Co-creating a pan-African Research and Knowledge Infrastructure for societal benefit through climate action: The KADI project.

Climate change is having an accelerating impact globally, and across Africa through the increased frequency, magnitude and duration of droughts, fires, floods and other extreme climatic events. Our ability to address this crisis requires policy makers, private enterprise, scientists and society at large to converge and co-create the solutions needed to understand, adapt and mitigate climate impacts. Research infrastructures (RIs) underpin our ability to develop appropriate climate services that address these issues, and through the scientific evidence they deliver, aligned with societal priorities they will reduce vulnerability to climate change and promote sustainable development across Africa.

The Horizon Europe funded KADI project (Knowledge and climate services from an African observation and Data research Infrastructure) has developed a conceptual framework for a pan-African RI that will deliver the science-based climate services required to reduce societal and economic costs of climate change, help to address national, regional and international political agendas and contribute to achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The KADI-RI is driven, supporting successful co-creation and delivery of climate services that are sector relevant and user specific; transdisciplinary in nature integrating academic, non-academic and societal areas; scalable in space and time, producing interoperable and accessible data products; and sustainable in scope, through the incorporation of financial, organisational, technological, social and epistemological longevity.

This presentation will discuss the development of the KADI-RI blueprint using systems mapping approaches in the co-creation of climate services and how these outputs can be used to identify the diverse research networks and interoperable data systems that are essential for understanding climate trends and their associated impacts. KADI pilot studies have demonstrated; 1) how the use of low-cost sensors and citizen science engagement can address issues of air pollution and heat stress in urban environments; 2) how long-term African Union (AU) and European Union (EU) collaborative networks can provide insight into the benefits of long-term meteorological measurements to inform sensor and data analytical requirements, 3) explored how such exchanges can consolidate African networks measuring ocean biogeochemistry and integrate these into global RIs, and 4) examined the interactions between diverse observation networks and the development of earth system modelling and remote sensing capacity. Knowledge exchange activities have been central to the development of the KADI-RI blueprint, facilitating the mobility of scientists across Africa and the EU to attend stakeholder workshops, training courses and to develop communities of practice that will ensure all stakeholders work together to design solutions that reflect regional priorities.

Key recommendations of the KADI project include the need to minimise observational gaps to ensure better data coverage; combine in situ, remotely sensed and modelled data to enhance analytical capabilities; invest in infrastructure and skills; improve access to data products through open data policies and engage and include all communities in data collection and climate service design. This work provides 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 to develop local ownership and integration of African climate-services into global observation systems.