alessandra Giannini has serious reservations about the study. “The direct and indirect effects of greenhouse gases cannot be easily separated,” she writes in a response piece in the August print issue of Nature Climate Change.

Giannini argues that the study and its results were based on climate model simulations from one model–a model that is not capable of reproducing the well established historical connection between Sahel rainfall and sea-surface temperatures. This is a significant flaw, says Giannini, who conclusively demonstrated this connection in 2003, and has been trying to unravel the mysteries of a Sahelian climate since.

In 2013, she published a paper which showed that by simply looking at what North Atlantic sea-surface temperatures were doing relative to those in the rest of the world’s tropical oceans, the climatic ups and downs of the Sahel during the 20th century could not only be explained, but also tied to both the observed trend of increasing rainfall in the region and to projections of wetter conditions. “That work marked the first unified, sensible explanation of the past, present and future climate of the Sahel,” Giannini says.

Other model-based studies—some more than a decade old—had already shown how the Sahel could become wetter based on the increase in the surface temperature of Africa north of the equator in response to the increase in atmospheric carbon-dioxide concentrations alone. “But we know that the direct influence of CO2 is not the only influence on Sahel rainfall in the real world,” Giannini says. “The influence of CO2 mediated by warming of the global oceans, and the regional response of sea surface temperatures to aerosols also play a role.”

Even the region’s current wet phase is not without its concerns. “Rainfall in the Sahel is anything but consistent nowadays,” Giannini says. “During the wet 1950s and 1960s, the higher rainfall came from more frequent rain events. Today, there’s greater variability from one year to the next and from one season to the next, and the increase is better explained by increased intensity of rain events, rather than by more rainy days,” she says.

The more intense downpours have led to recurrent flooding in recent years, causing loss of life, crops and infrastructure, she says.

On the road from Hewanorra airport in southern St. Lucia to the capital in the north of the island, a bridge is missing, washed out during heavy rains on Christmas Eve, 2013. A sharp curve steers vehicles around the bridge-less gulch. The taxi driver tells us the reroute on this vital road was completed in a matter of days. A year and a half later, the bridge is still a work in progress. It’s June, so the wet season is only just beginning, and the narrow, deep trench is bone dry. I try to imagine the amount of water that must have gushed through here. Where did it come from?

That’s a question for climate scientists and meteorologists, and typical of one that researchers study at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI). It’s also a question that doesn’t go far enough.

As knowledge of our climate improves, the process of turning that knowledge into information usable for decision making needs attention.

Seasonal scale prediction — e.g. the likelihood of above-normal rainfall in an upcoming season — offers some of the most skillful climate forecasts scientists can produce. Areas of the tropics are especially favorable for seasonal prediction because they’re influenced most directly by the source of climate variability scientists know the most about: El Niño Southern Oscillation.

The problem is that although climate scientists may give a probability for increased risk, this information is often in a variable that a decision maker can’t readily use. Knowing why a climate event happened, being able to predict a climate extreme, these are increasingly-available types of information.

But if a forecast isn’t accessible to the people who can do something with it, it is not useful information.

This is what brings me and my IRI colleagues to St. Lucia. For the last three years we’ve partnered with regional institutions to generate relevant climate knowledge for improving climate risk management in the region, and in particular to assist water managers to incorporate this knowledge into their decisions and plans. The work has been funded via a grant from Higher Education for Development and the US Agency for International Development.

We are here for the Caribbean Climate Outlook Forum (CariCOF) — a regional meeting in which climate scientists present a forecast to decision makers — as well as a workshop for water managers to explore the potential for using climate information in the water sector. Most of the videos throughout this piece are interviews from those organizing and participating in the workshop.

Working in the field of climate adaptation sometimes requires adapting to your own projects. Staying flexible and nimble allows for changes in the approach to the project that are more tailored to local needs. Consistent obstacles in international development include making “improvements” that are not sustainable and providing information that is not usable. In its projects, IRI seeks to work as a catalyst, lending expertise to help develop information products and systems that decision makers can — and want to — use after the project ends.

The key in achieving this is to listen to regional partners about their needs and constraints, and then identify together the key gaps that climate expertise could help fill. Our regional partners in this project were the Centre for Resource Management and Environmental Studies (CERMES) at the University of West Indies (UWI) and the Caribbean Institute for Meteorology and Hydrology (CIMH), a regional training and research organization.

Grants such as the one funding this project typically focus on developing a new formal university course. “But we quickly received a reality check,” said Walter Baethgen, the principal investigator on the project and IRI senior research scientist. “We realized there would not be enough time to pilot a course and finish the accredidation process at the University of the West Indies during the grant’s time period.”

To find out what the project team did instead, hop on over to our page on Medium.

As climate change creates agricultural instability around the world, Columbia scientists are testing a seasonal forecasting system in Uruguay to give farmers a fighting chance.

Daniel Lalinde on his farm in the Maldonado Department of southeastern Uruguay. Francesco Fiondella

Daniel Lalinde doesn’t need a climate scientist to tell him that the sun shines hotter and brighter than it used to. At El Coraje, his farm in Uruguay’s Garzón hills, he can feel the difference on his face and arms, which burn more easily now. To protect himself, he no longer works his fields between eleven in the morning and four in the afternoon. His cattle are suffering, too: they cling to the edges of their pasture, seeking shelter beneath the tree canopy.

“The summer is very hot, and the winter isn’t as cold. It isn’t even winter,” says Lalinde, who works alongside his wife, Margarita, and a few part­-time farm hands, growing vegetables and raising cattle for beef. “We see extremes in rainfall, too. Either there’s too much rain or not enough. There is no middle ground.”

The Lalindes dug a small reservoir on their land so that the livestock have enough to drink during dry spells. They diligently follow the weather reports on local television, looking for hints about how much water they ought to preserve on any given day. The daily reports are useful, but the Lalindes say that longer­-term forecasts would serve them better. If they knew their pastures were likely to wilt in the summer, for instance, they might buy fewer calves in the spring, to ensure that the cattle they do raise get enough grass to eat. Even minor miscalculations can prove costly: packaged feed is expensive and will eat into their profit margin.

Farmers across the globe must grapple with extreme weather fluctuations, but in Uruguay, a country where more than 80 percent of the land is devoted to raising animals and growing crops, these challenges are felt acutely. This is why the Uruguayan government is working with Columbia’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) to create one of the most sophisticated agricultural information networks in the world. The country’s new National Agricultural Information System, funded by a $10 million loan from the World Bank, and developed in partnership with scientists at Uruguay’s National Agricultural Research Institute and the Ministry of Livestock, Agriculture, and Fisheries, will help farmers prepare for each new season by generating remarkably precise climate forecasts that predict temperature and rainfall patterns up to three months in advance. The forecasts will be unusual in their geographic specificity, providing different climate scenarios for about forty distinct regions in this country the size of Florida. The climate data will then be translated into terms useful to farmers — for example, by visiting a website and clicking a map to indicate where he lives, a cattle farmer will learn how much rain is likely to fall on his land over the summer, whether it will be spread out evenly over the season or arrive in a few torrential bursts, and how this could affect groundwater levels and the lushness of his fields.

“If the fields are going to dry out, maybe he’ll invest in new irrigation equipment instead of buying lots of new calves,” says Walter Baethgen, a Columbia agronomist and environmental scientist who is overseeing the ten IRI researchers who are working on the project.

And if heavy storms are expected on Uruguay’s western coastal lowlands, where flooding has often caused corn, sorghum, and soybean seedlings to wash away?

“Maybe they’ll wait out the rains before they plant,” Baethgen says. “The idea is to provide farmers with cutting-­edge climate data in terms that anybody can understand.”

The new seasonal forecasting service could be transformative for Uruguay, a small democracy of three and a half million people wedged between Brazil and Argentina on the southeast coast of South America. Farm products represent more than two­-thirds of Uruguay’s exports, but in recent years the changing climate has led to poor harvests. While the country has staved off widespread hunger, thanks to ample grain reserves and a modern food-distribution system, it has suffered financially. The last major drought, which occurred in 2008 and lasted almost a year, affected not only farmers but also truckers, storage­-facility owners, grain-­processing-­plant employees, dockworkers, shippers, exporters, commodities investors, and financiers.

“A nation whose economy is based upon agriculture will see its fortunes rise and fall on the shift in the winds,” says Baethgen, a native Uruguayan who came to the United States in 1984 to earn a PhD in crop and soil environmental sciences at Virginia Tech. “That’s the way it’s always been.”

Walter Baethgen in Las Brujas, Uruguay, where he has established a field office for Columbia’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society. Francesco Fiondella

Baethgen, sixty, has devoted much of his career to helping South American farmers survive these shifts. He began this work in the early 1990s, when, as a researcher for the International Fertilizer Development Center, an Alabama-­based nonprofit, he conducted some of the first studies showing how annual yields of wheat, barley, rice, corn, soybeans, cotton, coffee, and many other crops in South America were likely to be affected by climate change. His research, which employed a novel combination of computer-­based climate­ and crop­-simulation models, carried dire warnings: food production on this continent was likely to drop off and to become less consistent from season to season.

“It wasn’t obvious to people at the time that global warming was going to be bad for agriculture in this part of the world,” says Baethgen. “A warmer atmosphere was certainly going to increase precipitation overall, which you’d think would be good for crops. But the science showed that fluctuations in the weather were going to hurt most farmers.”

