Localised climate data for African villages

SciDev.net via IRIN News: African cities and villages will soon have access to detailed data on how climate change may affect them until the next century. The Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX), an initiative of the World Meteorological Organization and the World Climate Research Programme, aims to provide localised projections about impacts of climate change. It will feed into the next assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, due to be released in 2014.

The information is expected to help countries and local communities in their efforts to adapt to changing weather patterns, and to tailor their disaster risk reduction plans. CORDEX aims to downscale the data for all regions of the world, but Africa — which has so far been under-researched and has been identified as the most vulnerable by the IPCC — is a priority for the initiative.

The CORDEX Africa campaign will also allow African climatologists to meet other African scientists who study vulnerability, adaptation and the impact of climate change on people, to translate the model numbers into meaningful, usable information. Experts from countries that include Benin, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Swaziland, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe will analyse the data....

A village in Benin, shot by rgrilo, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license