ENANDES+ Enhancing the Weather, Water and Climate Services Value Chain in the Andes: The Challenges of a Coordinated Regional Project Implementation

ENANDES+ "Enhancing Adaptive Capacity of Andean Communities through Climate Services" is the extension of the ENANDES project funded by the Adaptation Fund (AF). ENANDES involves the national hydro-meteorological services of Chile, Colombia and Peru and the WMO Regional Climate Centre (RCC) for Western South America. The contribution of the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) to ENANDES+ includes the national hydro-meteorological services of Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru. Although not identical, ENANDES and the SDC contribution to ENANDES+ share most of the project objectives. The overall objective is to make Andean societies more resilient to climate variability and change. This will be achieved by improving the provision of weather, water and climate services at national and regional levels by strengthening the partners' technical, user involvement, socio-economic and human capacities. Ultimately, ENANDES+ aims to establish user engagement in selected sectors in two target regions, i.e. the catchment of the rivers Pastaza in Ecuador, and the transboundary Pilcomayo in Bolivia and Argentina, where socio-economic benefits of user-specific services will be assessed. Where possible, synergies will be sought to co-design and develop regional, national and local data and forecast products and services, e.g. for drought monitoring or frost warnings.

To address this challenge, it is a specific ambition of ENANDES+ to exploit, and possibly boost, the regional collaboration capacities present in the region. The so-called nucleo regional de experticia, or NUREX for short, is designed to help establish, coordinate and monitor peer-to-peer collaborations amongst the project partners as appropriate and required for the project implementation. Moreover, the NUREX, in close collaboration with the WMO Regional Climate Centres in Ecuador and Argentina as well as the WMO Regional Training Centres of Argentina and Peru , is tasked to channel and manage the extra-regional knowledge transfer into the region, which in this project comes mainly from Switzerland.

This paper will focus on highlighting the complexities arising from the multi-partner nature of the project, the need to address the entire hydrometeorological value chain, and the management requirements for coordinated regional peer-to-peer collaboration for project implementation. The need for a dedicated regional, project-specific technical coordination will be motivated. We argue that this task is easily underestimated and emphasise that sufficient time and effort be allocated to the establishment of such a structure; appropriate coordination with existing regional structures, e.g. the WMO regional Working Groups, adds to the complexity. The sustainable embedding of the best practices into such structures is particularly desirable. In summary, the paper will reflect on the inter- and intra-institutional, interdisciplinary complexities, as well as national and regional challenges related to improving weather, water and climate services to meet a common goal in the context of the Andean region.