Baethgen soon published papers describing how farmers could minimize crop losses in extreme weather by adjusting their soil chemistry, planting schedules, and irrigation strategies. He became frustrated, though, at how difficult it was to change behavior. Part of the problem, he found, was that farmers had trouble drawing clear lessons from seasonal climate forecasts. This was understandable because the forecasts available at the time were vague instruments, offering only predictions of whether the average temperature and total rainfall for an entire season would be low, normal, or high. Baethgen also realized that many of his fellow scientists did not effectively communicate their recommendations to farmers: too often they would advise farmers to make certain tilling, planting, or fertilizing decisions based upon a single climate variable. The farmers tended to shrug them off.

Sheepherding in southern Uruguay. Francesco Fiondella

“Farmers make decisions based on all sorts of factors — the weather, obviously, but also market prices, production costs, fertilization requirements, the risk of disease to crops,” he says. “They think about these factors holistically, and often quite intuitively. If you tell a farmer there’s a 40 percent chance of getting more rain than normal, and a 20 percent chance of getting less rain than normal, how is he supposed to use that information? He’s trying to decide whether to plant soybeans or maize. You need to give him information in a way that helps him answer that question.”

In 2004, Baethgen was recruited by Columbia to be part of the IRI, an interdisciplinary unit within Columbia’s Earth Institute whose mission is to help people adapt to climate change, especially in developing countries. The IRI’s forty-­member staff includes climate scientists, as well as researchers who, like Baethgen, specialize in making climate data accessible and relevant to people working in agriculture, public health, urban planning, economic development, ecology, and other sectors.

“The IRI is the only place I know of that has made a science of turning raw climate data into actionable knowledge,” says Baethgen. “It’s a place where a Columbia professor can tell a public­-health official in Bangladesh if floods are likely to cause cholera epidemics anytime soon. Or, in my case, whether farmers ought to be worried about their cattle going thirsty.”

Since coming to Columbia, Baethgen has contributed to IRI agriculture projects throughout the world. He has worked on efforts to discover which types of corn are most likely to withstand rising temperatures in West Africa, how rice crops will react to new rain patterns in India, and what potato varieties might survive drought conditions in Tanzania. Baethgen’s research in Uruguay, meanwhile, has benefited from the cross­-disciplinary contributions of IRI climate modelers, economists, management experts, psychologists, sociologists, ecologists, and financial analysts. His access to the University’s intellectual resources, he says, has enabled him to undertake increasingly ambitious projects in his home country, many of them supporting the National Agricultural Research Institute (known by its Spanish abbreviation, INIA), a research and development agency with close ties to Uruguay’s agriculture ministry. In 2007, for instance, Baethgen helped to organize a collaboration between INIA and IRI scientists to create a system for monitoring soil­-moisture levels across Uruguay; electromagnetic images of the soil captured by NASA satellites are now analyzed regularly by Uruguayan scientists to see if drought conditions are imminent. “The country’s agriculture officials appreciate this, because it can validate their request for relief funds if, say, they want to provide emergency credit lines to farmers for purchasing water,” says Baethgen, who in 2010 received the Morosoli de Oro, a prestigious award given to Uruguayan citizens for service to their country. “A lot of trust has been built up between Uruguay and Columbia over the years.”

The relationship deepened last year when INIA allotted the IRI $1.6 million to lead the development of its new seasonal forecasting and information service. Baethgen quickly assembled a group of Columbia scientists with the expertise to build the necessary climate­-modeling technologies and to present the results in a way that was useful to farmers. He set up an IRI office in Las Brujas, a small town thirty miles outside of Montevideo, to accommodate the large numbers of Columbia faculty, researchers, and students who would be traveling to Uruguay to work on the project.

“We now have a steady stream of Columbia scientists coming here,” says Baethgen, whose role on the project is to coordinate the collaborations between Uruguayan scientists and their Columbia partners. “Eventually, the new IRI office will be promoting the involvement of Columbians on similar climate­-risk­-management efforts throughout the Southern Cone region of South America.”

The first Columbians to work on the project were climate scientists led by Paula Gonzalez, an associate research scientist at IRI who specializes in operating computer models that generate seasonal forecasts. These computer models, Gonzalez explains, are similar to those used to create the daily weather forecasts delivered by TV meteorologists. The main difference is that whereas meteorological forecasts are based solely on analyses of the planet’s current atmospheric conditions, seasonal forecasts also incorporate predictions of how sea-­surface temperatures are likely to change over the next three to six months. Scientists have learned to anticipate sea­-surface temperatures this far in advance, Gonzalez says, by observing the atmospheric cycles known as El Niño and La Niña, which cause predictable changes in water temperature across the eastern tropical Pacific and, in turn, affect weather patterns around the earth.

According to Gonzalez, the computer models that she and her colleagues are developing for Uruguay’s National Agricultural Information System (SNIA) will produce seasonal forecasts that will in some ways be the most sophisticated in South America. In addition to being geographically precise — the Lalindes, for instance, will get different forecasts than will cattle farmers in neighboring districts — the forecasts will describe the future climatic conditions of each region in unusual detail. Rather than simply predicting average temperature or rainfall accumulation for the next season, for example, they will indicate whether intense heat waves or dry spells may be coming.

“This is what climate scientists call ‘weather-­within-­climate’ pre­dictions,” says Gonzalez, whose team is also training Uruguayan technicians to operate the models. “We can’t possibly say what the weather will look like on any given day, or any given week, months in advance. But we can get an idea of how wet and dry periods are likely to be distributed, based on the patterns of high-­ and low-­pressure systems that are appearing in our simulations.”

A separate group of IRI researchers led by Catherine Vaughan ’09GSAS, an environmental scientist who studies how people make decisions related to climate change, was recruited by Baethgen to develop the Web portal that farmers will use to access SNIA’s climate forecasts. This portal is the most distinct aspect of SNIA’s service, according to Vaughan; never before, she says, have seasonal climate forecasts been made available to people in a form as user-friendly and practical. In addition to telling a farmer what climatic conditions to expect next season, the portal will also tell him how these conditions could affect the yields of his crops. It will do this, Vaughan says, by analyzing the farmer’s climate forecast against a database containing huge amounts of information on past harvests.

“If he tells the website where he lives, what type of soil is on his land, how he irrigates, and what fertilizers he uses, he’s going to get individualized feedback about what his crop yield could look like,” says Vaughan, who is working with Uruguayan social scientists and agriculture experts in creating the portal. “Maybe he’ll see what the predicted outcome is for corn, and then get a similar analysis for soybeans so he can compare the two.”

To Baethgen, a lot is riding on the project’s success. He believes that if large numbers of Uruguayan farmers use the forecasting service — and if this has a demonstrable impact on their productivity and livelihoods — other countries might implement similar forecasting systems. The approach could be effective, he says, anywhere people have Internet access and a well­-functioning agriculture ministry.

“The reason you don’t see systems like this operating in the US or Europe is because wealthy countries have government­-subsidized insurance programs that bail out farmers whenever there is a bad harvest,” says Baethgen. “As a result, there’s not much demand within the agricultural industry for something like this. Developing countries, on the other hand, can’t afford expensive farm subsidies. But they can afford to give their farmers the information they need to pursue efficient, climate-­smart agriculture.”

Andrew Robertson

Robertson co-chairs the S2S Prediction Project Steering Group, which is the first collaboration of the World Climate Research Program (WCRP) and the World Weather Research Program (WWRP), both of which are sponsored by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Elisabeth Gawthrop sat down with Robertson to learn more about the new data portal that the S2S Prediction Project launched in May.

Can you describe the collaboration between WCRP and WWRP? What brought these two groups together?

The tagline of the project is “bridging the gap between weather and climate.” Traditionally these communities have been pretty separate, but lately the World Weather Research Program has been moving toward longer timescales. It has recognized that in certain situations we can have forecast skill at timescales beyond two weeks. Meanwhile, at the World Climate Research Program, interest in daily weather extremes related to climate change has brought its focus down to the weather scale. So it’s an opportune time for these groups to come together.

Briefly, what is the S2S project? Who is involved? 

The main goal of S2S is to improve forecast skill and understanding of the sub-seasonal to seasonal timescale, and to promote its uptake by operational centers and use by the applications communities. We hope to improve prediction of high-impact weather events between 15 days and a season ahead, as well as the climate services that can use these forecasts . A primary motivation is to contribute to the Global Framework for Climate Services (GFCS) and help society adapt to climate change by being able to forecast floods, droughts, heat and cold waves, and tropical cyclones with better accuracy and longer lead times. There are a few coordinating scientists at WMO, but most of those involved are researchers from universities and scientists from operational forecasting centers around the world.

Does the project provide funding?

The project doesn’t directly fund people, but it connects scientists who are doing related work. There’s an expectation for the S2S project to link up with the various WMO working groups. It gives S2S a seat at the table when these groups get together, and thus prioritizes research at the S2S timescale.

For example, there’s WMO’s working group on numerical experimentation (WGNE); they’re the people who work on the models. The project should allow us to connect with this group to work on model improvement at the S2S timescale. There are various common challenges to forecasting, such as initialization of the models and the way the ensembles are generated. These technical elements may be particularly important for the S2S timescale.

