Organs
The Secretariat
In recognition of the need for enhanced understanding of the mutual processes driving Africa’s development, and variability and change in the climate system in order to improve predictive capabilities at all timescales and development scenarios, participants of the Climate Research for Development (CR4D) initiative meeting in Marrakech decided to set up a temporary Secretariat at the African Climate Policy Centre (ACPC) of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA). Hence, the Secretariat formally begun operations in the middle of June 2015 with its immediate task of developing an election mechanism for the selection of members of the scientific committee. Moreover, the Secretariat is/will be responsible for the implementation of CR4D-Africa agenda. The CR4D Coordinator is responsible for coordinating and managing the day-to-day activities of the Secretariat including provision of technical and strategic leadership, programme co-ordination and management roles, as well as programme outreach and networking support.
Oversight Board
The oversight Board provides strategic direction and serves as custodian of the CR4D agenda. It is comprised of the CR4D founding partners; ACPC/ ClimDev-Africa and AMCOMET. It endorses nominees to the Scientific advisory Committee (SAC) and the Institutional Collaboration Platform (ICP).
Institutional Collaboration Platform
- An important CR4D-decision making body that acts like the General Assembly or Congress, and will be the body that serves as the custodian of CR4D Agenda by making sure that CR4D priorities cuts across science, services, policy and practice.
- ICP in collaboration with CR4D Secretariat will take an active role in mobilizing resources for the CR4D Agenda.
Membership
- Representative of all key stakeholders: Research; Service Providers; Policy, user/practitioners; Civil Society Organizations; NGOs; Development Partners/Agencies; Foundations, etc.
- Permanent membership is proposed for the three CR4D Partners (ACPC, AMCOMET and WMO).
- Permanent membership proposed for RECs(Regional Economic Communities), RCCs (Regional Climate Centers), and RTCs (Regional Technology Centres) that provide the institutional mechanisms to mainstream the CR4D agenda into policy.
- Participation could be flexible according to the themes being addressed by the ICP (inclusive participation – representing stakeholders from all relevant sectors – researches, user community and service providers).
Scientific Advisory Committee
The Scientific Advisory Committee (SAC) serves as the caretaker of the research agenda by filtering stakeholder identified priorities, and ensuring they are consistent and aligned to funding priorities and principle of equity; - regional, gender, and youth (early career) balance. It includes representatives of both climate and social sciences and is to provide strategic guidance on-going climate-related research in Africa and relevant international research. The SAC duties and responsibilities cover wide ranges including implementing the Institutional Collaboration Platform’s recommended priority research agenda; developing and updating a database/inventory of African Climate Research Institutions and climate and related experts/expertise including those involved with development sectors as well as private sector and NGOs; and leading periodic gap and needs assessment, including where and whether repositories of information/data of previous and ongoing activities are available and accessible.
Membership
- Representatives of key stakeholders: Climate Science, Climate Services, Climate Policy, and possible Practitioners.
- Regional balance should be observed at all times by ensuring that at least one climate scientist or social scientist represents East, West, Central, South, and North Africa in as much as possible.
Selection of SAC members
The nomination of SAC members took long process, starting with an initial list of 136 nominees. Based on disciplines, skills, competency, gender, geographic distribution, the committee retained 32 nominees. In February 2015, in Cape Verde during the official launch of the CR4D initiative, the SAC nominees had been whittled down to eight (8) members. However, a decision was made, during the oversight board meeting in May 2015 to expand to 17 in order to meet the key criteria of multi-disciplinarily, gender and regional balance. The Oversight Board also announced its decision to expand the SAC member to 19 to address the current gender imbalance as well as inadequate representation of the social science experts in the SAC and accepted the nomination of Prof. Richard Anyah as the 16th member.
CR4D Scientific Advisory Committee (SAC) Members
Bruce Hewitson: Professor Bruce Hewitson is the National Research Chair on Climate Change at the University of Cape Town with a PhD from Pennsylvania State University (1992). His key expertise is in regional climate change, climate modelling, downscaling and climate change scenarios.He also has a breadth of experience in issues relating to these topics, such as mentoring and training in capacity building activities, engaging with stakeholder communities on climate change issues across Africa, and serving the international climate change research activities through IPCC and related agencies.As director of the Climate System Analysis Group (CSAG), Professor Hewitson has extensive experience in multi-disciplinary projects, project proposals, project management, and fund generation.
