2021 ACToday Report: From Two Countries to Ten: A Region Receives Powerful Climate Forecasting Boost

Authored by IRI on May 11, 2021

This story was published as part of the Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today, for Tomorrow (ACToday) Columbia World Project 2021 Report. Read the full report here.

The black silhouettes of the countries of Colombia and Guatemala, along with the identifying text.

ACToday has worked with the national governments of all six countries where the project operates to design and deploy a state-of-the-art forecasting system known as NextGen. In 2019, NextGen was launched in Colombia and Guatemala. The new forecast approach gave the two countries a significant upgrade to their climate prediction capabilities almost overnight, and has enabled the development of more sophisticated decision-support systems, including mapping tools, for agriculture and food-security planning.

What is NextGen?

NextGen is an approach to producing weather and climate forecasts at timescales of weeks to years. It’s based on more than 25 years of research at Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI), and is being implemented in countries across the world through ACToday. In 2019, the governments of Colombia and Guatemala became the first countries to deploy the new system within their national meteorological services. Since then, Bangladesh and Ethiopia have followed suit. NextGen has given these countries a powerful upgrade to their forecasting capabilities, and enables them to provide their citizens an unprecedented caliber of climate information for decision making in agriculture, public health and other sectors.

Download NextGen factsheet.

Neighboring countries have paid attention to ACToday’s successes in Colombia and Guatemala, leading to an exciting development in 2020: Every country in Central America,as well as Peru and Chile,is working to adopt the NextGen system.

“Food security transcends boundaries,it doesn’t recognize national borders,” said Ángel G. Muñoz, the ACToday country lead for Colombia and Guatemala. “So when we improve the capability of an entire region to monitor and forecast climate conditions that could impact food production, storage, transport and trade, all the countries, and the 150 million people who live in them, benefit.”

The decision to implement NextGen in these new countries came after a meeting of the Board of Directors of the Central American Regional Committee of Hydrological Resources (CRRH), said Muñoz. The directors of the region’s seven national meteorological services make up the board.

“ACToday was invited to present NextGen to CRRH, and when we showed them the system’s forecasting and verification capabilities, one-by-one, each country gave us the green light to implement it,” he said.

“We’re proud to see how the Central American meteorological services are implementing NextGen using a regional approach rather than a country-by-country one,” said Berta Olmedo, CRRH’s executive secretary. “These countries share similar demands for food security, similar expertise and resources, and similar climate risks. The NextGen system enables them to take advantage of each other’s experience to develop a state-of-the-art regional system that provides tailored information at national and subnational levels.”

“When we improve the capability of an entire region to monitor and forecast climate conditions that could impact food production, storage, transport and trade, all the countries, and the 150 million people who live in them, benefit.”
Ángel Muñoz, IRI

Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, ACToday has continued its work, conducting a set of virtual NextGen trainings for each country’s national meteorological service. Staff from INSIVUMEH, Guatemala’s meteorological service and a key ACToday partner, are leading the training sessions, which include representatives from all the participating countries.

“They’re learning the fundamentals together, sharing ideas and working through decisions and problems as a team, and for the whole region, independently of the country they are from,” said Muñoz. “We consider this an important step in building a strong, long-lasting NextGen community in the region.”

International Attention

The headline of the image reads "NextGen in other countries" with the text below it: "Every country in Central America—as well as Peru and Chile—is working to adopt the NextGen system." A map of Central and South America below uses a greyscale key to identify the ACToday Countries (in black: Guatemala and Colombia), Central America (in dark grey: Belize, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panamá) and (in light grey) Perú and Chile.

ACToday’s work in Latin America has also generated interest at the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).

“NextGen has an incredibly flexible approach for producing spatially-detailed and seamless predictions at timescales of weeks to years,” said Wilfran Moufouma-Okia, the head of WMO’s Regional Climate Prediction Services Division. “It provides new avenues for delivering high-quality climate information, products and services that benefit decision makers.”

WMO is supporting the expansion of NextGen into Chile and Peru through its existing climate services project called ENANDES, which aims to increase the adaptive capacity of highly vulnerable Andean communities in these two countries and in Colombia. Moufouma-Okia said the decision came after he and his WMO colleagues saw the positive impacts of ACToday’s collaboration with IDEAM, Colombia’s national meteorological service.

“NextGen has an incredibly flexible approach…that provides new avenues for delivering high-quality climate information, products and services that benefit decision makers.”
Wilfran Moufouma-Okia, WMO

“What’s really exciting is that as more countries implement NextGen, we’re helping change the way individual national meteorological services work because we’re able to take a regional approach to training and collaboration,” said Muñoz.

“Advances in one country often end up informing and guiding the trajectory of one or more of its neighbors through technical cooperation and knowledge sharing across countries in the Southern Hemisphere, he said.

The headline of the image reads "Next Gen around the world" and three long grey text boxes are stacked below the headline. In the top box is the black silhouette of the country of Ethiopia and the text "Ethiopia's National Meteorological Agency, which has been working with ACToday on NextGen since 2019, produced its first set of NextGen-based forecasts in June 2020 and made them available to the public via its Flexible Forecasts Maproom." The second grey box contains the black silhouette of Bangladesh and the text "The Bangladesh Meteorological Department (BMD) has been producing monthly and seasonal NextGen forecasts since November 2019. ACToday Bangladesh has held a number of trainings with BMD staff and has provided ongoing support for BMD's efforts at automating parts of its forecast-generation process." The third grey box contains the black silhouette of Vietnam with the text "Vietnam's National Center for Hydro-Meteorological Forecasting has begun integrating components of NextGen into its existing operations. The ACToday Vietnam team has organized five trainings, both in-person and remote."