Development of a Web Based Decision Support System to Provide Relevant Climate Indicators for Climate Change Adaption

The African continent faces various challenges and numerous risks due to current and future climate change. To strengthen the resilience of West African societies in the sectors of agriculture, food security, water and risk management, adaption measures need to be implemented in time. In the WASCAL-LANDSURF project, an earth system model for West Africa is developed to enable high-resolution regional climate change information. The obtained data must be accessible to the public so that interested stakeholders and smallholders can incorporate them into their decision-making processes.
To realize this, a web based spatial decision support system (SDSS) is developed with state-of-the-art open-source technologies to give information on climate change as well as relevant cross-sector indicators. For successful co-development, stakeholder workshops were held to identify important key functionalities and indicators that need to be implemented. The SDSS will be multilingual and easy to use to ensure an extensive range of applications. Users will have the possibility to familiarize themselves with the Web Portal by means of different guides in order to ease the entry into the SDSS. The current prototype supports map and diagram visualization and selection of various indicators and climate data, as well as query functionalities for different West African regions. Many other functionalities, such as the possibility to download data and statistical outputs of selected indicators, will be integrated soon. The final web portal will give users the opportunity to include climate indices in a simple and clear way into their decision-making process to strengthen their resilience towards climate change.