Bunda College joins global experts on climate change prediction in Africa

Bunda College of Agriculture, a constituent college of the University Malawi, is part of the EU-Africa research consortium that will be working on climate change prediction, impacts and adaptation.

The four year project worth 587,000.00 Euros is being funded by the European Union and has 18 collaborating institutions.

According to the Country Principal Investigator, Dr David Mkwambisi (pictured), the project is being led by Riccardo Valentini of Italy.

Mkwambisi said that the proposal was developed due to several climate change stresses that are affecting Africa.

‘This research is important because Sub Saharan Africa (SSA) being the world’s poorest region with climatic and ecological vulnerability greatly enhanced by the socio-economic situation and the low adaptive capacity, countries will be able to put in place strategies that can enhance adaptation to climate change and weather variability, “said Mkwambisi.

Mkwambisi further said that the research will help Malawi whose agriculture is predominantly rain-fed and crop harvest and animal stocking rate, income and, ultimately, survival, depend critically on sufficient and timely soil moisture.

He further explained that stakeholders need the appropriate and most up-to-date tools to better understand and predict climate change, assess its impact on African ecosystems and population, evaluate and undertake the correct adaptation strategies.

“In this respect, there is need to develop improved climate predictions on seasonal to decadal climatic scales in SSA, to evaluate climate change impacts on water and agriculture, improve early warning systems from short to medium-long term predictions and propose new and feasible adaptation strategies, especially fitted for the weakest communities.”

In response to Nyasa Times questionnaire, Mkwambisi said that the current proposal will focus on the following specific objectives to suggest and analyses new suited adaptation strategies, focused on local needs; develop a new concept of 10 years monitoring and forecasting warning system, useful for food security, risk management and civil protection in SSA and  analyses the economic impacts of climate change on agriculture and water resources in SSA and the cost-effectiveness of potential adaptation measures.

When asked to justify the need for the current research project, Mkwambisi who is also leading other global research projects on climate change related issues in Malawi said that even though there are several regional climate models developed for predicting seasonal to decadal climate and that can be applied in Africa, they show many limitations and there is a strong need to improve them in order to increase their applicability and validity.

He further said that improvements in dynamical climate prediction over the past 25 years did not occur because of any major scientific breakthroughs in our understanding of the physics or dynamics of the climate system.

“On the contrary, our experience indicates that dynamical weather and climate prediction is challenging and improvements take place slowly and through a great deal of hard work” said Mkwambisi.

“There is still some significant unresolved seasonal to decadal predictability and the land surface has been recently evidenced as a very promising contributor to forecasts skill over sensitive land areas such as SSA. Nevertheless, we have only a very limited understanding and quantification of the land surface effective capability to raise the level of predictability at seasonal and longer time scales,” said Dr Mkwambisi.

In the current proposal, Malawi will be fully involved in the modeling components, especially in the downscaling activities and in the climate impacts analysis and the consequent evaluation of vulnerabilities and adaptation strategies that will be considered in the case studies around Linthipe catchment area (Lilongwe, Dedza, Ntcheu and Salima).

In particular the following innovations of the current proposal beyond the state-of-the-art will be undertaken; The production of a harmonized 30+ year database of soil moisture data from microwave remote sensing will for the first time allow a quantitative analysis of climate-vegetation-soil moisture interactions on interannual to decadal time scale based on observation data.

They will estimate for the first time the coupling and the reciprocal forcing between soil moisture-vegetation, evapotranspiration and rainfall over SSA and develop a new integrated approach to climate impact assessments.

They will also be a new medium-term (10 years) warning system and a new socio-economic impact assessment through improvements of a recursive dynamic computable general equilibrium model.

Ten partners are from African countries (Burkina Faso, Ghana, Togo, Sudan, Ethiopia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Tanzania, Kenya, Malawi and South Africa) while the rest are from Europe (Italy, Sweden, France, Netherlands, Spain and Germany).

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