Climate Research for Development in Africa Programme strategy (2019–2023)

Science-informed  and  evidence-based  policy,  planning  and  practices  are  essential  to  ensuring African development is sustainable and more resilient to the negative impacts of climate change. Hence, there is an increasing need for tailored weather and climate services, adaptation strategies, sustained policy support that will reduce Africa’s vulnerability to the vagaries of severe weather and extreme climate events. However, the major challenges facing the African climate research include lack of a critical mass of trained scientists with requisite expertise  in  understanding  and  predicting  the  climate  driving  mechanisms  across  time,  space scales and inadequacy of observational networks for meteorological, hydrological and related environmental data. Further compounding the problems is a weak communication and computational capacity, as well as inadequate climate database management system. In this regard, the Climate Research for Development (CR4D) in Africa initiative promotes and nurtures a long-term collaborative African climate research agenda and related activities. The research should be driven by user information needs for decision support and strengthened through interdisciplinary co-design that enables the mainstreaming of climate information into  policy  for  contingence  planning  of  climate  sensitive  socio-economic  activities  and  decision-making  processes.  The  CR4D  initiative  is  envisaged  to  support  the  up  scaling  of  existing and new initiatives, fostering international collaboration and joint planning between projects  and  other  initiatives.  However,  this  ambitious  research  initiative  requires  close  collaboration  within  the  Africa  climate  research  community,  across  existing  projects,  and  forging  linkages  with  new  regional  and  international  partners.  The  CR4D  Oversight  Board  believes that the CR4D 5-years strategy will contribute to socio-economic development and poverty  eradication  efforts  of  Africa  by  conducting  user-inspired  climate  science  research  that  translates  into  appropriate  and  actionable  information  for  policy  and  sustainable  development planning.