Below is a piece originally published on The Conversation on January 21st, 2020, and was authored by IRI researcher Elisabeth Ilboudo-Nébié. In the Sahel of West Africa – which covers Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad – land degradation has led to migration towards less densely populated and more fertile areas. The land […]
Below is a piece originally published on The Conversation on February 24th, 2019, and was authored by IRI researcher Alessandra Giannini. Over the last decade many countries in the Sahel region – the semi-arid southern edge of the Sahara that stretches from Senegal to Ethiopia – have been embroiled in conflict. Populations in these countries […]
Alessandra Giannini, a climate scientist at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society, part of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, has been selected as one of 18 researchers to receive funding from French President Emmanuel Macron’s “Make Our Planet Great Again” program. Macron announced the new research program in June after the United States indicated […]
The original version of this post first appeared on the web site of the International Institute for Environment and Development. What caused the great Sahelian drought of the 1970s and 80s? For the past 10 or so years, state-of-the-art climate models have consistently shown how the shift from the anomalously wet conditions that characterised the […]
In El Niño retrospective, lessons from Senegal In a three-part series for the International Research Institute for Climate and Society, graduate student Catherine Pomposi relates her experience in Senegal during the 2015 El Niño. She explains the 2015 El Niño forecast and its climate impacts in Senegal, as well as current efforts to better understand climate in […]
Pradipta Parhi, a graduate research assistant in Columbia’s Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering published a paper in the February 2016 issue of the Journal of Climate. The study examines why two areas of Africa – the Sahel and eastern equatorial Africa – tend to experience drier- and wetter-than-normal rainy seasons, respectively, during El Niño. He is […]
From crowd-sourcing tornado data to teaching Harlem high-school students about climate change and climate justice, IRI scientists will be sharing a number of fascinating projects at the annual meeting of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) next week in New Orleans. Below is a schedule of their presentations and posters. Presenting authors appear in bold. Crowd-Sourcing the Storm: A New […]
The Sahel is a semiarid region south of the Sahara Desert that stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea. In the 1970s and 1980s it was hit by a series of persistent droughts and recurring famines that killed more than 100,000 people. The region remains one of the poorest and least developed in […]
Headed to AGU? Find the full schedule of IRI staff presenting here. The Sahel region, just south of the Sahara Desert, stretches across Africa from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea. The persistent drought and resulting famines that pummeled the region in the 1970s and 80s were for decades blamed on local societies – on […]
By Catherine Pomposi On a hot weekend in mid-June, I traveled with members of the Senegalese National Meteorological Agency, known by the acronym ANACIM, to the village of Toucar in the Fatick region of Senegal. The meteorological team works in the region producing and delivering climate information for the farmers who live there. Fatick, like […]
Note: Reprinted with permission. Copyright 2014 E&E Publishing, LLC. www.eenews.net/cw by Umair Irfan, E&E reporter The Harmattan, a dark, dusty northeasterly trade wind, dims the winter skies over West Africa and sows a deadly plague in its wake. The affliction, meningitis, can infect up to 200,000 people annually across the Sahel, but with regional climate […]
by Michael Shirber, for Astrobiology Magazine Wind and dust conditions in Sub-Saharan Africa Africa can help predict a meningitis epidemic. Determining the role of climate in the spread of certain diseases can assist health officials in “forecasting” epidemics. New research on meningitis incidence in sub-Saharan Africa pinpoints wind and dust conditions as predictors of the […]
This post is the second in a series of Q&As with scientists from the International Research Institute for Climate and Society who will be presenting their work at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco December 9 to 13. During the 1970s and 80s, the western Sahel suffered from severe and prolonged […]
The Sahel is a semiarid region south of the Sahara Desert that stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea. In the 1970s and 1980s it was hit by a series of persistent droughts and recurring famines, epitomized by the 1984 famine in Ethiopia. The Sahel remains one of the poorest and least developed […]
by Vanessa Meadu, Francesco Fiondella and Brian Kahn The massive and wide-scale drought that has left American farmers shaking their fists at barren clouds is the fifth-worst on record for the U.S. Eight out of every 10 acres of agricultural land has been affected. As a result, farmers will pull in the lowest corn yield […]
In countries where an overwhelming majority of the population relies on rain-fed agriculture, drought can have serious consequences. Mali found this out during a crippling decade-long drought during the 1970s and 1980s. As part of drought response efforts, the Malian government collaborated with a range of humanitarian actors starting in 1982 to provide farmers with […]
by Ken Kostel It would be easy for any graduate student to turn inward during his or her time at Columbia University, to focus solely on the long, rigorous task of publishing journal articles and completing the thesis. It would be easier still for a newly minted scientist to look anywhere other than his or […]