Africa needs long-term investment in scientific infrastructure and science careers to allow the
continent to adapt to climate change and its effect on weather systems.
New research led
by the University of Leeds in partnership with the National Centre
for Atmospheric Science, says the international community is spending
billions on climate services for the region, but they should listen to the
needs of African scientists if those services are to be effective and
sustainable.
In a paper published in Nature, the researchers say Africa weather and seasonal forecasting is being held back by gaps in understanding of the science behind weather systems in the tropics.
Around half the population of Africa do not have access to any early
warnings of hazardous weather, and massive improvements in global weather and
climate science and services have not been reflected on the continent.
Organisations such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the
World Bank and the United Nations, are keen to rectify this and have spent many
millions of pounds on the delivery of weather radars to African nations but few
of them have delivered useful data due to a lack of investment in their
operation on the ground.
The African weather services market is currently estimated at around $60
million but none of the top 20 public and private sector providers are based in
Africa itself.
Co-author Douglas Parker, Professor of Meteorology at the National
Centre for Atmospheric Science and the University of Leeds, said: “External
solutions are not always the best for Africa, and unless long-standing
challenges to African capacity and capability are addressed, the investment
will lack sustainability, as has been seen many times in the past.
“It’s essential that African scientists have the skills and the tools to
provide their communities with locally designed climate solutions. For example,
imagine that the flood management authorities ask their weather service for
forecasts to be delivered for a particular city. It’s vital that the weather
service is able to provide those new forecasts
without always needing assistance from a partner thousands of miles away in
Europe.
“It is not enough simply to impose solutions which work in the Global
North. Increasing the availability of inaccurate forecasts will not give people
better early warnings; sending more radars to Africa will have no impact on
data availability unless we invest in African capacity and capability to
maintain the equipment and exploit the data they produce.”
Forecasting solutions
The University of Leeds is already working on forecasting solutions with
partners in Africa to strengthen the capacity of agencies in the continent so
that they can meet the needs of their population.
One successful outcome of that partnership is the FASTA smartphone app
which provides real-time information about active storms over Africa as well as
a short forecast of their movement over the next couple of hours.
FASTA has been developed with African partners and has been released in
several African countries to support the mission of providing a weather service
with state-of-the-art information.
Several African centres are now generating the same information locally
and the University is working with them to exploit the data for the benefit of
their communities.
But there are still many barriers to Africa’s ability to adapt to
climate change which are highlighted in the new research, alongside several
possible solutions.
The research concludes that creating sustainable solutions is also
linked to innovation and job creation in Africa. Dr Benjamin Lamptey, Visiting Professor of Meteorology at the National
Centre for Atmospheric Science and the University of Leeds and lead author of
the study, said that the weather of Africa was different to that of Europe and
the USA and that new approaches to weather prediction needed to be developed in
Africa, for Africa, including new ways to use the data and new approaches to
the daily operation of a weather service.
“Every year, projects are funded across Africa to establish better
weather prediction services, but very often when the project ends, the African
teams still lack skills and infrastructure to maintain those services
independently,” he added.
“Although weather prediction always requires international cooperation
for sharing of data, we should not always be reliant on the Global North for
basic things.
“There are many talented young scientists in Africa who have the ability
to harness the new tools which are becoming available – high resolution models,
AI methods and satellite data. But this new generation of African scientists
needs to be supported by the training, hardware and data which modern weather
prediction will demand.”
The researchers say cooperation between academic and operational sectors
in Africa will be key to resolving some of the issues, with universities having
the capability to share knowledge about advances in weather prediction with
hundreds of students annually.