Jenniffer Mohammed-Katerere: Dr. Katerere is an independent human rights, environmental law and policy expert working on rights-environment issues. Her work focuses on governance, entitlements, and vulnerability, well-being and livelihoods issues with a strong emphasis on empowering people and addressing poverty. Although a lawyer by training, Jennifer has worked in multidisciplinary research for 15 years, often engaging directly at the research-policymaking interface. My experience includes working with national, regional (predominantly in Africa but also in Asia), and international organizations to support policy development from local to global levels – and it extends across various resource sectors including water, forests, and wildlife. Jennifer currently leads the IUCN initiative to develop a natural resource governance framework and is chair of IUCN-CEESP Theme on Environment, Conflict and Security. Most recently, she has worked on environmental change-vulnerability-human well-being links; conflict-governance-human security interactions; collaborative (including transboundary) natural resource management, governance, and policy to reduce conflict and improve livelihood opportunities.
Specialties: Human vulnerability and resilience, Environmental and natural resource conflict, Climate change adaptation, Human rights and natural resource management and governance.
Opha Pauline Dube: Prof. Dube is an Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Science at the University of Botswana. She holds a PhD from University of Queensland, Australia - 2000; an Mphil. Degree from Cranfield Institute of Technology, UK - 1989 and a BA degree from the University of Botswana (UB) – 1985, with Geography and History as core subjects. In 2012 she held a 3 months Visiting Research Fellowship at the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility (NCCARF), Griffith University, Australia. Her field of teaching, research and publications cover social and biophysical aspects of the environment and include applications of geo-spatial information technologies, land degradation/desertification, wild land fires, impacts of climate change, vulnerability and adaptation, sustainable development, gender and environment and environmental hazards and disasters. Pauline has been active in global environmental change research for more than 20 years, with a focus on Africa, initially through the International Geo-sphere Biosphere Programme (IGBP) and the Global Systems for Research and Training (START). She has been chair of the Botswana Global Environmental Change Committee (BGCC) since 2002, a committee she founded 1993. Recently she joined the IGBP and the International Human Dimensions Program (IHDP) collaborative synthesis activity on the concept of the Anthropocene.
Benjamin Lamptey: Dr. Lamptey has a PhD in Geosciences from Pennsylvania State University and is the current Deputy Director General of ACMAD. Prior to joining ACMAD Dr. Lamptey was a postdoctoral researcher at NCAR where he worked on the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model, the Community Land Model (CLM) as well as using datasets (both remotely sensed and in situ) for various analyses particularly over West Africa. He is also a Senior Lecturer at the Regional Maritime University, Ghana. His expertise are on Environmental Applications: Science and Impacts of climate variability and global environmental change, modeling weather, climate and climate change, climate change adaptation, remote sensing, meteorological applications to different disciplines.
Arame Tall: Dr. Tall Climate Information Services- Scientist, Champion at CCAFS- the CGIAR Program on Climate Change Agriculture and Food Security. She has been Consultant, Global Framework for Climate Services (GFCS) Office during which period she designed and facilitated pilot workshops to establish frameworks for climate services at the national level in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, using innovative methodology to communicate climate science to policy makers and vulnerable communities. Arame has also worked for International Societies of the Red Cross to provide technical advice and guidance to the Red Cross movement in Africa on how to best use the new scientific tools for Climate Risk Management, to anticipate, plan and prepare for climatic hazards and thwart unnecessary loss of lives and livelihoods caused by completely predicable disasters in the region. Arame has also been Consultant, Climate Change, Disasters, Development: United Nations International Strategy on Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) on Hyogo Framework African National Platforms Institutional Assessment, and Facilitator, Early Warning – Early Action & Drought Risk Reduction in East Africa Hosted and facilitated National Early Warning – Early Action Workshops for Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda.
Amadou Gaye: Prof. Gaye is a scientist and Director of the Physics Laboratory of the Atmosphere and the Ocean at UCAD and is specialised in rainfall variability related to the African monsoon. He is very much active on analysis of climate simulations for climate change and variability issues. He is involved in coordination of African scientists working on Climate. He has been Project Investigator for several research projects.
Samuel Nii Ardey Codjoe: Prof. Codjoe is the Vice-President of UAPS, and holds a PhD degree in Geography and Soil Science (Minor) from the University of Bonn, Germany. He is a Professor and the Director at the Regional Institute for Population Studies (RIPS), University of Ghana. He also teaches at the Centre for Migration Studies, Centre for Social Policy Studies and the Institute for Statistical Social and Economic Research all of the University of Ghana. He is currently the Project Leader of the African Adaptation Research Centre of Excellence being sponsored by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) of Canada. His research interests are population-environment nexus, migration, fertility, and climate change/variability and its impact on urban and rural livelihoods.
