Communities across Sub-Saharan Africa are extremely vulnerable to climate risks, such as storms and floods, but often have limited access to relevant life-saving climate information that could help them cope with extreme weather. 

Focusing on communities affected by floods in the Greater Horn of Africa and floods and tropical cyclones in Madagascar, the National Centre for Atmospheric Science is embarking on a new EU-funded project known as ACACIA.

The ACACIA (Anticipatory Climate Adaptation for Communities in Africa) project, aims to improve the ways climate services are produced, communicated and used for making short-term and long-term decisions to diminish climate risk in Sub-Saharan Africa.

“Flooding and tropical cyclones threaten the lives and livelihoods of millions of people across East and Southern Africa every year. For example, Tropical Cyclone Freddy in 2023, although well forecast, took hundreds of lives in Madagascar and southern Africa. In 2016, deadly floods across Ethiopia caused more than 200 fatalities. 

“These events occur regularly but, with climate change, they may increase in frequency and intensity,” says Linda Hirons, ACACIA researcher at the National Centre for Atmospheric Science and the University of Reading. 

Linda explains how ACACIA is taking a co-production approach, with African partners, which brings together different knowledge sources, experiences and working practices to jointly develop climate services so they can be accurate, actionable and appropriate for informing decisions and improving early warning systems: 

“In Madagascar, for example, the project partners with the local Red Cross who will use ACACIA-developed science and climate services to enhance their community-based anticipatory and adaptive capacities – for example inform where they need to mobilise their volunteers and what resources those volunteers might need access to – including evacuation plans, emergency supplies, WASH kits and tents.”

The project also sets out to evaluate the impact of new services among populations in the Sofia region of North West Madagascar to identify if the project-initiated coping strategies actually save and improve lives.  

“My role in the project is the co-production of reliable actionable weather and climate information. This will involve working in close collaboration with National and Regional Met services in Africa, Meteo Madagascar, Ethiopian Meteorological Institute and ICPAC, as well as communicating directly with the local Red Cross on the ground. 

“This part of the project will make sure there is a two-way communication between what climate information is needed practically by the communities to inform important decisions, and what climate information is possible for the models to predict skillfully with enough notice,” adds Linda.

ACACIA forms an interdisciplinary alliance of European and African partners and follows on from other projects that the National Centre for Atmospheric Science has been a part of, including: GCRF African SWIFT, WISER, CONFER, FOCUS-Africa, and Future Climate for Africa.