Project Aims to Strengthen Climate Resilience

The Caribbean, Asia’s Indo-Gangetic Plain and West Africa are three regions known to be extremely vulnerable to climate variability and change, particularly to droughts, extreme weather events and stresses on food production, water resources and coastal areas. A new five-year project jointly led by the International Research Institute for Climate and Society and the University of Arizona aims to strengthen climate resilience in these regions using strategies in the sectors of water resources, hazard risk management and coastal planning and management.

The project team will focus on five key activities:

• Assessing each region’s vulnerabilities, information needs, capabilities and adaptation challenges.
• Working with national meteorological agencies as well as regional climate centers to produce forecasts and other climate information products that serve the needs of the water, disaster response and coastal management sectors.
• Using these products to develop drought early-warning systems and other types of integrated decision-support tools
• Improving the system through rigorous evaluation
• Building local capacity through trainings and workshops

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Agency for International Development are funding the project, which will kick off its first set of activities in late May 2014 in the Caribbean. It will expand to Asia in the fall of 2014 and to Africa by the end of 2015.

Read the full story here.

About the International Research and Applications Project (NOAA)

Official IRAP website