Report says well-resourced partnerships between climate information providers and aid agencies are key to protecting people from disasters
LONDON (AlertNet) - Climate information providers and humanitarians must build closer partnerships to protect people from weather disasters, and governments should allocate more funds to prevent climate-related crises, says a new publication from the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI).
"The potential of recent developments in climate science, including the production of climate forecasts for a few months through to decades into the future, can be extremely useful for disaster prevention, preparedness and response efforts," writes Jan Egeland, co-head of a taskforce on global climate services and former U.N. aid chief, in a foreword to the report launched this week.
"However...ensuring improved disaster outcomes goes beyond the provision of better and more tailor-made information. It requires close and active collaboration between different groups of professionals involved in disaster risk management, in order to build trust, capacity and truly useful information."
The report, produced with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), the World Food Programme (WFP) and the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) among others, presents 17 case studies from around the world to demonstrate advances in using climate information to manage disaster risks and improve livelihoods on the ground.
Following Haiti's devastating January 2010 earthquake, for example, worries that the rainy and hurricane seasons would cause further woes for vulnerable survivors living in tent camps prompted aid agencies to team up with the IRI – based at New York's Columbia University – and meteorological organisations in the United States and the Caribbean. Together they launched a website enabling disaster risk managers to monitor reliable forecasts more easily.
But the report singles out food security as the area where most progress has been made in using climate information to anticipate problems.
Kenya has set up a steering group involving government and U.N. agencies, the U.S.-funded Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) and the national meteorological department, which meets once a month to predict food shortages and help farmers cope with droughts or floods, as well as profit from favourable conditions.
And in another initiative to tackle entrenched vulnerability to climate change, the World Food Programme, the government and World Vision consulted climate records for Taita Taveta district in Coast Province to back up local views that drought had become more common. The result was a programme in which more than 4,500 local people received food aid in return for rehabilitating and extending a network of irrigation canals.
LACK OF FUNDS
The "Climate and Society" report also highlights the problems thrown up by fledgling attempts to provide climate services for the aid community. One major obstacle is inadequate funding from donors for disaster preparedness and prevention.
"Donors are lagging behind their rhetoric on disaster prevention, but on the other hand we haven't yet provided a lot of evidence about the added value of climate information," Molly Hellmuth, an IRI associate director who co-edited the report, told AlertNet.
"(Donors) need to understand that, when using seasonal forecasts to anticipate potential disasters, you will lose sometimes, but in the long-run, it's a winning investment."
The report cites the IFRC's first-ever flood emergency appeal based on seasonal climate forecasts for four West African countries in 2008. While donor contributions took a few weeks to emerge, the Red Cross used internal funds to stock up relief supplies in advance of the rains. That allowed it to meet people's needs for shelter, cooking supplies, water and sanitation within a day or two, compared with a 40-day wait when flooding hit the region in 2007.
Yet despite growing understanding that early action save lives as well as money, the report says emergency appeals based on climate information have not been very successful in garnering donor support ahead of time.
That could be starting to change. Last week, for example, Britain's Department for International Development (DFID) laid out plans for improving its response to disasters, saying it will invest more resources in strengthening resilience, including practical steps like increasing the number of cyclone warning alarms and public shelters, and building more and better flood defences.
All DFID's country programmes will incorporate disaster risk reduction plans, starting with Nepal, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi and Mozambique, it said, promising to include weather experts in the teams of specialists it sends into disaster zones.
In addition, discussions have been initiated between humanitarian agencies and donors about setting up new funding mechanisms and finding innovative ways to raise money for pre-emptive aid activities triggered by weather and climate warnings.
ACTIONABLE INFORMATION
The IRI publication argues that disaster risk managers need more help to understand how they should act on information from meteorological services and climate scientists, especially medium- and longer-term predictions.
Seasonal forecasts usually give a probability that rainfall will be above or below average a couple of months in advance. But varying probabilities can be difficult to interpret, Hellmuth said.
"We could develop thresholds that relieve disaster risk managers of the burden of interpreting this information and lead to early action – so that if there's, say, a 50 percent chance of above normal rainfall, they would know how to prepare," she added.
Similarly, providers of climate information can do a more effective job if they know what humanitarians really need. Through its partnership with the Red Cross, IRI has developed forecasts that include the likelihood of weather extremes occurring. Aid workers often find those predictions more useful than estimates of rainfall over a three-month period, for example, because spells of heavy rain are most likely to cause flooding.
Nonetheless, the report emphasises that the best approach is to combine climate information across a range of time scales where possible - from past data to short-term and seasonal forecasts, and scientific modelling of climate patterns for the coming decades.
One major barrier to this is that many low-income countries, particularly in Africa, simply do not have the forecasting capacity or climate records required. A separate report from Jan Egeland's taskforce, presented at the recent World Meteorological Congress, highlights how around 70 developing countries have little or no climate information, with Africa the least-covered continent.
It proposes the creation of a "Global Framework for Climate Services" that will make more climate information available to policy makers and others working to address the impacts of climate change, reduce the risk of disasters, and safeguard food production, water supplies and health, especially for the most vulnerable communities.
The initiative, endorsed by the member states of the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) at the congress earlier this month, aims to launch fast-track projects to build the climate-forecasting capacity of developing countries, forge better links between the providers of climate information and its users, and put in place a network of regional climate centres.
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