If coordinating groups such as S2S didn’t exist, research would likely be much more piecemeal. They improve access to data, efficiency of work, prevent duplication and free up and enable funding sources.

Infographic: Forecast Skill

This graphic is a qualitative estimate of forecast skill based on the lead time of the forecast’s issuing. In addition to the differences in the sources of predictability noted in the graphic, there are also differences in the nature of the forecasts. Weather (short-term) forecasts tend to be deterministic (e.g. the temperature will be 85ºF today). As forecasts move into longer-range timescales, the methods and data that go into the forecasts change, and so the nature of the forecast also changes. A greater level of uncertainty must be factored in to sub-seasonal and seasonal forecasts. So, instead of predicting specific weather events, the longer-range forecasts typically predict climate using probabilities, like the chances of a season being hotter, cooler, drier or wetter than average. Based on feedback from climate information users, researchers are also developing forecasts that predict other parameters, like the frequency of rainfall events over a season. Therefore, saying that a sub-seasonal or seasonal forecast has good skill does not mean it can accurately predict daily weather weeks or months ahead of time, but rather that it does a good job of predicting if the climate over the course of the season is going to deviate much from average. Infographic adapted by Elisabeth Gawthrop from figure by Tony Barnston.

What is the database that’s just been released? 

One of the project’s main deliverables is a public database of sub-seasonal forecasts from about eleven forecasting centers around the world. It is located at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts and will soon be available from the Chinese Meteorological Agency too. This will be a huge resource to the climate and applications communities that will allow researchers to analyze the model output, assess when and where there is skill, better understand the underlying processes and model weaknesses, combine models together and eventually build applications that can help in decision support. We hope it will generate a lot of community interest. It’s a research database, so the forecasts become available 3 weeks behind real time, but re-forecasts over past years are also included which is very important for testing the forecasts. Four models are already available (see s2sprediction.net) with more to follow soon.

What other activities is the Steering Group organizing?

Besides coordinating the database, we have set up five sub-projects to stimulate community research on S2S topics including monsoons, the MJO, extreme events, teleconnections, forecast verification and African applications. Researchers can find details on the project web page and we encourage them to get involved. We are also organizing regular workshops. We just had one on S2S predictability of monsoons, held at the Korean Meteorological Agency, which hosts the S2S Project office. We are planning to develop some case studies of extreme events, through which we’ll focus on a high impact weather event and examine whether or not it had been predicted and how a forecast of that could have been used by decision makers. The extremes sub-project is looking at the cold wave in Europe in February 2013 to see how it was handled in the models. We’re also coordinating with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in real time to be aware of important events for the humanitarian aid community.

How do you anticipate working with end-users to apply the improved S2S forecasts?

S2S’s contribution to the Global Framework for Climate Services is primarily through the Research, Modeling and Prediction component of GFCS. We are working with WWRP’s Societal and Economic Research Applications (SERA) working group, with WMO’s Commissions, and with IRI to develop end-user applications. I think now that the data base is open to the public, this aspect of S2S will really take off and I’m excited about the possibilities.

Rebuilding efforts following a major flood in December 2013 that caused significant damage to the island nation of St. Lucia, including washed out bridges like this one. Photo: Elisabeth Gawthrop/IRI

What do you, and through you IRI more generally, bring to the S2S project? 

That’s an excellent question. I think IRI has a huge amount to offer S2S from our 20 years of experience with developing seasonal forecasts for use in real-world decision making in developing countries and in different sectoral contexts. For example, IRI has stressed a participatory approach, together with decision makers and key intermediaries, to developing decision-relevant information. The verification of forecasts in the user context is something very important to the uptake of forecasts, as is identifying the best entry points for forecasts. The latter is often an intermediary such as a national meteorological service, an agricultural extension service, or an agency like the IFRC. For example IRI has worked a lot in Africa, Asia and Latin America with CCAFS, which is the Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security program of the CGAIR Consortium of International Agricultural Research Centers. Having these connections with the agricultural community can be of great value to S2S.

Where is there the most opportunity for improving S2S forecasts?

There are two main categories of opportunities for improvement. One is identifying areas where the skill of the forecasts could be improved, and the other is the delivery of forecasts that have value in given societal context. One place of low-hanging fruit that fits both is India and its monsoon. Seasonal forecasting is generally difficult there, but there is a strong intraseasonal oscillation “ISO” within the monsoon season which is a major cause of monsoon breaks and active phases, which is potentially predictable.

At IRI we tend to focus on the seasonal forecast, but the skill over India is often terrible. But irrigation scheduling decisions may benefit from a weather forecast, while planning fertilizer application could use a forecast for the second fortnight of the month. This is what is often referred to as “seamless forecasting” where we make use of a set of forecasts for different time ranges. I think that’s where this project could have the biggest impact, because monsoon forecasts for 15-30 days out may be more skillful than the seasonal ones, they could add to the information available. Forecasts at this timescale also allow for frequent updating. So there’s a lot of scope for forecasts in the S2S range.

Peering into the satellite control rooms at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) last month was extremely exciting. As participants of the NASA DEVELOP National Program, we use satellite data every day in our research. Helen Cen and I had just finished our end-of-term presentations with other DEVELOP participants and were led on a tour through the control rooms of some of NASA’s Earth-observing satellites. Needless to say, our eyes were wide with excitement and awe.

The DEVELOP Program gives young researchers the ability to conduct hands-on remote sensing  research with a focus on answering pressing societal questions. The International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) serves as one of DEVELOP’s regional locations and hosts 4-6 participants each year. They’re advised by IRI research scientist Pietro Ceccato.

“With a mutual mission to foster the use of remote sensing and improve decision making, DEVELOP and IRI have shared a strong collaboration for almost three years,” notes Lauren Childs-Gleason, DEVELOP’s National Science Lead. “The DEVELOP-IRI location has conducted more than 15 application feasibility projects in that time and has made significant contributions to the program’s project portfolio, especially in agriculture and health.”

These application feasibility projects concentrate research on engaging and solving end-user specific problems, with the intent of practically implementing the findings soon after the projects are finished. Typically, the 10-week terms culminate in presentations that are given at various locations throughout the country, demonstrating the outcomes of the “DEVELOPers” projects. The two of us were invited by the GSFC node to present our results along with others in Greenbelt, Maryland.

This past term, we conducted two of these feasibility projects at the IRI. One project studied flood detection capabilities of satellites, and the other produced a Drought Severity Index (DSI) for the country of Uruguay.

Flood Mapping in Malawi

Partnering with the Malawi Red Cross National Society, Helen Cen of DEVELOP and Andrew Kruczkiewicz, a consultant on the project from the IRI, examined a specific flood event in Malawi from January of this year. They compared and evaluated different satellite-based flood detection products to determine which were best at identifying these floods.

In January, Kruczkiewicz traveled to Malawi with the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre to support the Malawi Red Cross National Society and directly observe the devastating floods. His experience attending meetings while in the country helped define the goals for the project as well as lend a critical glimpse into what information is needed in these emergency situations. “Our hope for the project was to pinpoint which products are best at mapping floods,” says Kruczkiewicz. “The outputs will help in humanitarian preparedness and response efforts.”

They compared seven flood detection products and found differences in their ability to detect the January event. A couple of products identified flooding near shelter sites in regions prone to flash floods, while others were better at recognizing riverine floods at high spatial resolution.

“Over the summer we hope to receive village-level flood data to conduct a quantitative analysis of accuracy, and incorporate previous project findings and other available data to help develop an early-warning system for the region,” says Cen, who will continue this research during DEVELOP’s summer term.

Creating a Drought Severity Index

My research involved looking at the opposite climate extreme: drought. Previous research by IRI’s Jerrod Lessel produced a drought severity index (DSI) for Uruguay based on work from Jinyoung Rhee from the University of South Carolina and compared it to other remotely-sensed drought indices. Over the past couple of months, Lessel and I expanded on this research, testing and validating different precipitation and vegetation products in the drought index with ground-based data from Uruguay’s Instituto Nacional de Investigación Agropecuaria (INIA), which is currently used as the drought-monitoring standard within Uruguay.

Working with us on this research were scientists from Uruguay, who helped refine and narrow our project goals. “The Ministry of Agriculture and INIA wanted a product that uses remote sensing to increase ease of use over station data, as well as a product with high spatial resolution to monitor drought conditions in Uruguay,” describes Lessel.

The final Drought Severity Index product created for the country of Uruguay, with data from March 2015. Drought conditions are indicated by color, with regions in red signifying severe drought.

Our analysis concluded that NOAA’s CPC Morphing Technique (CMORPH) precipitation product and the Normalized Difference Water Index was the best precipitation and vegetation product to use for the DSI due to their high correlations with data from on-the-ground weather stations. Collaboration with our project partners helped us deem CMORPH as the better precipitation product for the DSI over NASA’s Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission, which had slightly higher correlations overall. The Ministry of Agriculture and INIA determined that the near real time operational ability of CMORPH would allow for better evaluation of drought events.

Overall, our project partners were very pleased with our research.

