No. 3: June 2016

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In the past few months, all five of the FCFA research teams have begun producing enhanced scientific knowledge on Africa's climate: AMMA-2050, FRACTAL, HyCRISTAL, IMPALA, UMFULA. They’ve also begun hands-on pilot studies across sub-Saharan Africa, which use improved climate information to support complex decisions on long-term (5-40yr) investments, policies and plans. These pilot studies will be the cornerstone of FCFA’s work, demonstrating the application, value and role of climate information in complex decision-making contexts.

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FCFA brochure

FCFA is delivered through five research consortia and a coordination unit. The consortia are working across 11 countries and multiple institutions to achieve the goals of FCFA.

To learn more about each team’s work and how to collaborate, dive into the brochure, also available in French and Portuguese. In addition, a three minute animated slideshow introduces the FCFA programme – available in English, French and Portuguese.

Approaches to capacity building in Africa

Katharine Vincent of Kulima Integrated Development Solutions, part of the Future Climate for Africa ‘UMFULA‘ research team working in Malawi and Tanzania, explains how the team is taking a fresh look at capacity building for climate science and climate-smart decision-making. These insights draw on the recently published research article in Climate Policy.

Resources available: Understanding urban governance, entry points for climate science

The FCFA Programme and FRACTAL research team hosted a webinar on the 15th of April 2016. We are pleased to share the presentation and discussion documents from the event: Understanding Urban Governance: Entry Points for Climate Science.

Discussant Dr Sue Parnell leads a constructive conversation following the seminar presentations. From left to right: Dr Sue Parnell, Prof. Dianne Scott, Dr Hannah Baleta, Mr Gilbert Siame, Dr Tasila Banda.

This seminar presented a critical discussion on approaches for understanding the governance structures that shape medium-term development decisions taken in various African contexts and at various scales (e.g. city region, catchment, and national) and an opportunity to discuss entry points for climate science. The aim was to sharpen the theoretical underpinnings and the practical application of these approaches within the Future Climate for Africa programme.
Please feel free to watch an archived versio n of the webinar.

Event video available: Adapting Rwanda's economy to a changing climate

CDKN and FCFA hosted a public event Adapting Rwanda's economy to a changing climate at the Overseas Development Institute on 20 May 2016. This work is an early product of the Future Climate for Africa programme.

Panellists at this event discussed a ‘decision first’ approach to adapting to climate change in Rwanda’s tea and coffee industries. Speakers, including Paul Watkiss (GCAP), Alex Mulisa (FONERWA), Sarah Love (DfID) and Dr Emily Wilkinson (ODI) explored how lessons from the Rwandan approach can help other countries and sectors to become more climate-resilient.

A video recording of the event is now available to watch. At the event we launched the new FCFA film: Adapting Rwanda's economy to a changing climate, watch below:

Publications from FCFA researchers

FCFA's pan-African focused research team, IMPALA have shown that equilibrating hemispheric albedos in the HadGEM2-ES coupled climate model improves long standing model biases. This improves the modelling of monsoon rainfall across the Sahel and indicates that an accurate representation of the cross-equatorial energy transport appears to be critical if tropical performance is to be improved (Haywood et al. 2016).

Continuing in west Africa, AMMA-2050 present a new method to evaluate the spatial scale at which local monsoon onsets are coherent across West Africa. Identifying local onset onset regions and understanding their variability can provide important insights into the spatial limit of monsoon predictability. A potential use of local onset regions is presented (Fitzpatrick et al. 2016).

The FRACTAL research team address the challenge of co-producing climate knowledge in the African context, such as the low importance given to long term climate trends, short supply of capable boundary organisations and difficulty of engaging with decision-makers. They describe the context for a place-based exploratory analysis for climate risks, the elements and steps incorporated in the approach and the challenges still remaining (Steynor et al. 2016).

HyCRISTAL analysed how rainfall in Africa has changed since the 1980s. They found a trend of rainfall increase in the Sahel and Southern African regions and decline in East Africa (March to May). Rainfall changes in Sahel and Southern Africa were linked to greenhouse forcing and the strengthening of the Walker Circulation respectively (Maidment, Allan and Black 2016).

UMFULA have developed a process-based approach to climate model evaluation focussing on the South Indian Ocean Convergence Zone (SIOCZ), an austral summer rainfall feature extending across southern Africa into the southwest Indian Ocean. Simulation of the SIOCZ was evaluated for the CMIP5 . Comparison between CMIP5 and AMIP models revealed a systematic bias of excessive precipitation over southern Africa and the Indian Ocean, but not particularly along the SIOCZ (Lazenby, Todd and Wang 2016).

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