Future Climate for Africa (FCFA) aims to generate fundamentally new climate science focused on Africa, and to ensure that this science has an impact on human development across the continent.

Watch the video to learn more about FCFA

LOCATIONS COVERED

FCFA is implemented by 5 international research teams working across the African continent:

AMMA-2050 – Burkina Faso and Senegal.
UMFULA – Malawi and Tanzania.
HyCRISTAL – Kenya and Uganda.
FRACTAL – Botswana, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Zambia.
IMPALA – Pan-Africa

African Climate Risks Conference

Future Climate for Africa hosted the African Climate Risks Conference (ACRC) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in October 2019 under the theme “dismantling the barriers to urgent climate adaptation action.” It brought together over 350 researchers gathering from 52 different countries across the African continent and abroad to discuss the latest research on African climate. It also provided the opportunity for many FCFA researchers to showcase their findings on the latest climate research from the FCFA programme.

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Call for applications: FCFA and GCRF African SWIFT Python training 2021

This virtual training call is open to all researchers in atmospheric science and meteorology, and to forecasters at operational weather centres based in Africa who have a keen interest in developing their data analysis skills. Applicants who are under the GCRF African SWIFT project and FCFA are highly encouraged to apply.

This is the sound of West Africa’s changing climate

If you could take a year’s worth of rain gauge readings from a city in Ghana, and transform the information into a musical track, what would it sound like? What would the tune sound like if it the data were to show the rainfall that the same city might expect a century later, based on computer-generated climate projections of a warmer world? A group of scientists and musicians have teamed up to use the process of ‘data sonification’ to do just that, using climate model data from cities in the West African countries of Niger and Ghana to create tracks that demonstrate musically how the climate will shift away from the historic norm within the next century.

East African infrastructure planning must consider both wetter and drier years

Kholombidzo is a town on the banks of the Shire River in southern Malawi, and is the site of a proposed hydro-electric scheme that will add between 160 and 370 megawatts of electricity capacity to Malawi’s grid once it is completed. But severe rainfall in the Shire River Basin in 2019 is a telling reminder of how exposed this kind of infrastructure can be to climate risk, and how fluctuations in water flow in a river system between drier and wetter seasons or years can compromise the performance of important water-related infrastructure. A new study by climate researchers with a special interest in East Africa further argues that drought will also have a significant impact on the performance of the proposed Kholombidzo plant and other water-related infrastructure that is planned for the area.

Trust, collaboration and flexibility are key elements in climate research programmes

Between November 2020 and March 2021, Future Climate for Africa (FCFA) hosted a series of events to reflect on key learnings from the FCFA, the Collaborative Adaptation Research Initiative in Africa and Asia (CARIAA), and the Climate and Development Knowledge Network (CDKN) programmes. The series was loosely structured around findings from a recent FCFA learning report entitled “A critical reflection on learning from the FCFA programme” and provided a space to reflect on the past success and challenges from the three programmes while opening a dialogue with the broader community. This helped identify common strengths and key approaches to inform future climate research programmes.

FEATURED RESOURCES

Climate variability affects water-energy-food infrastructure performance in East Africa

March 15, 2021

The need to assess major infrastructure performance under a changing climate is widely recognized yet rarely practiced, particularly in rapidly growing African economies. Here, we consider high-stakes investments across the water, energy, and food sectors for two major river basins in a climate transition zone in Africa. We integrate detailed interpretation of observed and modeled climate-system behavior with hydrological modeling and decision-relevant performance metrics. For the Rufiji River in Tanzania, projected risks for the mid-21^st century are similar to those of the present day, but for the Lake Malawi-Shire River, future risk exceeds that experienced during the 20^th century. In both basins a repeat of an early-20^th century multi-year drought would challenge the viability of proposed infrastructure. A long view, which emphasizes past and future changes in variability, set within a broader context of climate-information interpretation and decision making, is crucial for screening the risk to infrastructure.

Convection permitting regional climate change simulations for understanding future climate and informing decision making in Africa

February 23, 2021

Pan-Africa convection-permitting regional climate model simulations have been performed to study the impact of high resolution and the explicit representation of atmospheric moist convection on the present and future climate of Africa. These unique simulations have allowed European and African climate scientists to understand the critical role that the representation of convection plays in the ability of a contemporary climate model to capture climate and climate change, including many impact relevant aspects such as rainfall variability and extremes. There are significant improvements in not only the small-scale characteristics of rainfall such as its intensity and diurnal cycle, but also in the large-scale circulation. Similarly effects of explicit convection affect not only projected changes in rainfall extremes, dry-spells and high winds, but also continental-scale circulation and regional rainfall accumulations. The physics underlying such differences are in many cases expected to be relevant to all models that use parameterized convection. In some cases physical understanding of small-scale change mean that we can provide regional decision makers with new scales of information across a range of sectors. We demonstrate the potential value of these simulations both as scientific tools to increase climate process understanding and, when used with other models, for direct user applications. We describe how these ground-breaking simulations have been achieved under the UK Government’s Future Climate for Africa Programme. We anticipate a growing number of such simulations, which we advocate should become a routine component of climate projection, and encourage international co-ordination of such computationally, and human-resource expensive simulations as effectively as possible.

