FOCUS-Africa is an EU Horizon 2020 project funded to co-develop tailored climate services in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region. The project, led by the WMO and started in September 2020, gathers 16 partners across Africa and Europe jointly committed to addressing the value of climate services for key economic sectors in Africa: agriculture and food security, water, energy, and infrastructure.
The project is piloting eight case studies (CSs) in five different countries involving a wide range of end-users. New services derived from seasonal and decadal forecasts are applied for food security and crop production in South Africa, Malawi, Mozambique, and Tanzania. High-resolution climate projections, as well as historical climate reanalyses, are used to support planning and investment decisions for: a railway infrastructure and a mix of renewable energies in Tanzania, hydropower generation assessment under climate change scenarios in Malawi, and water resources management in Mauritius.
For all the FOCUS-Africa’s case studies, socio-economic impact assessment of the delivered climate services will be carried out in collaboration with the CS leaders, service providers, and end-users, by providing ex-ante and ex-post evaluations grounded in the Global Indicator Framework for the Sustainable Development Goals. The project will align the capacity development efforts with those promoted by WMO for enhancing the capabilities of the NMHSs to deliver climate services to users and will make sure that the project's innovative processes and tools will be part of the WMO training curricula.
FOCUS-Africa's expected impacts are:
How to cite: Boscolo, R., Bastani, H., Beraki, A., Fournier, N., Marcos-Matamoros, R., Troccoli, A., Dkhissi, Y., Kamga, A., Lumsden, T., Bojovic, D., Dell'Acqua, M., Omrani, H., and Mateyisi, M.: Demonstrating the full-value chain of climate services in Southern Africa: the FOCUS-Africa project, EMS Annual Meeting 2021, online, 6–10 Sep 2021, EMS2021-460, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2021-460, 2021.