Climates Services: Must Help Us Understand Risks

This is the fifth of ten interviews with climate and development experts conducted at the International Conference on Climate Services, held at Columbia University in October 2011.

Carlo Scaramella is the World Food Programme’s Coordinator for Climate Change and Disaster Risk Reduction. He says the WFP’s interest in climate services is fundamentally to make use of climate information to better understand risk, anticipate calamities and inform development programs and interventions for the most vulnerable people.

“One can look at this in terms of enhancing the ability of the humanitarian community to respond, for instance, to food insecurity that comes from climate change, but there is also a potential to support governments, national communities, and other institutions to think about development in a manner that already incorporates climate risks.

…the point for us is setting priorities right, and for an agency like the World Food Programme, our focus is of course vulnerable people in the most vulnerable countries, countries where climate change is a multiplier of hunger risk. That’s where we focus our attention.”

Learn more on the ICCS website and the Climate Services Partnership.