“The DSI product produced by Sweeney and Lessel is used by INIA and the Ministry of Agriculture in Uruguay to map the drought conditions in the country,” says IRI’s Ceccato. “During February, March and April 2015, the DSI product helped the Ministry to monitor and identify the drought conditions that affected parts of Uruguay.”

Our presentations at NASA GSFC were met with applause and engaging discussions afterward. Cen and I will remain with DEVELOP through the summer, continuing research on the Malawi floods project and commencing a new assignment on fire burn scar mapping. This summer we’ll travel to the annual DEVELOP Summer Closeout where participants from each location throughout the US will share their research at NASA Headquarters, and sometimes get the special opportunity to shake hands with NASA’s Administrator Charles Bolden.

Our work on floods, droughts and now burn scars demonstrates a few of the ways in which NASA satellites provide crucial data about our Earth, and how this information can help people around the world. To learn about more applications of satellite data, visit the DEVELOP website.

DEVELOP-IRI project summaries and videos

Helen Cen – So Many Maps, So Little Time

Alex Sweeney – Taking Droughts From Earth to Space

When it comes to climate risks in the Caribbean, the bluster and rage of hurricanes and tropical storms steal the stage. These events flare up quickly, can cause enormous damage and loss of life, and dissipate within days.

Drought is different. It’s more insidious and creeping, intensifying over many months, stunting or killing crops as it develops, emptying rivers and drying out water supplies. It represents one of the most frequently occurring and persistent climate hazards faced by the Caribbean’s nearly 40 million residents.

For Jamaica, an island smaller than Connecticut, droughts can wreak havoc, especially to its many farming communities. The agriculture sector accounts for nearly 7 percent of Jamaica’s gross domestic product and employs about one-fifth of its workforce.

“Agriculture is particularly vulnerable to climate variability and drought,” says Glenroy Brown, a scientist from the Jamaican Meteorological Service. “We have many small farms that rely heavily on rainfall for their crops.”

In 2014, the country’s 3 million inhabitants faced one of the worst droughts in a decade and the fourth worst recorded since the 1970s.

“You had the situation where vegetable farmers, especially, lost entire crops, entire fields,” says Sheldon Scott, from Jamaica’s Rural Agricultural Development Authority, who works with farming communities in seven of the island’s parishes. “That caused significant loss of income and loss of investment in many of the parishes we visited.”

The normally bountiful harvests of tomatoes, melons and sweet peppers were not to be seen. The drought caused agricultural productivity to decline by 30 percent compared to 2013. This, along with bush fires sparked by the dry conditions, contributed to nearly $1 billion in losses for the country.

The impact could have been worse if not for a new seasonal drought forecasting system that Brown and his colleagues helped pioneer in Jamaica with support from USAID. The new system helps the meteorological service anticipate conditions for the coming months.

This technological innovation was the first step in building resilience. The system grew out of USAID’s support for Jamaica’s new national climate policy and recognition of how climate change might undermine the country’s long-term development goals. USAID helped the meteorological service provide information and tools to specific groups such as farmers, who are highly vulnerable to climate change but important contributors to the national economy.

“It sounds simple, but what we’re doing is essentially putting a standard three-month rainfall forecast in context with recent rainfall measurements,” says Simon Mason, a climate scientist at Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society, who helped Brown design, build and implement the new system. “So if it has already been unusually dry and the forecast calls for below-normal rainfall, it could point to fairly serious drought.”

In little more than a year, this new drought forecast system expanded beyond Jamaica, helping inform decision-making and bolster climate resilience in 23 Caribbean countries, which may also have to make significant changes to adapt as global temperatures rise and weather patterns shift.

The second half of this story, Success in Jamaica and Beyond, can be read on Frontlines.

Climate is one of many variables that influence where and when malaria outbreaks occur. The International Research Institute for Climate and Society, which is a WHO/PAHO Collaborating Centre for Early Warning Systems for Malaria and Other Climate Sensitive Diseases, has been working for over a decade to better understand the relationship between malaria and climate, with the intent of applying this research into malaria prevention, control and elimination. Identifying the role of climate in malaria outbreaks also helps decision makers determine the effectiveness of interventions to prevent and treat the disease.

Here’s the rundown of our current malaria and climate work:

Support for the Climate Services Partnership: Climate & Malaria Data
Location: Madagascar and Ghana
Goals: Improved use of climate information in combatting malaria in the two selected countries.
Partners: President’s Malaria Initiative; US Agency for International Development; International Center for Tropical Agriculture

National Climate data and information for malaria control programmes in Africa
Location: Ethiopia and Tanzania
Goals: Enhanced availability, access and use of climate information in malaria decision-making at the national level in two priority endemic countries, Tanzania and Ethiopia.
Partners: Roll Back Malaria and Department for International Development

World Health Organization 
Location: Tanzania and Malawi
Goals: Technical Support and Operational Research Services for Health 
Partners: World Health Organization and and Global Framework for Climate Services

Development of Climate Analysis Section for the President’s Malaria Initiative Impact Evaluation Reports and Refinement of Climate Analysis Tools
Location: Rwanda, Zanzibar (Tanzania) and Mali
Goals: Identify data gaps and methodological challenges in analyzing climate as a variable of malaria transmission; develop methods to assess impact of climate variability on malaria transmission; produce climate analyses to incorporate into the President’s Malaria Initiative impact evaluation
Partners: US Agency for International Development; National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Development of Climate Analysis Section for the President’s Malaria Initiative Impact Evaluation Reports
Location: Ghana and Zambia
Goals: To strengthen the capabilities of SERVIR to respond to the needs of national partners concerned with the delivery of quality assured climate information to national development partners including, but not limited to, health.
Partners: US Agency for International Development; National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Climate Variability and Change: Implications for Malaria Control in East Africa
Location: Ethiopia
Goal: Unpacking the implications of a changing climate for national malaria control and elimination strategies; prioritizing a scientific community of practice; facilitating an informed discussion on current trends and future possible scenarios
Partners: School of Public Health at Addis Ababa University; Ethiopian Public Health Institute; Ethiopian Public Health Association, United States National Institutes of Health; Columbia Global Center-Africa; Health and Climate Foundation

Population Health Vulnerabilities to Vector-borne Diseases: Increasing Resilience under Climate Change Conditions in Africa
Location: Kenya, Tanzania, Botswana, South Africa, Côte d’Ivoire and Mauritania
Goal: Provide technical assistance and advice to WHO-TDR and five interdisciplinary research teams during the implementation of the research activities on climate and health
Partners: WHO-Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases, International Development Research Centre

Visit IRI’s Public Health page to learn more about our research and activities on malaria, meningitis and other climate-sensitive diseases.

Most extreme climate and weather events involve an unwanted surplus — too much rain, too much wind or too much snow and ice. Drought is a little different: it’s the absence of something. It takes time for a drought to build, making it fundamentally different to monitor or forecast than many climate and weather events. In the Caribbean, much of the interaction between forecasters and decision makers has revolved around the wet season events— especially hurricanes and floods. These short, high impact events deserve this attention, but scientists and decision makers have also started working together to develop useful information about other kinds of climate impacts, namely drought.

In an effort to improve drought forecasts and their use by stakeholders, the first dry season Caribbean Climate Outlook Forum (CariCOF) took place in St. John’s, Antigua in December 2014. CariCOF is one of many regional COFs around the world that bring together climatologists, meteorologists, and the people who might use the information they produce (e.g. representatives from health, agriculture, water management, etc.).

Before this past December, the Caribbean only hosted such a meeting just before the wet season. But if rainfall during the wet season isn’t sufficient, drought can manifest and become further exacerbated during the dry season.

The drought forecast received the most interest and sparked the most discussion. The drought forecast was debuted to stakeholders at the CariCOF last May in Kingston. Marck Oduber from Aruba’s Meteorological Service explains his successes in learning and using the drought tool:

But for those not trained in atmospheric science, interpreting the drought information can be a bit trickier. The complexity of drought stems not just from technical monitoring and forecasting challenges, but also from its differing relationships among the economic sectors it influences…

CariCOF concluded with a few exercises led by scientists from the International Research Applications Program, or IRAP, which is a joint partnership between IRI and the University of Arizona funded by the US Agency for International Development and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

IRAP’s role in CariCOF is to identify why climate information being produced isn’t being used — or is being underused — and to help with the development and dissemination of climate information products that are more widely used. Much of the discussion during this COF centered on communication of the climate information. Zack Guido from Arizona and Simon Mason from IRI explain more:

Read and watch the full story here. 

Dengue, a mosquito-borne viral illness, is a leading cause of illness in the tropics and subtropics. Cases of the disease have been reported in the United States and Western Europe. Dengue is transmitted to people primarily by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which reproduces in containers with standing water in and around homes. There is currently no vaccine or cure for dengue, and so public health agencies are keen to identify alternative strategies to manage the disease.
 
The research teams conducted the two studies in the urban coastal city of Machala, Ecuador, an area where dengue is prevalent, and the site of ongoing dengue research by Upstate Medical University and partners.
 
“This work provides insights into the complex climate and social factors that trigger dengue outbreaks, contributing to efforts to develop a dengue early warning system,” said Upstate researcher Anna M. Stewart Ibarra, who is also the Latin America Research Program Director for Upstate’s Center for Global Health & Translational Science.
 
“We also found that social and political conditions have to be considered when designing dengue control interventions, especially for high-risk, marginalized populations,” said Stewart Ibarra.
 