Wilfried Pokam: Dr. Pokam is a Lecturer in the Department of Physics of the High Teacher Training College in the University of Yaounde 1. He holds a PhD degree in Atmospheric Physics from the University of Yaounde 1. His research interests have included the study of atmospheric thermodynamics in Central Africa. He has become noted for his work on moisture flux in relation to the water cycle over the region of prime diabatic heating on the continent, which highlights new climate features over Central Africa. He has been a consultant for the Center For International Forestry Research (CIFOR) in charge of climate modeling. During this period, he gained expertise on the climate-human-ecosystem interactions and work with the forestry research and user communities. He also contributes to the CORDEX project as facilitator for the
Oluyede Ajayi: Dr. Oluyede obtained PhD in Agricultural Economics at the University of Hannover in Germany. Presently he works a Senior Programme Coordinator in CTA, The Netherlands from where he designs and manages agricultural and rural development projects for Africa, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) regions. Previously, he worked as Global Co-Leader of a global policy initiative and as Senior Scientist in International Agricultural research Centres (ICRAF, Africa Rice and IITA) where his work focused on ensuring that science leads to developmental impacts for rural communities. He had also worked in the NGO sector supporting rural microfinance institutions and capacity building. He has to his credit over one hundred and sixty (160) journal articles, books, book chapters and other academic publications under several themes. One of his publications is currently listed among the "top ten most read articles" in a global journal (International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability).
Judith Omumbo: Dr. Omumbo holds a PhD from Oxford University, an MPH (Hebrew University, Israel) and a Bachelor’s degree in Dentistry (University of Nairobi). She began her career in epidemiology working as part of the KEMRI/Welcome Trust Collaborative Programme in Kenya. She was awarded a Welcome Prize studentship to undertake DPhil at the University of Oxford in modeling the spatial risks of Plasmodium falciparum in East Africa and completed her Dphil in 2005 after which she moved to the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) as an Associate Research Scientist with IRI’s Africa Program until 2011. Her research interests continue to involve building the capacity of the health sector in Africa to use climate information effectively for decision- making in the control of climate sensitive diseases. She serves on the Scientific Advisory Committee of the World Wide Anti-malaria Resistance Network (WWARN) and the External Technical Advisory Group for AvecNet, a project on “Targeting malaria by hitting the vector” that is led by the Liverpool School of Tropical medicine and sponsored by the European Union. She has contributed significantly to the development of the use of maps and Geographic Information Systems to undertake the spatial and temporal distribution of malaria in Kenya and the Greater Horn of Africa over the past 15 years of her career. She serves as at technical advisor on malaria international program of the World Health Organization She has added her knowledge of climate information to capacity building initiatives she has led for climate sensitive disease control program in Eastern Africa.
Laban Ogallo: Prof. Ogallo is the former Director of IGAD Climate Predisction and Applications Center (ICPAC). He is currently the Coordinator of a 5-year UNDP-ICPAC project on early warning and disaster risk reduction over eastern Africa. He obtained his B.Sc (Hons), M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from University of Nairobi.He also obtained a postgraduate Diploma in Operational Forecasting from the then East African Institute for Meteorology Training and Research [EAIMTR]. He has served as the Secretary of Kenya National Council for Science and Technology. Prof. Ogallo has published and contributed to over 100 scientific papers and books, mainly in the field of meteorology, climate change and related applications. His main areas of research interest include climate change, Climate modeling, prediction and applications of climate information in integrated disaster risk reduction, and sustainable development efforts. He has been an active participant in the UN IPCC climate change assessment reports. He is a member of many environment related professional bodies / advisory committees at Global, regional and national levels including being a TWAS fellow.
Fredrick Semazzi: Prof. Semazzi holds joint appointment in the Departments of Marine, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, and Mathematics at North Carolina State University, USA. His expertise spans a range of climate and weather related fields, in both the modeling and applications arena. Prof. Semazzi has lead a number of international Programs, and served in many International climate working groups. He was the NSF, Associate Program Director: Climate Dynamics Program (1989-1990). He served as Director of the Climate Information & Prediction Services (CLIPS) program: World Meteorological Organization (WMO), Geneva, Switzerlan, during the period 1998-1999. He was the first WCRP/CLIVAR, Senior Scientist: International Climate Variability (CLIVAR) Project Office (ICPO) of the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) during the period, 1999-2000. Most recently, he was panel member on the WMO/ICSU/IOC Joint Scientific Committee (JSC), for the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP); 2009-2012; Member of Regional Climate Outlook Fora (RCOF) Expert Review Panel: World Meteorological Organization RCOF Review 2008. Currently he is leading Regional Hydroclimate Program (RHP) over eastern Africa ( Hydroclimate Project for Lake Victoria Basin-HyVIC) that was approved by WCRP/GEWEX in December 2014.
