EMPOANDES: Capacity-building for climate services development in the Andes through a multi-country HEI-NHMS-stakeholder partnership

Andean societies are expected to face increasing climate risks due to intensifying hydroclimatic extremes, long-term warming, and high exposure of livelihoods and infrastructure across complex topography. While climate datasets and analytical methods are rapidly expanding, translating climate information into actionable decisions remains constrained by persistent gaps in usability, institutional interfaces, and workforce competencies. EMPOANDES is a newly initiated Erasmus+ CBHE multi-country capacity-building initiative that will address these challenges by strengthening the regional climate services ecosystem through coordinated higher-education modernisation, applied training, and stakeholder co-definition of educational needs.

The project will follow a staged, needs-led implementation pathway to strengthen climate-services education and training across the participating countries and at the regional Andean scale. First, EMPOANDES will conduct a co-definition of education and skills needs with universities, national meteorological and hydrological services, and key sectoral users, combining country-level assessments with a regional synthesis to identify common capacity gaps and priority thematic areas. Second, these findings will be translated into a structured portfolio of courses to be developed or updated, specifying learning outcomes, target audiences, delivery formats, and linkages to sectoral decision contexts. Third, EMPOANDES will develop competency guidelines for climate service provision to harmonise expectations across institutions and to provide the reference framework for curriculum design. Fourth, the project will create and/or revise the selected courses and their associated teaching materials, ensuring coherence across modules and comparability across countries. Finally, a train-the-trainers programme will be implemented to build instructional capacity and ensure sustainable delivery, complemented by pilot roll-out and iterative refinement based on learner feedback and stakeholder validation.

This contribution will present the planned implementation architecture (partner roles across universities, national meteorological and hydrological services, and sectoral actors), the competency-to-curriculum mapping strategy, and the project monitoring framework (training coverage, prototype maturity, and adoption pathways). EMPOANDES is expected to deliver an operational portfolio of educational assets and early-stage climate service prototypes with defined pathways to impact, thereby contributing to sustained regional capacity for climate-informed adaptation planning in Andean mountain contexts.