New microsite on FCFA's impact and relevance
FCFA has improved the understanding of what drives Africa’s climate and how it will change, as well as the impacts and adaptation options. The use of this climate information to address real world problems and inform development plans was achieved by FCFA through innovative engagement processes that included inter alia government decision-makers, communities and researchers. This microsite aims to outline and sign-post this impact of FCFA to readers through the synergies between the following three pillars: Pillar 1: Delivering a step change in climate science for Africa, Pillar 2: Novel approaches to research and engagement and Pillar 3: Influencing real world problems.
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FCFA podcast series: The African Climate Breakdown - stories about climate change
Listen in as we share FCFA’s ground-breaking climate change research and hear stories on the impact of climate change on Africa and how communities can better adapt to allow for a more climate-resilient future. Follow and subscribe to the podcast on Apple or Spotify or listen on the FCFA website.
Listen to episode 3: Tackling climate change in African cities
The episode reflects on key research from FRACTAL and AMMA-2050. We delve into the fact that cities are particularly at risk to the impacts of climate change. Rapid population growth, as well as rapid environmental, economic, and social change which present their own issues, all are magnified by climate change.
Listen to episode 4: Making Africa’s agriculture more climate resilient
The episode reflects on key research from HyCRISTAL, UMFULA and AMMA-2050. We discuss the innovative approaches used to address the impact of climate change on agriculture in West Africa, East Africa and Malawi.
In case you missed it - watch the recent learning sessions
These two learning sessions provide insight into the experiences from international multi-consortia research and development programmes (FCFA, CARIAA and CDKN). Participants share lessons from the successes and failures of existing efforts relating to Southern leadership and the importance of including knowledge management units and Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) processes in programmes.
Watch the sessions:
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Online climate change journalist training
Future Climate for Africa, together with leading climate journalists and experts from ICPAC, BBC Media Action and NECJOGHA hosted online climate change journalist trainings for 45 African journalists in October and November 2020 and February 2021. The aim of the training was to increase journalists’ understanding of climate change and their capacity to report on climate change issues in Africa. Read more here.
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Call for applications: FCFA and GCRF African SWIFT Python training
GCRF African SWIFT and FCFA are organising a virtual one-week intensive training course from the 7th to 12th June in the use of Python programming for climate data analysis and visualisation. This virtual training call is open to all researchers in atmospheric science and meteorology, and to forecasters at operational weather centres based in Africa who have a keen interest in developing their data analysis skills. Applicants who are under the GCRF African SWIFT project and FCFA are highly encouraged to apply. Complete an online application form here by 30th April 2021. Read more here.
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New open access book on Climate Risk in Africa - profiling adaptation and building resilience in sub-Saharan Africa
The open-access book, “Climate RIsk in Africa - Adaptation and Resilience” published in January 2021 by Palgrave Macmillan captures experiences from FCFA. Each chapter examines how FCFA researchers and practitioners worked with stakeholders in different contexts and regions to jointly develop climate information. The work demonstrates a need to blend insights from climate science about what the future climate will look like with experiences of the social science of response through adaptation, based on insights from practical applications in a variety of contexts.
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Technical guidelines for using CP4-Africa simulation data
This guide provides a practical overview of the first pan-African, kilometre-scale convection-permitting regional climate simulations (CP4-Africa), run as part of FCFA’s IMPALA project. CP4-Africa provides the first convection-permitting resolution, multi-year climate simulations for present-day and idealised future climates on an African-wide domain. The simulations have provided an unprecedented level of climate detail across Africa and initial studies have shown improvements in the simulation of many, but not all, aspects of African climate.
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New interactive tool on climate change and urban, water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH)
Climate change is expected to have severe consequences across Africa. Cities in Africa are particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change. This interactive tool provides an overview of the status of Urban Water Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) systems in countries and cities where FCFA has been working, and the climate risks these WASH systems are facing. It is intended to provide an insight into the relationship between future climate and effective WASH service delivery in African cities.
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This is the sound of West Africa’s changing climate
If you could take a year’s worth of rain gauge readings from a city in Ghana, and transform the information into a musical track, what would it sound like? What would the tune sound like if the data were to show the rainfall that the same city might expect a century later, based on computer-generated climate projections of a warmer world? A group of scientists and musicians have teamed up to use the process of ‘data sonification’ to do just that, using climate model data from cities in the West African countries of Niger and Ghana to create tracks that demonstrate musically how the climate will shift away from the historic norm within the next century. Read more.
East African infrastructure planning must consider both wetter and drier years
Kholombidzo is a town on the banks of the Shire River in southern Malawi, and is the site of a proposed hydro-electric scheme that will add between 160 and 370 megawatts of electricity capacity to Malawi’s grid once it is completed. But severe rainfall in the Shire River Basin in 2019 is a telling reminder of how exposed this kind of infrastructure can be to climate risk, and how fluctuations in water flow in a river system between drier and wetter seasons or years can compromise the performance of important water-related infrastructure. A new study by climate researchers with a special interest in East Africa further argues that drought will also have a significant impact on the performance of the proposed Kholombidzo plant and other water-related infrastructure that is planned for the area. Read more.