Cush Ngonzo-Luweso: Dr. Ngonzo-Luweso received the best scholar award at Kenyatta University (Nairobi, Kenya) in the year 2014, and was the recipient of the 2011 H2O Adaptation Award from the Canadian International Development Research Center (IDRC). Cush is currently working at IWMI as the Focal Regional Manager of the Volta and Niger Basins (West Africa) for the CGIAR research program on “Water, Land and Ecosystem (WLE)” led by IWMI as of April 2015. Prior to joining IWMI, he was a lecturer of advanced quantitative techniques and Economics of Watersheds at the Department of Geography of Kenyatta University (Nairobi, Kenya). He also worked in the public and private sectors in Kenya and DR Congo as well as countries like Mali, Uganda, Tanzania, Burkina Faso and Ghana, thus totaling 19 years of professional experience in teaching, research, project management and evaluation in Central, East and West Africa. He is a versatile researcher holding PhD and Masters of Applied Science in Integrated Watershed Management (esp. Economics of Water and Climate Change) from Kenyatta University (Nairobi, Kenya), and B.A. and M.A. in Applied Economics (Finance) from University of Kinshasa (DR Congo). He is also an Alumnus of the World Bank’s IPDET Program at Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada), SLE/ Humboldt University of Berlin (Germany) and the IASS – Institute of Advanced Sustainability Studies -Potsdam (Germany). He has published over 20 papers, 7 book chapters and 2 books, all-focusing on of Water and Climate Change.
Noureddin Gaaloul: Dr. Gaaloul is a water expert and Full Researcher in the National Research Institute for Rural Engineering, Water and Forestry (INRGREF-Tunis). Working as a hydraulic engineer in Tunisia, he has more than 15 years of experience as a national and international expert on water management, with a focus on management and environmental aspects. He holds a Ph.D. in Sciences and Technology of Water, from the University of Bordeaux I, France, in 1992. His work is in the Geology Company of Mining and Research (B.R.G.M – French). He was involved in several strategic studies with the Tunisian Ministry Agriculture and Hydraulic Resources and has contributed to both the development of the Tunisian strategy for agriculture and water resources adaptation to climate change. He has published several papers and he is also author or co-author of several reports, consulting and expertise reports. He has given several scientific presentations in national and international high standard conferences such as international conference on Seawater Intrusion in Coastal Aquifers, and international seminars.
Ashraf Zakey: Dr. Zakey is the Under Secretary of state for research and climate
The Egyptian Meteorological Authority. He has more than 22 years of combine national and international experiences in Air Quality modeling, Atmospheric Modeling and climate-chemistry interactions. I have good skills of understanding the needs toward the air pollution to meteorological science. As well, I have experiences in leading a projects and organizing meetings on national and international coordination. I participated in several national and EU projects. I am author and co-author of several scientific publications in international journals and conferences. I organized several training workshops on the theory of atmospheric modeling and environmental aspects including climate weather and air quality. I'm a reviewer of a number of papers in International Journals.
Richard Anyah hold a BSc, MSc, and Ph.D. degrees in Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences and has over seventeen (17) years of experience and expertise in climate and related research, project coordination, management and administration. His research is mostly focused on modeling the impacts of climate variability and change at the food-energy-water systems (FEWS) nexus.. As a tenured Associate Professor of Atmospheric Science in the Department of Natural Resources and the Environment at the University of Connecticut, he has been engaged in research and teaching programs in regional climate change and impacts modeling and related applications to understand climate-human-ecosystem interactions and impacts. He has also demonstrated his scholarship, professional, work, and project management experiences in over 50 publications and presentations at different levels. .Furthermore, he has been consistently engaged with the many regional and international climate community in the following capacities: (a) Member, Scientific Steering Group: World Climate Research Program (WCRP), Global Energy and Water Exchanges Program(GEWEX), (b) Point of Contact for Eastern Africa for WCRP-Coordinated Regional Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX), (c) Co-Chair of the Scientific and technical Committee, First Africa Climate Science Conference (ACC2013), (d) Chair: Steering Committee: Connecticut Conference on Natural Resources 2014, (e) Guest Editor, Climate Research: Special Issue on Theory and Use of Regional Climate Models. 2010-2012, (f) Expert Reviewer: IPCC, Working Group II (WGII) 4th & 5th Assessment Reports, (g) Coordinator of ICPAC Climate Modeling Advisory Task Team (2009-2013). As the first CR4D interim Coordinator, he provided strategic direction and guidance in the implementation of CR4D Initiative as well as networking and knowledge dissemination related to the CR4D activities, besides leading the development of strategic partnerships and long-term orientations for the initiative. He was involved in the preparation of the DiFD funded CR4D project activities under the Pan-African Component of the Weather and Climate Information Service in Africa (WISER) project.