The team found that a confluence of unusually high rainfall and minimum temperatures were associated with the dengue outbreak, and that this confluence happens on timescales of one to two years.

“The key idea is that these two climate variables aren’t always in phase, but when they are, we can have an epidemic in coastal Ecuador,” said coauthor Ángel Muñoz, from the International Research Institute for Climate and Society. “Monitoring the phase difference between minimum temperature and rainfall may allow us to identify suitable conditions for an outbreak months ahead of time. This could be a key component of a  dengue early-warning system.”

In the second study, researchers also found that risk factors included households headed by women, and among other factors, the combination of poor housing conditions and access to piped water, likely due to water storage practices in areas where water supply interruptions are frequent. This study, which didn’t include IRI researchers, used focus groups to assess community perceptions of dengue fever. Researchers identified persistent misconceptions that limited people’s ability to take actions to prevent dengue. Social cohesion and political access were also major dengue risk factors, especially in low-income communities where people were unable to mobilize the resources needed to prevent disease outbreaks. They highlighted the need for dengue interventions that target the most vulnerable populations, and the importance of strong collaborations with local municipal governments and community leaders.

The Elqui River valley lies in Chile’s northern, mountainous Coquimbo region, which is extremely dry. The region receives only about 100 millimeters (4 inches) of rain each year, and most of it during one short rainy season. The rainfall is also highly variable and driven in large part on El Niño and La Niña fluctuations. In some years, the region will get close to zero rainfall, while in others it will get five times the average amount. Coquimbo has been in almost continuous drought since 2007, which presents an enormous challenge to those managing the Elqui basin’s water resources, which provides drinking water for two cities and irrigation for large vineyards, small farmers and goat herders.

The video below tells the story of how scientists from Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society, UNESCO, the Water Center for Arid and Semi-Arid Zones in Latin America and the Caribbean and the Center for Advanced Research in Arid Zones worked with the local water authorities to help them better manage and allocate Coquimbo’s most precious resource. They developed a seasonal forecast model to predict precipitation for the region using data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and IRI’s powerful Climate Predictability Tool. They also developed an accurate model for the Elqui River that predicts the river’s streamflow for the upcoming season based on data from weather stations around Coquimbo. The Elqui water authority used seasonal forecasts for the first time in 2012 to generate water estimates for the upcoming summer.

“Our initial work sparked new collaboration with other areas, such as the Huasco River Basin, 200 km north of Elqui,” says UNESCO Programme Specialist Koen Verbist. “There, water basin managers have implemented a forecast model that applies the same methods as those used in the Elqui pilot project, but have added even more functionality.”

Climate scientists can spot El Niño and La Niña conditions developing months ahead of time, and they use this knowledge to make more accurate forecasts of droughts, flooding and even hurricane activity around the world. Now, a new study shows that El Niño and La Niña conditions can also help predict the frequency of tornadoes and hail storms in some of the most susceptible regions of the United States. The study appears in the current issue of the journal Nature Geoscience.

“We can forecast how active the spring tornado season will be based on the state of El Niño or La Niña in December or even earlier,” said lead author John Allen, a postdoctoral research scientist at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI), part of Columbia University’s Earth Institute.

A tornado brews near El Reno, Okla., May 2013. A new study links the frequency of tornadoes and hailstorms in parts of the southern United States to ENSO, a cyclic temperature pattern in the Pacific Ocean. (John Allen).

The El Niño-Southern Oscillation, or ENSO, is a naturally occurring climate cycle in which sea-surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean fluctuate. When waters are warmer than normal, as they are currently, it is described as El Niño; when cooler, La Niña.

Allen and his coauthors show that moderately strong La Niña events lead to more tornadoes and hail storms over portions of Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas and other parts of the southern United States. El Niño events act in the opposite manner, suppressing both types of storms in this area.

While the information can’t pinpoint when and where storms will wreak havoc, it will nevertheless be useful for governments and insurance companies to prepare for the coming season, Allen said.  In recent weeks, researchers from IRI and other institutions have detected El Niño conditions over the Pacific, which implies that this spring will be a relatively quiet one for severe storms in the southern United States.

“The big contribution of the paper is that it looks at the changes in environmental conditions associated with ENSO,” said Harold Brooks, a senior research scientist at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), who was not one of the study’s authors. “Previous efforts have focused on tornado reports, but the connection with changes in large-scale conditions hadn’t been made,” he said.

Last year, 47 people died in tornadoes. But in 2011–a La Niña year– tornadoes killed more than 550 people, higher than in the previous 10 years combined. Hail storms and tornadoes cause an average estimated $1.6 billion in insured losses each year in the United States, according to the insurer Munich RE. Powerful, isolated events such as the 2011 Joplin, Missouri, tornado can smash the average. That storm alone caused several billion dollars in damage and killed 158 people.

The idea that ENSO can affect the frequency and locations of tornadoes and other severe storm systems isn’t new. It is already known to exert a strong influence on temperatures and rainfall in the United States, and affect the position of the jet stream. Yet scientists have had difficulty quantifying ENSO’s role in tornadoes, for two reasons. First, a variety of other factors can make them seemingly random: one year can see hundreds of twisters, while another sees few. Also, historical weather records are not reliable for long enough to make strong statistical connections. This is true especially for tornadoes, which often flare up and die quickly.

“Trying to tease out an ENSO signal from both the natural noise and the human noise becomes quite complicated,” said coauthor Michael Tippett, from Columbia University’s Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science. “You can’t get a robust correlation using the observational record alone.”

Past studies that have relied on eyewitness records alone have had limited success, said Allen. “For example, previous work has shown a clear linkage between ENSO and winter activity, but spring—the season when most of tornadoes occur in the southern U.S.—remained an enigma until now,” Allen said.

To get around these challenges, the Columbia University team created indices derived from environmental conditions such as wind shear, temperature and moisture. Each is a key ingredient in severe storm formation, and each is influenced by ENSO. The scientists then verified the indices using available observational records.

When ENSO is in a warm, or El Niño, phase (top), the frequency of tornadoes goes down. When it is in a cool, or La Niña phase (bottom), tornadoes increase (indicated by red areas). The effect is strongest in the boxed area. From Allen et al., Nature Geoscience, 2015.

Adding a forecasting component was relatively straightforward. “We’re already set up to monitor and forecast ENSO,” said Tippett. “We know that ENSO affects the large-scale environment, and the large-scale environment affects the tornado occurrence.” During La Niña, both vertical wind shear and surface warmth and moisture increase significantly in the southern states, making conditions favorable to severe storm occurrence.

Agencies such as NOAA and its counterparts all over the world constantly monitor conditions in the Pacific to spot a developing El Niño or La Niña, so the authors say it wouldn’t be too difficult to issue a warning for tornadoes or hail based on the ENSO state.

They note caveats, however. First, ENSO is not the only driver of severe storms. “Any kind of extreme weather is at most only loosely controlled by coherent, predictable climate phenomena like ENSO, and tornadoes are no exception,” said coauthor Adam Sobel, who also is at Columbia’s engineering school, as well as its Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Second, the current study shows robust correlation only in the southern states, where the ENSO signal is especially clear. “A lot of the year-to-year variability is for all practical purposes random and unpredictable,” said Sobel, who also directs a new Columbia University Initiative on Extreme Weather and Climate.

In 2013, the International Research Institute for Climate and Society teamed up with the University of Arizona to help regions of the world that are most vulnerable to climate variability and change. Here’s a look at what has been accomplished so far.

Farmers are at the mercy of the weather. They need the rain to nourish their crops, but when the rain doesn’t come or when it’s excessive, their hard labor can go to waste – crops ruined. With the global climate changing and potentially becoming more variable in some places, the livelihood of millions of farmers is at stake, especially in the most susceptible regions, such as the Caribbean, Asia’s Indo-Gangetic Plain and West Africa.

The International Research and Applications Project (IRAP), funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), supports IRI and the University of Arizona to develop tools and frameworks with local organizations that will increase climate resilience in these vulnerable regions. IRAP focuses on an end-to-end approach that deals simultaneously with both the problem – climate variability and change – and the solution in order to develop the most effective adaptive strategies to manage climate risk.

“University of Arizona’s globally-recognized strengths in the human dimensions of climate are great complements to our strengths in climate science and sectoral climate risk management,” says IRI Director Lisa Goddard. “Together, we’re working with institutions and scientists in the region, which creates ownership and sustainability of the effort and also helps build the capacity of everyone involved.”

IRAP initially focused on the Caribbean region, where droughts, hurricanes and floods threaten farmers each year. In 2010, for example, farmers faced the worst drought in 50 years. The drought had significant consequences for farming communities. They produced fewer crops, combatted brush fires and faced water shortages. Since then, the IRAP partners have brought together Caribbean scientists and decision makers to work on effective ways to link climate information, including risks of extreme events, to their impacts, and to identify appropriate actions for preparedness and longer-term resilience.

Maps made for decision making

One of the first products to come out of IRAP was a prototype map room, developed by IRI and the Caribbean Institute for Meteorology and Hydrology (CIMH). The tool allows users to analyze climate in the Caribbean and provide more targeted data. The results can be viewed on multiple platforms, from phones to tablets to desktops, making them easily accessible as well as easy to use. The map room provides information about recently observed atmospheric circulation, atmospheric temperature, ocean temperature, as well as information about precipitation and drought conditions. Researchers will continue to build in data that can be used to look at past, present and future conditions.