Technical Brief: Climate change impacts – implications for policy and practice in Tanzania’s Rufiji River Basin

February 17, 2021

This brief synthesises the results of undertaking a climate risk analysis for the Rufiji River Basin, Tanzania. The basin supports extensive socio-economic and environmental services and is targeted for major development via hydropower infrastructure and investment through the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania. The implications of climate risk for development objectives that cut across the water-energy-food-environment sectors are outlined and recommendations proposed to help achieve climate resilient sustainable development.

The brief is for practitioners and technical policy-makers with a detailed interest in understanding development processes and the impacts of climate change in the Rufiji River Basin. The approach is relevant for other large river basins undergoing rapid development.

Climate services in Africa: Re-imagining an inclusive, robust and sustainable service

February 12, 2021

Africa is one of the most vulnerable continents to climate change because of its heightened sensitivity to climate variability and inadequate institutional adaptive capacity. Notwithstanding these challenges, Africa, and its inhabitants, have been confronting the vagaries of climate for centuries, including severe droughts and floods. Given this context, this paper provides a commentary on the efforts to ensure and enable climate services on the continent as well as a critical, reflexive assessment of activities in this varied landscape. A special focus on the institutional frameworks and the underlying knowledge systems that support and interface with climate services will be examined. A central question underpinning the paper is: to what extent is the expanding landscape of climate services being endogenously driven in Africa? Finally, some recommendations for future efforts to enhance effective institutions and knowledge brokering and facilitate better climate services in Africa are suggested.

In-situ fluorescence spectroscopy indicates total bacterial abundance and dissolved organic carbon

February 11, 2021

We explore in-situ fluorescence spectroscopy as an instantaneous indicator of total bacterial abundance and faecal contamination in drinking water. Eighty-four samples were collected outside of the recharge season from groundwater-derived water sources in Dakar, Senegal. Samples were analysed for tryptophan-like (TLF) and humic-like (HLF) fluorescence in-situ, total bacterial cells by flow cytometry, and potential indicators of faecal contamination such as thermotolerant coliforms (TTCs), nitrate, and in a subset of 22 samples, dissolved organic carbon (DOC). Significant single-predictor linear regression models demonstrated that total bacterial cells were the most effective predictor of TLF, followed by on-site sanitation density; TTCs were not a significant predictor. An optimum multiple-predictor model of TLF incorporated total bacterial cells, nitrate, nitrite, on-site sanitation density, and sulphate (r² 0.68). HLF was similarly related to the same parameters as TLF, with total bacterial cells being the best correlated (ρ_s 0.64). In the subset of 22 sources, DOC clustered with TLF, HLF, and total bacterial cells, and a linear regression model demonstrated HLF was the best predictor of DOC (r² 0.84). The intergranular nature of the aquifer, timing of the study, and/or non-uniqueness of the signal to TTCs can explain the significant associations between TLF/HLF and indicators of faecal contamination such as on-site sanitation density and nutrients but not TTCs. The bacterial population that relates to TLF/HLF is likely to be a subsurface community that develops in-situ based on the availability of organic matter originating from faecal sources. In-situ fluorescence spectroscopy instantly indicates a drinking water source is impacted by faecal contamination but it remains unclear how that relates specifically to microbial risk in this setting.

Tryptophan-like and humic-like fluorophores are extracellular in groundwater: implications as real-time faecal indicators

February 11, 2021

Fluorescent natural organic matter at tryptophan-like (TLF) and humic-like fluorescence (HLF) peaks is associated with the presence and enumeration of faecal indicator bacteria in groundwater. We hypothesise, however, that it is predominantly extracellular material that fluoresces at these wavelengths, not bacterial cells. We quantified total (unfiltered) and extracellular (filtered at < 0.22 µm) TLF and HLF in 140 groundwater sources across a range of urban population densities in Kenya, Malawi, Senegal, and Uganda. Where changes in fluorescence occurred following filtration they were correlated with potential controlling variables. A significant reduction in TLF following filtration (ΔTLF) was observed across the entire dataset, although the majority of the signal remained and thus considered extracellular (median 96.9%). ΔTLF was only significant in more urbanised study areas where TLF was greatest. Beneath Dakar, Senegal, ΔTLF was significantly correlated to total bacterial cells (ρ_s 0.51). No significant change in HLF following filtration across all data indicates these fluorophores are extracellular. Our results suggest that TLF and HLF are more mobile than faecal indicator bacteria and larger pathogens in groundwater, as the predominantly extracellular fluorophores are less prone to straining. Consequently, TLF/HLF are more precautionary indicators of microbial risks than faecal indicator bacteria in groundwater-derived drinking water.