A web portal dedicated to climate change impact studies in the Global South: ClimatSuds.ird.fr

The recent sixth IPCC report highlighted the lack of studies on the impacts of climate change in the Global South. While paradoxically these countries have the weakest resilience capacity to adapt to these forthcoming changes. In this context, a co-construction workshop was organized in 2022 to define the multi-sectoral needs of different academic or institutional actors working on the impacts of climate change. Bridging together meteorological and hydrological agencies, universities, research centers, and private companies from Africa, Europe, South Asia, and South America, this workshop allowed defining the types of data and their modalities of access, that are the most adapted to conduct impact studies of climate change in different domains. The main difficulties in accessing climate data identified for researchers working on climate change impacts were related to the lack of technical capability to retrieve and process the worldwide databases of climate models data and also the need for expertise to exploit this wealth of data efficiently. Following this workshop, a climate services platform was implemented in 2023 (https://climatsuds.ird.fr/) to access a large dataset of bias-corrected CMIP6 climate models simulations, as well as a set of climate indices relevant for impacts assessment (heavy rains, extreme heat..) and impact models outputs (ISIMIP2a) in different sectors (water, vegetation, agriculture, and health). The web platform enables data extraction by point, by country, or by free polygons, visualization in graphic formats, and export to NetCDF or CSV files. Besides data access functionalities, the web portal will gradually integrate different training resources for the users and new datasets according to their needs.