Facilitating access to information, not just data, is a key step in ensuring that the public can prepare for extreme weather and climate events. The Caribbean map room builds on earlier work funded by USAID to develop a drought monitoring and forecasting tool for Jamaica in collaboration with the country’s national meteorological agency. This innovative tool combines rainfall observations from Jamaica’s network of weather stations with three-month seasonal rainfall forecasts created with IRI’s Climate Predictability Tool. Through IRAP and other USAID investments, the drought products are being applied to the entire eastern Caribbean; countries in the western Caribbean and Central America are interested to implement these innovative tools as well. CIMH now regularly produces a drought bulletin based on this information. IRI and the University of Arizona helped organize a Caribbean Climate Outlook Forum (CariCOF) in Kingston, Jamaica that produced a consensus seasonal climate forecast for the region. While forecasts and other kinds of climate information often comprise one of many components of risk management, limited access, misunderstandings, and the inadequacy of existing information often cause that information to be underutilized.

Integrating Climate Information and Decision Processes for Regional Climate Resilience in the Caribbean

Following the forum, members of the IRAP team led a two-day workshop to take the conversation beyond forecasts. The workshop was a first step at understanding how people interact with climate in this region. It included participatory activities designed to assess the goals of climate services, how people communicate climate information, how people respond to climate events and what inhibits their responses. The discussion around these objectives led to several areas that could be improved-upon when dealing with climate information and climate resilience. IRAP published a report (see right) that provides details on the main activities of the workshop and its key findings. For example, while forecasts are important because they can theoretically allow regions to take appropriate steps to reduce the damage caused by droughts and hurricanes, real world situations are more complicated. A number of workshop participants said that information about forecasts wasn’t always readily available, so preparation for extreme weather events came late or not at all. Communication between meteorological centers, decision makers and the public is key to dealing with this issue. Participants also agreed that to improve climate resilience, stakeholders must better understand how climate information is currently used by society, and how it can better meet the needs of vulnerable communities and sectors. An analysis and understanding of how climate information is used and disseminated, and how it is then used to effect action is essential to improving current systems.

“The importance of building and maintaining trust between participants cannot be overemphasized,” says Jim Buizer, Director of Climate Adaptation and International Development at the University of Arizona Institute of the Environment. “And trust requires transparency and robust and ongoing communication amongst all the players.”

Once communication is established, the next step is preparation. Every region experiences climate variability differently, so participants emphasized the importance of ensuring that adaptive measures are situation-appropriate. This will come through further research on the most effective combination of public policy and community responses, understanding how forecasts inform decision making and how the presence of strong social networks can help communities rebuild themselves after an extreme weather event.

The Year Ahead

The IRAP workshop in Kingston laid the groundwork for identifying and addressing research gaps in order to improve the effectiveness of climate information in the coming years. It also helped the IRAP team identify a demonstration project for which it could apply its end-to-end approach: climate services to help manage coffee leaf rust in Jamaica. IRAP, in collaboration with the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) and the Coffee Industry Board of Jamaica, is exploring the potential to assess the climate vulnerabilities of coffee farmers, develop relevant climate information and evaluate the role of this information in improving the management and control of coffee leaf rust. In the next year, IRAP will also expand into Asia’s Indo-Gangetic Plain. Members of the team travelled to India, Nepal and Bangladesh in February for a scoping visit. There, they met with regional representatives of The World Bank, national development agencies, farmer groups NGOs and others.

This year’s conference will focus on improving Africa’s weather and climate services, which will help countries better anticipate and manage extreme weather, droughts and other climate-related impacts.

The focus of the side event is to share experiences on the Enhancing National Climate Services (ENACTS) initiative, an ambitious effort by IRI and its partners to transform climate services in Africa. ENACTS focuses on the creation of reliable climate information suitable for both national and local decision making. IRI’s Madeleine Thomson and Tufa Dinku will be presenting at the event, as will directors from the meteorological services of some the countries where ENACTS has already been implemented.

Dinku describes ENACTS in more detail in the brief Q+A below.

Q. You’ll be presenting the ENACTS experiences from Ethiopia and Tanzania – take us through a before-and-after comparison – what is different in these countries now that ENACTS has been implemented there?

Ethiopia and Tanzania are the first two countries where ENACTS is being implemented. ENACTS is now also being implemented in three more countries: Madagascar, Rwanda, and most recently The Gambia. In terms of what is different, ENACTS focuses on three things: improvement of the data available, improving access to climate information products, and lastly, engaging with users so that they understand and use the information products to improve decisions. I’ve seen two main changes after the implementation of ENACTS. The first is data coverage. Ethiopia for example, now has climate data available at a resolution of 4 kilometers over the whole country, going back 50 years. This is a transformational change.

Previously, the country had to rely mostly on ground-based weather stations, which covered only parts of the country. Now there’s more data available for more people to use. ENACTS has also helped improve access: the services now have online map-rooms for users to obtain a range of climate information products. This access did not exist before; this is something very new. Ethiopia was the first country in the whole of Africa to make this kind of information available; the very fact that you can now click on any area in Ethiopia and obtain information is revolutionary in Africa.

What are the key elements that have made ENACTS so successful in such a diversity of African countries?

With ENACTS, we don’t just focus on improving data, but also improving both the access to data and its use. We work on making sure people have access to information, and we spend a lot of effort training users to understand the newly available products. The other element is the process of improving the data itself. We don’t ask national meteorological services to relinquish their data. We work in-country with them on their data and help them to create high quality products by blending station data with publicly available satellite and reanalysis data – and that is very critical. In this way, we have access to more data, which means better quality products. Another element at the core of ENACTS is to properly train staff at the national meteorological services so that their work is long-lasting and sustainable. Finally the value of the information is only in the extent users can access it and use it in decision making. When better decisions are made using ENACTS products then the meteorological services can be seen as a key partner in national development.

Where are you hoping to implement ENACTS in 2015?

We are making plans to expand ENACTS in Ghana and Mali, and are hoping to initiate the service to Burkina Faso and Zambia before the end of the year.

LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM (26 January 2015) — Nigerian government officials will convene in London this week to gather advice for scaling-up agricultural insurance policies for smallholder farmers, to bolster the up and coming agricultural powerhouse’s resilience to climate and market shocks.

The meeting will also serve as the official launch of a new study that provides decisive evidence that large-scale index-based insurance is a commercially viable option for the rural poor, and outlines the key traits of successful index insurance schemes. The new study, carried out by the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) and the International Center for Climate and Society (IRI) at Columbia University showcases projects that have overcome many of the challenges that have previously hindered the uptake of index-based insurance, such as poor infrastructure and lack of financing, and have gone on to scale to reach millions of smallholder farmers in some of the poorest areas of the world, many of which were previously considered insurable.

“Many countries are leading a movement to increase insurance coverage for the most vulnerable farmers,” says IRI’s Dr. Dan Osgood, who co-authored the study. “This shift could change the lives of millions of smallholder farmers across the globe, who face increasingly erratic weather due to a changing climate.”

One opportunity for large-scale change comes from Nigeria, a rapidly growing agricultural producer, which has committed to covering 15 million of its smallholder farmers with agricultural insurance by 2017. While traditional loss-based insurance is not viable for smallholder farmers in environments like rural Nigeria, because of the high cost of verifying losses on large numbers of small landholdings, index insurance payouts are pegged to easily measured environmental conditions, or an “index,” that is closely related to agricultural production losses. Possible indices include rainfall, yields, or vegetation levels measured by satellites. When an index exceeds a certain threshold, farmers receive a fast, efficient payout, in some cases delivered via mobile phones.

“Nigeria has made a bold commitment to support all smallholder farmers in enhancing their incomes and food security, through crop insurance beginning with 2.5 million in 2015 and is seeking evidence-based solutions to follow through on it,” says Dr. Débísí Àràbà, Team Leader, Environment and Climate Change Unit, Office of the Honourable Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Nigeria.

The new study also examines case studies from Kenya, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Senegal, Mongolia and India.

“In the case of India, one in four of the country’s smallholder farmers are now insured by a science-based index insurance product,” says lead author Dr. Helen Greatrex. “The rapid growth of India’s program and the others we profile is a bold statement about the potential of index insurance to overcome the tough challenges we face in providing a safety net for millions of the poorest farmers,” she comments.

The report identifies key traits of successful index insurance schemes, including:
• Including farmers in the design process
• Integrating insurance into broader development and climate risk programs
• Working with policy makers, market leaders and businesses to develop supply chains and legislative frameworks
• Investing in farmer education
• Working closely with research organizations for agro-meteorological and social knowledge
• Unlocking new opportunities to improve farmer income

“The huge growth in the numbers of farmers who have chosen to purchase index insurance in recent years suggests that the programs we reviewed have targeted a real need, and are finding effective solutions to the challenges to providing useful insurance to smallholder farmers at scale,” said co-author Dr. Jim Hansen, who leads research on managing short-term climate risk for the CCAFS program. Major reinsurance companies such as SwissRe, MunichRe, have backed weather-based index insurance as sound investment.

