Regional Climate Research Partnerships

The Climate Research for Development (CR4D) in Africa initiative was officially launched in 2015 to strengthen links between climate science research and climate information needs and thus enhance integrating climate change into policy and development planning in Africa. CR4D is an African-led initiative supported by partnership between African Climate Policy Center (ACPC) of UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), African Ministerial Conference on Meteorology (AMCOMET), World Meteorological Organization (WMO), and Global Framework for Climate Services (GFCS). The initiative facilitates integration of the Africa climate research community (scientists and institutions) with end-user climate information needs. The Secretariat is located at the African Climate Policy Centre (ACPC). The CR4D collaborative platform promotes multi-stakeholder collaboration that brings climate science, services and policy-making under a coordinated multi-disciplinary network of expertise and institutions to collectively address the challenges while maximizing on the opportunities presented by climate change and variability to socio-economic Development in Africa. It promotes participatory climate research by facilitating and strengthening networking capacities of institutions and stakeholders to enable and enhance co-production of demand-driven climate information and services. This will lead to improved access, quality, usability, dissemination and mainstreaming of climate information/knowledge into socio-economic planning, and critical for Africa’s meeting commitments under the COP21 agreement, Agenda 2063, as well as the SDGs.

The overarching mission of CR4D is to create a Pan-Africa Collaborative Platform and a federated network of African climate science, services, policy, and practice communities as well as development partners and other stakeholders to co-explore, co-design, co-produce and co-communicate climate information and services, thus improving access, quality, and usability as well as mainstreaming of climate information into Development Planning in Africa. To achieve this grand mission, CR4D Scientific Advisory Committee (SAC), in conjunction with the Secretariat, the Institutional Collaboration Platform, and the Oversight Board, supports implementation of the CR4D initiatives. In addition to these formal components of the governance structure, achieving CR4D goals will focus on Six (6) federated Regional Climate Research Partnerships (RCRPs) for East, West, Central, South, North and African-SIDS as the regional implementation mechanism. RCRPs will be the regional platforms/nodes for bringing together multiple stakeholders and institutions

  • Jointly identify key challenges, knowledge gaps and user-driven research priorities
  • Co-design climate research and co-produce user-oriented climate information and services
  • Facilitate the development of multidisciplinary and multi-stakeholder research and outreach Teams or Partnerships
  • Promote innovative communication and user platforms and tools for translating new research into applications