Future Climate for Africa (FCFA) aims to generate fundamentally new climate science focused on Africa and to ensure that this science has an impact on human development across the continent. FCFA aims to:
- Improving scientific understanding of climate variability and change across Africa and the impact of climate change on specific development decisions;
- Demonstrating flexible methods for integrating improved climate information and tools in decision-making; and
- Improving medium to long term (5-40 year) decision-making, policies, planning and investment by African stakeholders and donors.
FCFA is made up of five research consortia and managed by a coordination unit. The five research consortia are as follows:
UMFULA: Uncertainty Reduction In Models For Understanding Development Applications
UMFULA (“river” in Zulu) is a research project that aims to improve climate information for decision-making in central and southern Africa, with a particular focus on Tanzania and Malawi. The team is generating new insights and more reliable information about climate processes and extreme weather events and their impacts on water, energy and agriculture, with the aim to support long-term – 5 to 40 years – planning decisions around resource use, infrastructure investment and cross-sectoral growth priorities.
AMMA-2050: African Monsoon Multidisciplinary Analysis 2050
AMMA-2050 aims to increase the understanding of the regional climate in West Africa and how it will change, applying this knowledge to practical development questions. The team aims to address the challenges of understanding how the monsoon will change in future decades, to 2050, and how this information can be most effectively used to support climate-compatible development in the region. By applying expert judgement, AMMA-2050 will identify adaptation options in water resources and agriculture in West Africa.
FRACTAL: Future Resilience For African Cities And Lands
FRACTAL aims to understand the decision context and the climate information required to contribute to climate resilient development in nine southern African cities. The FRACTAL team aim to help advance understanding of scientific knowledge about climate processes, regional and local climate trends, factors that influence decisions in these cities, as well as how climate knowledge might be better integrated into climate-sensitive decisions at the city-regional scale (particularly decisions relating to water, energy and food with a lifetime of 5 to 40 years).
HYCRISTAL: Integrating Hydro-Climate Science Into Policy Decisions For Climate-Resilient Infrastructure And Livelihoods In East Africa
HyCRISTAL aims to develop a new understanding of East African climate variability and change, their impacts, and to work with regional decision makers to support effective long-term (5 to 40 year) decision-making in the face of a changing climate. In particular, it is designed to understand, quantify and reduce the uncertainty in the regional climate projections; and in collaboration with a range of stakeholders, co-develop climate-change coping options that meet the region’s societal needs in both urban and rural areas through a series of pilot demonstration projects, covering urban WASH, rural livelihoods, water management, tea production, transport and lake levels.
IMPALA: Improving Model Processes For African Climate
IMPALA focuses on a climate model, the Met Office Unified Model, to improve its simulation of African climate through a better understanding and representation of weather and climate processes. IMPALA has developed a very high-resolution pan-African climate model (grid-spacing of around 4km) called CP4-Africa that is the first of its kind, that better captures key processes and local-scale weather phenomena including extremes, and provides new understanding of the roles played by these processes in African climate variability and change. This will result in reduced uncertainty in future projections of the African climate and provide valuable information to climate scientists and modellers within Africa and worldwide, and empower decision-makers with information that can be used to reduce risks and help protect the livelihoods of the most vulnerable.
The Coordination, Capacity Development and Knowledge Exchange
The CCKE unit is administered through SouthSouthNorth and performs several functions to increase the overall impact of the FCFA programme, including:
- Coordinating activities to promote learning and knowledge exchange between research partners including workshops, conferences, webinars, and meetings.
- Coordinating and compiling reporting to the donors and the annual review of the programme.
- Gap filling research was commissioned as the programme progressed and new research questions emerged.
- Research and travel grants were issued and managed for early career researchers from the FCFA research consortia through the FCFA Innovation and Mobility Fund.
- Generating and disseminating content to communicate FCFA work and key research messages to wider audiences through the FCFA website, Twitter account, news stories, press releases, briefs, and other publications.
Under the FCFA programme, the CCKE also administers the Accountable Grant, hosting the Climate Mainstreaming Facility and providing on-granting support to establish the African climate model evaluation hub, LaunchPAD.
LauchPAD is an FCFA legacy programme that draws on an international research collaboration to progress understanding of how climate models simulate regional climate dynamics with a focus on Africa. The main objective of the programme is to develop evaluation tools that can be automated across climate models to improve the availability of climate information on 5 to 40-year timescales.
The Climate Mainstreaming Facility provides flexible on-demand support to the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) country offices, regional and central departments to strengthen climate mainstreaming and the integration of International Climate Finance (ICF) in their portfolios. The facility aims to improve the uptake of climate information and climate risk analysis and adaptation assessment, including for integration, and enhance compliance with the FCDO Smart Guide on Climate and Environment.
For more information please visit FCFA website or contact us at email@example.com