Impact story: FONERWA: Climate Risk Screening Tool for Rwanda

There was limited understanding of climate change or impacts by FONERWA (Rwanda’s climate and environment fund), no direct considerations for climate variability or change in the application process and few project proposals were appropriately considering climate information. Recognising this, the FCFA work in Rwanda centred on developing the capacity of the FONERWA project appraisal team to perform a rudimentary screening on all project proposals. This would include a stronger review of applications for climate risks and provide FONERWA with information they can share with project developers so that climate information is better understood and incorporated into project design and implementation.

Impact story: Climate Information for Resilient Tea Production (CI4Tea)

The Climate Information for Resilient Tea Production (CI4Tea) project has developed a new methodology for producing site-specific climate change information. CI4Tea is co-producing climate information by iteratively engaging tea sector stakeholders in western Kenya to understand their climate information needs and incorporate their feedback for developing usable climate information.

Impact story: Informing long-lived decision making in the Lake Victoria basin through provision of a plausible range of future lake level and outflow changes

Lake Victoria is one source of the Nile and it provides major fisheries (which are important both to local livelihoods and the national economies), is a key transport route between three major countries of the East African community and the Lake outflow provides a major hydropower source. The lake is unusual in that it is the largest tropical lake in the world and is largely fed by on-lake rain (not rivers) and largely emptied through evaporation (not rivers). The evaporation and lake-land circulations mean the lake triggers rain over the lake at night, making it a unique coupled hydrological-meteorological system.

Impact story: Novel climate science used to improve water resources planning in Uganda

HyCRISTAL aims to integrate hydro-climate science into policy decisions for climate resilient infrastructure in East Africa. Within East Africa, HyCRISTAL is working in Uganda to develop use of climate information in water resources planning. Specifically, the British Geological Survey (BGS) is working in partnership with the Ugandan Ministry of Water and Environment (MWE) to improve the use of climate information in catchment management planning.

Impact story: Rural Adaptation in East Africa: synthesising evidence for targeted national responses to climate change

HyCRISTAL’s rural work, is developing pathways for new climate research to support the resilience of rural communities vulnerable to climate change in two pilot locations, Mukono in Uganda and Homa Bay in Kenya, that capture two different Lake Victoria Basin national governance and policy regimes.

It is providing a rich suite of data and methodological training to understand current livelihood patterns and factors limiting peoples’ ability to adapt their sources of livelihood and policy implications through learning platforms and policy engagement in partnership with HyCRISTAL’s advocacy and academic partners in Uganda and Kenya. These tools are building an evidence-based pathway to rural adaptation at the county and national level. As HyCRISTAL’s climate modelling projections become available, they will intersect with the data on adaptations and the growing knowledge of decision-making processes.

Impact story: Addressing the impact of climate change on Urban WASH in East Africa

Within the Urban Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) sector, there is recognition that climate change is important and will affect the delivery of water and sanitation services. Similarly technical and professional staff within city and utility departments, who are responsible for the design, construction and maintenance of the physical systems that support this service delivery, are also already beginning to include climate considerations into their work, albeit at quite a simplistic level. HyCRISTAL’s work in Kisumu and Kampala therefore initially focused on trying to engage key people in the city to explore the situation with the current and likely future WASH system(s), considering it to be embedded within other city systems such as solid waste, drainage and infrastructure.

Impact story: Using theatre forum as a tool in the dialogue between scientists, people and policy makers in AMMA-2050

Theatre forum, a participatory approach that supports public analysis and collective experimentation, was a powerful tool in the dialogue between scientists, people and policy makers as well as its ability to bring up cultural and socio-political issues which would otherwise stay on the sidelines. In an interdisciplinary and international project such as AMMA 2050, forum theatre proved to be a useful methodology to create common ground to communicate climate information in a meaningful way with a diverse range of actors, in a more equal setting.

Impact story: Understanding and addressing the barriers to entry of Global South researchers to becoming expert reviewers of the IPCC Assessment Reports

To promote the participation of experts from developing countries in the IPCC process, Future Climate for Africa (FCFA) hosted two e-learning courses to encourage Global South participants to contribute valuable review comments to the IPCC 6th Assessment Reports. The courses were delivered between June – August 2018 and October – December 2019, in parallel to the review periods of the First Order Draft of the Special Report on Climate Change and Land and First Order Draft of the Working Group II on climate change: impacts, adaptation and vulnerability.

Impact story: Improving the global knowledge on climate change through Wikipedia

Future Climate for Africa (FCFA) and the Climate and Development Knowledge Network (CDKN) have been working with Wikipedia to enhance the participation of editors from the Global South, encourage researchers in the climate and development sphere to start contributing to Wikipedia, and enhance the quality and quantity of climate information on this platform. As a follow-up from Africa’s first Wikipedia edit-a-thon on climate change in 2019, FCFA and CDKN organised Wiki4Climate (a week of online Wikipedia editing on climate change topics) from 24th of November to the 1st of December 2020.

Impact story: Contributing African climate information to Wikipedia: Building the capability of African researchers

FCFA, together with the Climate and Development Knowledge Network (CDKN) and Wikimedia South Africa (WMZA), convened Africa’s first Wikipedia edit-a-thon on climate change in Cape Town, South Africa from 6-8 August 2019. The aim was to address the ‘Africa Gap’ on Wikipedia by increasing the contributions from African researchers on climate change information thereby making African climate information more accessible and representative of the climate research being done. It was also held to build the capacity of African researchers in contributing to Wikipedia.