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About IRI
The International Research Institute for Climate and Society, part of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, aims to enhance society’s ability to understand, anticipate and manage the impacts of climate in order to improve human welfare and the environment, especially in developing countries. Visit iri.columbia.edu and follow @climatesociety on Twitter.

About CCAFS
The CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) is a strategic partnership of CGIAR and Future Earth, led by the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT). CCAFS brings together the world’s best researchers in agricultural science, development research, climate science and earth system science, to identify and address the most important interactions, synergies and tradeoffs between climate change, agriculture and food security. www.ccafs.cgiar.org

About index-based insurance
Index insurance differs from traditional indemnity insurance, where payouts are explicitly based on measured loss. Instead, in index insurance, farmers can purchase coverage based on an index that is correlated with those losses, such as wind speed, the amount of rain during a certain window of time (weather based indices) or average yield losses over a larger region (area yield indices). Payouts are then triggered when this index falls above or below a pre-specified threshold. This means that index insurance is not designed to protect farmers against every peril, but is instead designed for situations where there is a well-defined climate risk that significantly influences a farmer’s livelihood.

Index insurance has the potential to build the resilience of smallholder farmers, not only by providing a payout in bad years to help farmers survive and protect their assets; but also by helping to unlock opportunities that increase productivity in the non-payout years, which might allow them to escape from poverty traps or from the threat of them. For example, insurance might allow a farmer to access credit, which they can then use to invest in new agricultural technologies or inputs. This could allow the farmer to use their increased profits to pay for the insurance premium, knowing that the insurance would allow them to repay their loan in the event of a climate shock.

For more information, please contact:
Alexa Jay: ajay@iri.columbia.edu or +1 206 849 5060
Liz Sharma: liz@sharmacomms.co.uk or +44 7963 122988

The Climate Services Partnership is pleased to announce the fourth International Conference on Climate Services (ICCS 4), which will be held in Montevideo, Uruguay. The event starts this Wednesday, December 10 at 10:30 am UTC and runs through Friday, December 12, 2:30 pm UTC.

ICCS 4 is being hosted by the Uruguayan Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries, with support from the World Bank, the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security and a host of other local and international organizations. The conference is convened by the Climate Services Partnership, an informal network that works to advance the provision and delivery of climate services around the world.

The three-day meeting will explore the theme of climate-informed decision support tools and a range of other topics,  including health, water, disasters, grassland management and the evaluation of climate services.

Decision support systems

While climate affects all aspects of life, the decisions we make are rarely based entirely, or even predominantly, on climate information. Rather, a range of factors must be considered as we make plans that shape our countries, companies and communities. Decision-support systems offer a way to meet this complex challenge–combining different kinds of information into a single framework and assisting decision makers by supporting, rather than replacing, their judgement.

By contextualizing climate information within this framework, decision-support systems can help us apply climate information to pressing real-world problems. But while decision-support systems have shown to be useful in advancing climate risk management, many questions remain, including what sorts of questions are these systems best suited for? How can we design them to best communicate uncertainty, and to what extent can they be linked to national-level policy decisions? These and other questions will be explored during ICCS4.

More than 180 participants from 31 countries will attend the conference. They will take part in 28 parallel sessions that will feature more than 100 speakers. Topics include: data-driven climate services; innovative solutions to decision support; institutional arrangements to support climate services; climate service ethics; climate services and partnerships in Small Island Developing States; the economic valuation of climate services.

Index insurance is a tool that can help manage climate risks and make farmers more resilient and productive, especially when used in combination with other financial tools. Learn more about the work of our Financial Instruments Sector team on their page.

Barbara Platzer, Climate and Health Program Specialist at Columbia Global Centers | Africa, based in Nairobi, Kenya, gives us her perspective on the meeting and its outcomes.

Q. The public health community knows how critical climate and weather data can be when it comes to understanding trends in vector-borne disease such as malaria. What obstacles still stand in the way of getting this information into practical decision making?

Absolutely, climate has long been understood to be a driver in key health outcomes and, in this case, in malaria transmission. The sensitivities to climate are not new, but there continue to be obstacles in having relevant and reliable data and tools that support global policy and national decisions around health. What we have learned for instance, especially in consultations with malaria programs, is how relevant national climate information can be to their impact assessment of past interventions. Programs need to know if declines in malaria cases are in part due to drought, for example. Conversely, potential rebounds in malaria transmission caused by less-favorable climate can be misconstrued as program failure, putting the reputation and the funding of the programs at risk.

This is in addition to their ability to use forecasted information operationally, although it is important to note that early-warning systems necessitate effective and often expensive response systems. The use of climate information may not always represent a realistic investment for programs and resources that are geared to endemic malaria or other chronic stressors. What we see though is the conversation around climate data and information, once demonstrated to be of value and of direct relevance to immediate country needs, can quickly grow to include a range of opportunities for practical decision making, from mapping populations at risk, investigating the seasonality and timing of interventions, monitoring year-to-year trends, targeting resources and advocacy for early preparedness.

Q. At this meeting, IRI also presented its work on the “Enhancing National Climate Services” (ENACTS) initiative. Can you briefly describe this initiative and how it was received by the participants?

ENACTS, in a nutshell, seeks to ensure the ready availability, access and utility of rigorous climate data and information in Africa.

Fact Sheet: Enhancing National Climate Services

IRI and partners have collaborated with national meteorological services, the custodians of climate data, to be able to effectively respond to the expressed needs of the health community and other sectors for relevant and reliable data, products and services. ENACTS, in particular, accesses all appropriate quality-controlled weather station data and other national observations and merges them with the best satellite and other remotely-sensed information. This represents a leap-frogging over global products that tend to rely primarily on coarse satellite estimates, reanalysis or modeled climate information.

At the meeting, we saw strong representation from the meteorological services in Ethiopia and Tanzania, which have pioneered this approach. On the health side,  longstanding advocates of ENACTS from the malaria programs as well as from the health research community attended. Also there were participants new to ENACTS, especially at the policy level. These participants came away I think with a much stronger understanding of the importance of nationally-owned, rigorous information for decision making in terms of mandate and maximizing impacts.

Q. What was different about this meeting compared to similar ones you’ve been involved in over the last few years?

Its timeliness and immediate traction. The meeting was designed as an executive briefing and national consultation for the Roll Back Malaria Partnership. A major outcome has been the much wider and effective communication of three key messages to national and global policymakers: the importance of alignment for malaria programs with cross-cutting development agendas that leverage climate as a multi-sectoral opportunity; the importance of managing reputational risks for malaria programs by taking climate into account, especially in their impact assessments; and the importance of maximizing impacts, using climate information as a resource to better target interventions when donor and national financing is becoming constrained.

The key outcomes of the meeting have already been represented at WHO’s first Conference on Health and Climate and the UN Climate Summit. The collaborations have also informed the RBM-led impact evaluations currently being conducted by the President’s Malaria Initiative-USAID, which has also been supported by the International Research Institute for Climate and Society.

As a concrete example of the timeliness and traction of the meeting, we also recently learned that the Tanzanian National Malaria Control Programme is working with its partners to emphasize the potential increased risks of the upcoming short rainy season, when the emerging El Niño may have an impact on malaria transmission.

El Niño tends to increase rainfall in parts of Eastern Africa, during the short October-December rainy season and concerns of its potential impact on malaria outcomes is high. In Tanzania, national bednet shortages, missed windows of spraying and general financing constraints have increased population vulnerability. As a result, the Malaria Control Programme is advocating for an increased allocation of resources for rapid testing and treatment commodities.

What has always been clear from these meetings and opportunities for consultation is that communities face very real and present-day risks of climate impacts that cut across a host of development concerns.

Q. Where are the biggest opportunities for further collaboration and investment?

While the climate presents risks, it also presents opportunities. This was another key theme of the meeting. Countries and the global malaria community should be aware of the potential risks of climate and act accordingly, while also recognizing the opportunities of taking advantage of lower transmissions to drive down the disease. As an example, we discussed the use of drugs, appropriate for some regions where malaria can be driven down by attacking the parasite (and not the mosquito), through targeted administration of antimalarials to children during the malaria season. This strategy ultimately reduces potential infective hosts and can support elimination strategies on the whole. It can also be improved through an understanding of the likely onset of the malaria season – which is directly related to rainfall onset.

A key opportunity for the malaria community is also to align their expertise and needs with broader development agendas and broader adaptation partnerships and funding, such as the through the Global Framework for Climate Services, which prioritizes sectors including health. New thinking on the framing of the current challenges to the malaria community may offer innovative ways to tackle old, persistent obstacles while preparing for the future.

IRI scientists Madeleine Thomson, Brad Lyon and Tufa Dinku also participated in the August meeting, as did Shirley McGill, a student in the Climate and Society masters program.

More information about the meeting, including presentations, is available on the Roll Back Malaria Partnership website. Download a full report here.

John Hargrove, an entomologist based in South Africa, providing expertise on tsetse fly. Photo by Pietro Ceccato.

Earlier this year, I attended a workshop in Arusha, Tanzania to train research scientists from South Africa, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Botswana, Kenya and Tanzania on how to use products derived from NASA satellites to monitor climate and environmental factors that influence the transmission of vector-borne diseases such as malaria, leishmaniasis, trypanosomiasis, schistosomiasis and Rift Valley Fever. Together, these diseases represent a scourge to both humans and animals in the region, affecting millions in East Africa alone.

