Responding to ENSO
Necessary Ingredients for Effective Responses
Our experience with publicly issuing forecasts of ENSO events and their
associated climate anomalies is short, and our experience with using them
to change the outcome of ENSO events is even shorter. But we have learned
a lot from this experience about the necessary ingredients for making responses
work.
Planning ahead of time
The best time to plan response strategies, build networks or stakeholds,
and educate people about ENSO is when no event is occurring (see
Time scales for ENSO responses)
Cooperation among stakeholders
Cooperation between institutions, countries, scientists and
agencies is essential to developing useful forecast responses. As well
as meteorological services, these organizations could include national
agencies, government departments, non-governenmental organizations (NGOs),
and user organizations, and civil society organizations concerned with
- disaster management
- public health
- agriculture
- water resources
- rural development
- food security
Cooperation is essential in order to improve and speed up inter-agency
communication, coordinate responses from agencies whose responsibilities
overlap, share experiences, and avoid giving conflicting messages to the
public. One way of fascilitating cooperation is by creating bodies with oversight,
authority, and responsibility to coordinate responses to forecasts; an example
of such a body is the Prime Minister's Office. This body can also provide
an authoritative voice to communicate information to the public. For example,
during the 1997-98 El Niño, forecasts in Ethiopia were communicated
more effectively through the involvement of the Prime Minister’s office.
In this way, a high level office was able to lend credibility and authority
to the forecast source, and seasonal warnings were taken more seriously as
a result (see
Ethiopia case study from Once Burned Twice Shy).
Communication among stakeholders
Good communication among stakeholders is essential for effective
cooperation and for helping forecasters understand user needs. There are many way
to fascilitate communication:
- Regular and special meetings among the various stakeholds.
For example, the climate outlook fora (or COFs) have been regularly bringing
together meteorologists and users in many regions (see
review of the COF process). Many countries now hold regular country-level briefings as well.
Special meetings can be useful if an event is possible or the situation
on the ground has already been difficult. For example, the IRI held an
international planning meeting
in May 2002 to prepare for the possibility of a developing El Niño.
- Networks of the various stakeholders (for example, the
Southen Africa Drought and Flood Network).
- Intermediaries can be an effective way for channeling information
at all time scales of response. Interpersonal and interagency relationships
are essential in building a strong warning dissemination system, particularly
between the 'originators' of warnings (or forecast producers) and the
users to whom they pass the warnings. For example, regional offices can
act as intermediaries in the flow of information from national headquarters
to the district level, and back again.
Partnership with the Media
The media have a potentially very useful role in communicating ENSO
information to the public, but a close partnership between forecasters and
journalists is essential for this to happen. In the past, forecasters have
been disappointed and frustrated with media coverage of forecasts and their
outcome -- in particular, the media's tendency to focus on categorical outcomes
of the forecasts (see Forecast Interpretation), to exaggerate the likely impacts of an event, and to leave out information
on how people could respond. (For example, read about
what happened in Zimbabwe in 1997-98.) To some degree this type of coverage is characteristic
of how the media operate, but there are ways that forecasters can improve
this situation:
- Come to terms with what the media can and will do.
- Educate jounalists about ENSO and forecasts (for example,
see
Workshop for the Media in East Africa).
- Train forecasters to interact better with the media and to
improve the clarity of the information they give.
- Foster relationships with key journalists.
- Identify other channels for communicating forecast information
to users.
Probabilistic forecast interpretation
People have a tendency to interpret forecasts as categorical rather
than as probabilistic -- that is, they expect only one outcome to occur
rather than multiple possible outcomes. This tendency occurs for several
reasons: people don't like to deal with probabilities and are not very good
at that, messages from the media tend to be categorical (see
The Media), and forecasters often 'slip' into using categorical language (e.g.,
"we are expecting a drier than normal season"). This misinterpretation can
lead to people to ignore the likelihood that other climatic conditions
might still occur, and therefore respond inappropriately.
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