Building climate adaptation capabilities through technology and community

To effectively plan for adaptation to changes in climate, decision makers require infrastructure and tools that will provide them with timely access to current and future climate information. For example, climate scientists and operational forecasters need to access global and regional model projections and current climate information that they can use to prepare monitoring products and reports and then publish these for the decision makers. Through the UNDP African Adaption Programme, an infrastructure is being built across Africa that will provide multi-tiered access to such information. Web accessible servers running RAMADDA, an open source content management system for geoscience information, will provide access to the information at many levels: from the raw and processed climate model output to real-time climate conditions and predictions to documents and presentation for government officials. Output from regional climate models (e.g. RegCM4) and downscaled global climate models will be accessible through RAMADDA. The Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) is being used by scientists to create visualizations that assist the understanding of climate processes and projections, using the data on these as well as external servers. Since RAMADDA is more than a data server, it is also being used as a publishing platform for the generated material that will be available and searchable by the decision makers. Users can wade through the enormous volumes of information and extract subsets for their region or project of interest. Participants from 20 countries attended workshops at ICTP during 2011. They received training on setting up and installing the servers and necessary software and are now working on deploying the systems in their respective countries. This is the first time an integrated and comprehensive approach to climate change adaptation has been widely applied in Africa. It is expected that this infrastructure will enhance North-South collaboration and improve the delivery of technical support and services. This improved infrastructure will enhance the capacity of countries to provide a wide range of robust products and services in a timely manner.