At the workshop, I showed my colleagues how to access real-time images captured by NASA sensors such as TRMM, MODIS, LANDSAT to monitor precipitation, temperature, vegetation and water bodies. These environmental factors influence the reproduction of mosquitoes, tsetse flies and sand flies, which are vectors for the diseases I mentioned above.

Maasai village in Tanzania affected by trypanosomiasis. Photo by Pietro Ceccato.

For example, using this type of information, my team has discovered that flood conditions in the April-May-June season in South Sudan will reduce sandfly activity and therefore the transmission of leishmaniasis from September to November.

In collaboration with John Hargrove and his team from South Africa, I’ve been studying the impact of environmental conditions on the reproductive cycle of the tsetse fly and how the information can be accessed by local communities in real time to take actions to control trypanosomiasis transmission to the cattle and humans.

Dissemination of global satellite information to local communities.

During a field visit to a Maasai village two hours’ drive from Arusha, I was fascinated by the behavior of the chief, who was constantly on his mobile phone, connecting to people in the area.  The access and use of mobile technology by this Maasai chief in such a remote area made me think about the possibility of delivering  real-time information derived from NASA sensors directly to people’s cell phones there, so they can be alerted to areas and periods when there is a higher risk of trypanosomiasis transmission.

Using the IRI Data Library’s Maproom interface, anybody can access NASA products via smartphone. The chief of the Maasai village will be able to now get the location of pastures, water bodies, rainfall and temperature conditions —all factors in the transmission of the trypanosomiasis–in real time. Our next challenge will be to train these villagers on how to use these products for control measures!

Here are 8 ways that illustrate how we have been developing science and technology that can help strengthen development programs and increase the resilience of developing nations:

1) Helping people, governments and humanitarian organizations take early action.  In storm and flood events, real time information can help people move out of harm’s way, and it can get responders and supplies in place as soon as they are needed.  Many places around the world still lack the information and communications systems to issue disaster warnings. Early action also saves money – with examples from the Red Cross that show for every $1 spent on disaster prevention, $4 is saved on disaster response and recovery.

2) Rolling out information services that help smallholder farmers make productive decisions. Throughout the developing world, the main sources of food are small rain-fed farms. These farmers depend on rainfall to water their crops, but have little or no access to kinds of weather and climate information farmers in the U.S. take for granted. Efforts such as the CGIAR’s Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security are helping bridge this gap and provide farmers the information they need when they need it, using technologies they can afford. Watch this video to learn more about climate-smart agriculture.

3) Anticipating and planning for epidemics of climate-sensitive diseases.  Diseases such as malaria, dengue, meningococcal meningitis and leishmaniasis continue to have devastating impacts throughout the world, claiming hundreds of thousands of lives and disrupting societies. Epidemics of these and many other diseases have a strong link to temperature, rainfall and other climate variables, which means we can use climate information to help prioritize and evaluate our public health intervention, as the World Health Organization has shown.

4) Insuring farmers against bad weather. Traditional crop insurance is too costly to work sustainably in most developing countries. Weather-based crop insurance, or index insurance, is affordable and already protecting millions of farmers in India, Ethiopia, Mexico and other countries from losing their investments because of droughts. It also enables them to access loans and other resources that increase their productivity and wealth. Oxfam America, the Syngenta Foundation, SwissRe, the World Bank Group’s Global Index Insurance Facility and the World Food Programme are among the organizations testing and implementing this innovation.

5) Balancing regional water needs, now and in the future. Rapid urbanization and growing demands for food production and hydroelectric energy are pushing water systems in many regions to their limits. A better understanding of the dynamics of water systems and the competing needs of households, farms, industry and other water users is strengthening the sustainable management of water supplies in places like Elqui, Chile and Angat, Philippines.

6) Preventing hunger by building resilience. Throughout the semi-arid regions of the world, food insecurity threatens the well-being of hundreds of millions of people. The World Food Programme leads the world’s largest effort to reduce food security risk and incorporates leading-edge climate science into its work to build resilience and prioritize major food security interventions.

7) Improving forest management policies and practices. Forests are an important natural resource.  Forests help improve water security, protect biodiversity and agriculture and can support tourism. In exceptionally dry years, many of the world’s forests are at risk of burning. The Center for International Forestry Research is working to understand how fire risk evolves in a drying climate and what policies can be used to help prevent unwanted and uncontrollable fires.

 8) Ending Data Poverty. In many parts of the developing world, where we need to implement the solutions highlighted above, we find major gaps in data and obstacles to its access and use. Data poverty has many causes, including conflict, lack of resources, limits in technical capacity and poor internet access. The IRI is working with a broad range partners to make data available, accessible and usable around the world. Download this fact sheet to learn more.

The International Research Institute for Climate and Society works with scientists, governments and organizations around the world to build resilience. IRI was created through a cooperative agreement between the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Columbia University. It has received continued support from NOAA, the U.S. Agency for International Development, NASA and other  U.S. agencies as well as international development organizations, UN agencies and humanitarian organizations as part of a global effort to share knowledge, collaborate and prioritize problem-focused research that helps improve our understanding of what is happening in the physical world and how to better manage it.

To learn more, visit iri.columbia.edu/about-us.

Media contact:

Francesco Fiondella
+1.646.321.2271

Twitter: @climatesociety

First Climate Week Panel To Focus On Building Innovative Index Insurance Markets in Developing Countries

NEW YORK, September 18, 2014 — A panel of leaders and experts from the business, humanitarian and research communities will convene this week at the Climate Week NYC to discuss the growing relevance of index insurance as a tool to manage weather-related risks for farmers across the developing world. The forum is organized by the World Bank Group’s Global Index Insurance facility (GIIF) and the Earth Institute’s International Research Institute for Climate Society (IRI).

Climate change poses serious challenges to the world’s farmers, as well as companies that work in agriculture, water, energy and other sectors. In order for the insurance industry to help meet these new challenges and risks, it must develop new products and services. Weather-based index insurance is an innovative risk management tool that has enabled farmers in both developing, and developed, countries to protect assets, gain access to credit and unlock productive opportunities.

“The shocks of climate change have been felt by small and medium businesses andmost severely by farmers dependent on agriculture for livelihood and financial support. Index insurance offers an opportunity to protect their income and investments against weather adversities while becoming part of a wider strategy to escape poverty,” says Gilles Galludec, Program Manager for GIIF.

While index insurance has already managed to reach millions of smallholder farmers in countries such as India with substantial private and public support, the business model needs to be adjusted to scale up and reach long-term financial viability.

“We know some projects have done well while others have not,” says Dan Osgood, who leads IRI’s Financial Instruments Sector team. “The Climate Risk Forum will provide a unique opportunity to hear experiences on what was done differently for the index insurance projects that worked, and what challenges must be addressed to assure success in the future.”

Details:

Building Innovative and Sustainable Index Insurance Markets for Weather-related Risks in Developing Countries

James Room, at Barnard College, 9:00 a.m.-12:30 p.m. Wednesday, September 24th.

Panelists:
Gilles Galludec, Program Manager, Global Index Insurance Facility, World Bank Group
Richard Choularton, Chief of Climate Resilience for Food Security Unit – World Food Programme
Alexandre Scherer, CEO – AXA America Corporate Solutions
Paula Pagniez, Senior Microinsurance Specialist – Swiss Re
Jon Hellin, Poverty Specialist and Senior Scientist, CIMMYT – CGIAR
Daniel Osgood, Lead Scientist – International Research Insitute for Climate and Society

Moderator: Gary Reusche, Senior Program Manager from the World Bank Group’s International Finance Corporation.

For more information about this event and to register:

http://www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu/events/view/73364.

Follow us on Twitter: #climateriskforum

About the World Bank Group
The World Bank Group plays a key role in the global effort to end extreme poverty and boost shared prosperity. It consists of five institutions: the World Bank, including the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) and the International Development Association (IDA); the International Finance Corporation (IFC); the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA); and the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID). Working together in more than 100 countries, these institutions provide financing, advice, and other solutions that enable countries to address the most urgent challenges of development. For more information, please visit www.worldbank.org, www.miga.org, and ifc.org.

About the Global Index Insurance Facility (GIIF)
The Global Index Insurance Facility (GIIF) is a multi-donor trust fund established in 2009, managed by IFC, and jointly implemented with the World Bank Group, supporting the development and growth of local markets for indexed/catastrophic insurance in developing countries, primarily in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and South Asia. GIIF helps establish index insurance markets through: Support for capacity building, which includes training for local insurers and financial institutions on the design of index insurance policies and claims process; Technical advice on products and pricing through a team of GIIF technical specialists, and Swiss Re (GIIF’s technical partner); An enabling regulatory and policy environment (World Bank Group/IBRD); Premium Support, to help borrowers access insurance on a broader scale and to create commercially attractive markets. More Information: www.ifc.org/giif

About the International Research Institute for Climate and Society
The International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI), part of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, aims to enhance society’s ability to understand, anticipate and manage the impacts of climate in order to improve human welfare and the environment, especially in developing countries. Visit iri.columbia.edu and follow @climatesociety on Twitter.