Designing a pan-African climate observation system to deliver societal benefit through climate action: The KADI project.

Climate change is having an accelerating global impact through the increased frequency, magnitude and duration of droughts, fires, floods and other extreme climatic events. The societal solutions to this crisis depend on the ability of policy makers, private enterprise, and society at large to access and utilise scientific research into climatic variables and carbon/ greenhouse gas dynamics across scientific domains. One of the most suitable approaches to make the scientific data available to support the needs of all parties is the development of standardised observations in sustainable research infrastructures (RIs), that can facilitate both basic and applied scientific analyses and produce the data products needed.

The Horizon Europe funded KADI project (Knowledge and climate services from an African observation and Data research Infrastructure) aims to provide the conceptual framework for the future implementation of a pan-African RI that delivers the science-based services to fully address the requirements of the Paris agreement and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The project will have direct societal benefit through facilitating inter-disciplinary cooperation between African and European Partners and conceptualising the requirements for climate change observations in Africa.

The KADI project will work towards the development of a comprehensive design for a pan-African climate observation system using the climate services identified and required by key stakeholders as a guiding design principle, and further building on the knowledge compiled and gaps identified through the SEACRIFOG collaborative inventory tool, the OSCAR/Surface, OSCAR/Space and OSCAR/Requirements tools. The project will provide a broad information-based network that will connect scientists, data and knowledge users at local, national and global levels, to develop a community of practice in climate services. These networking and knowledge exchange activities will allow for the development of an RI design study and the identification of the key players who can implement the conceptual design as sustainable funding for long-term observations becomes available.

The key activities of the project will utilise a co-design approach to identify the required climate services by key stakeholders/end-users and will explore these further through a series of climate service pilot projects that will focus on the impacts of climate change on terrestrial ecosystems, coastal areas, urban developments and national GHG budgets as well as on lessons learnt from existing long-term observations. The outputs from this will further inform the strategic design of the long-term observational and data infrastructures required. A knowledge exchange platform will facilitate pan-African and European innovation and will provide the link between the science-based concept design and the policy cooperation required to develop a functional and collaborative RI that will provide long-term sustainable support for the integration of African climate-services into global observation systems.