By Olga Rukovets, originally published on the State of the Planet blog You’ve likely seen the headlines about COP27, the United Nations (UN) Climate Change Conference that is taking place November 6–18 in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt for its 27th year. But what actually happens there and what difference can it make? On November 3, […]
Since its inception, the Columbia Climate School’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society has transformed the way the world thinks about climate and climate adaptation. For decades, the IRI has helped to build bridges between people who generate climate information and people who need it, in order to protect against food insecurity, disease outbreaks, […]
This post originally appeared on the AICCRA / CGIAR blog. In the presence of key stakeholders from federal, regional, public, and private sector institutions, Ethiopia launches a milestone NextGen Agricultural Drought Monitoring and Warning System. “Drought is known to Ethiopians from time immemorial,” declared Minister of Agriculture Oumer Hussien, recalling dramatic images from Ethiopia’s 1972 […]
Latest updates from the ACToday Columbia World Project, which has been developing climate services and other solutions to address food security in six countries.
In order to offer protective insurance to even greater numbers of smallholder farmers, in 2021 ACToday began testing mobile crowdsourcing apps that tap into the experiences and memories of farmers themselves.
An important part of ACToday’s goal of increasing food security has been to help develop new climate services that lead to better agricultural decision making. National frameworks for climate services serve this strategy in two important ways – by getting national meteorological services the recognition and support they need from national budgets and international donors, and by placing climate services at the center of adaptation efforts.
In 2021, ACToday’s Senegal team formalized a partnership with the Human Food and Nutrition Research Laboratory at Cheikh Anta Diop University – Senegal’s most prestigious higher education institution and home to the country’s largest graduate training programs. The partnership aims to address one of the most under-researched topics in development – the links between climate and nutrition.
One of the key objectives of ACToday is to strengthen the capacity of local governments and stakeholders to effectively interpret and use climate data to infom policy and planning. In the last year, the project’s six country teams conducted 52 trainings for more than 1,600 government, private-sector and nonprofit professionals as well as graduate students.
IRI researchers develop new methods to assess flash flood risk to support anticipatory humanitarian action One of the important applications of climate knowledge is in the area of disasters. Being able to predict the scale of a potential disaster and the risks a disaster could impose on a community in the future is valuable and […]
This post originally appeared on Clim-Eat’s LinkedIn Page as a part of their Weekend Read Series. Right before COP26, the IPCC published its Working Group I report: The Physical Science Basis of Climate Change (AR6-WGI, 2021). One of its key messages is that it is indisputable that human activities are causing climate change, which is increasing the frequency […]