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Collaborative research produces refined climate modelling and weather forecasting for Africa
Researchers working with IMPALA are wrapping up a cross-disciplinary, multi-institutional collaboration through which they have developed a model called CP4-Africa. The model has already been applied along with traditional climate model projections in several regions in sub-Saharan Africa. The aim is to produce climate information that will assist policy makers with accessible and useful information that can support governments in making more climate-sensitive planning and decisions. Read more.
 How will West Africa’s climate ‘feel’ decades from now?
The paper, published recently in the journal Climate Change by researchers working with AMMA-2050, shows that by the end of the century the average day in West Africa will be well outside of what people experience in today’s climate. This is as the region warms and the monsoon rains are disrupted in response to worsening global atmospheric carbon pollution. The paper visits a number of locations across the region, and gives the likelihood of what a ‘typical’ day will be like at these locations, relative to the present climate. Read more.
Improving prospects of rainfall projections in Eastern Africa through a convection permitting approach
The first African-led analysis of the highest resolution simulations of African climate change to date (Misiani et al 2020) show an improved simulation of the July-August (known locally as Kiremt in Ethiopia) rainfall of the South Sudan/Ethiopian region, and that global models are likely to underestimate increases in extreme rainfall under climate change. The analysis was performed at ICPAC (IGAD Climate Prediction and Applications Centre), in collaboration with the University of Leeds, as part of the East Meets West add-on to the HyCRISTAL project. The research also found increases in wind speed at low levels in the Turkana Jet, an important feature of regional wind patterns that are already being exploited for renewable electricity. Read more.
Locally adapted millet may boost farmer resilience in a drier Sahel
Farmers in the semi-arid Sahel region of West Africa have domesticated strains of pearl millet in a way that has made these ‘landraces’ ideally suited to the specific growing conditions of the region. Seed sharing between farmers and seed selection over many generations has been central to adapting the genetics of this crop to the hot, dry climate here, and its nutrient-poor soils. Read more.
 Rising temperatures may alter lightning activity over Africa
Parts of Africa are already lightning hotspots, and warming atmospheric conditions linked with rising carbon pollution may drive increased lightning activity during thunderstorm events in certain regions, according to new research from the University of Leeds and the UK Met Office. Read more.
Working back from the future: planning for Africa’s climate-altered conditions
By the year 2040, if shifts in the East African climate bring heavier rainstorms to the region, this will most likely result in greater flooding, urban infrastructure damage, and disease outbreaks in cities. Planning for that eventuality — putting the right drainage systems in place, for instance — calls for practical decision-making today that can be put into immediate effect so that cities in 2040 are prepared. Researchers from HyCRISTAL have developed a novel planning tool that can help today’s decision-makers bridge the gap between the need for long-term change and the short-term practical actions that are needed now in order to address future development challenges. Read more.
Grappling with risk in a climate-altered future: new Africa-focused book
Climate Risk in Africa: Adaptation and Resilience is an open-access book which draws on the experience of FCFA. The FCFA work aimed to support African countries by producing useable and appropriately designed climate information in order to further climate-resilient development and planning. FCFA projects focused on improving the availability, accessibility and use of climate information across various contexts. This included urban issues such as water and sanitation, or rural issues such as livelihoods or agriculture, across a range of sub-Saharan African countries. Read more.
 The need for inclusive, co-produced climate adaptation projects
Development funding earmarked for climate adaptation can be misused in the local context and could worsen the kind of community-level vulnerability that the funding is intended to address, explains Dr Katharine Vincent from Kulima Integrated Development Solutions and an associate professor at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Vincent recently took part in a global study which looks at precisely this: how development funding that is intended to boost adaptation to climate change can have unexpected outcomes, such as reinforcing or creating new forms of vulnerability. Read more.
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Recent journal articles by FCFA researchers
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Klein C, Nkrumah F, Taylora C, Adefisan E (2021). Seasonality and Trends of Drivers of Mesoscale Convective Systems in Southern West Africa. Journal of Climate.
Rowell D, Fitzpatrick R, Jackson L, Redmond G. (2021). Understanding Intermodel Variability in Future Projections of a Sahelian Storm Proxy and Southern Saharan Warming. Journal of Climate.
Ward N, Fink A, Keane R, Guichard F, Marsham J, Parker D, Taylor C. (2021). Synoptic timescale linkage between midlatitude winter troughs Sahara temperature patterns and northern Congo rainfall: A building block of regional climate variability. International Journal of Climatology.
Wilcox C, Aly C, Vischel T, Panthou G, Blanchet J, Quantin G, Lebel T. (2021). Stochastorm: A stochastic rainfall simulator for convective storms. Journal of Hydrometeorology.
Harvey, B., Huang, Y., Araujo, J., Vincent K., Roux, J., Rouhaud, E., Visman, E (2021). Mobilizing Climate Information for Decision-Making in Africa: Contrasting User-Centered and Knowledge-Centered Approaches. Frontiers in Climate.
Mubaya, C.P., Ndebele-Murisaa, M.R., Mamombe, R (2020). Alternative inclusive approaches for improving climate information services and decision-making in Harare, Zimbabwe. Urban Climate.
Daniels, E., Bharwani, S., Swartling, A.G., Vulturius, G., Brandon, K (2020). Refocusing the climate services lens: Introducing a framework for co-designing “transdisciplinary knowledge integration processes” to build climate resilience. Climate Services.
Macadam I, Rowell D, Steptoe H (2020). Refining projections of future temperature change in West Africa. Climate Research.
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