Can We Talk 10: How CONFER Enhances Climate Resilience in East Africa by Empowering Climate Services through Co-Production

Co-production within the climate service value chain fosters collaboration by enabling dialogue, building synergies, and promoting the development, improvement, and sharing of valuable climate products. Through ‘’Can We Talk”  engagements, the IGAD Climate Prediction and Applications Centre (ICPAC) demonstrates the value of co-production. The ‘Can we talk’ is an informal Down2Earth-led initiative learning event that brings together diverse disciplines from the Institution for shared thinking and learning. The synergy between climate researchers and stakeholders is vital to develop effective climate services. Co-production for Climate Service for East Africa (CONFER) is one of the projects that has highlighted the collaborative spirit. Let's delve into how CONFER is improving ICPAC products and enriching the Greater Horn of Africa Climate Outlook Forums (GHACOFs) co-production processes. 

CONFER focuses on the co-production of climate services, aiming to enhance ICPAC's capacity to develop and enhance climate services in the agriculture and water sector. Co-production involves active stakeholder engagement to ensure climate services meet their needs and enhance their planning capabilities. The Greater Horn of Africa Climate Outlook Forum (GHACOF) is a platform for this co-production process. 

Within the CONFER project, there are 5 work packages focused on co-production in the project. These are:

1. Co-production of climate services where several interviews and online surveys have been done to identify areas for improvement and gather suggestions for new products. Currently, based on users' feedback, the new products are developed through a co-production processes approach. The work packages also facilitate preparations for GHACOF, enhance existing products and feedback channels, and identify their challenges in disseminating their products to users and stakeholders. 
2. Climate, Hydrology, and Crop modeling emphasize laying the foundation of science and delivering modeling solutions. It focuses on enhancing weekly and sub-seasonal forecasts through intensive experiments and collaborations with international partners such as the UK, Germany, and Norway. In this regard, a true regional hindcast simulation for the OND season has been completed. The NOAA-CFS2v global hindcast was downscaled using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model over a large area encompassing the Indian and Atlantic Oceans. This downscaled data has a resolution of 30 km; the nested simulation was further refined and performed at a 10 km resolution over the GHA region. The entire hindcast covers the period from 1982 to 2022 and provides hourly meteorological data. Currently, work is underway for the MAM and JJAS seasons. This high-resolution hindcast data significantly benefits weather and climate forecasting in Africa. It will improve ICPAC’s ability to predict weather patterns on weekly and sub-seasonal timescales, including the crucial onset and cessation of critical seasons like OND. This detailed information is also essential for generating accurate water resource forecasts and estimating agriculture productivity. Moreover, under this work package, WRF-Hydro model calibration over East Africa has led to the establishment and successful implementation of a coupled system at ICPAC High-Performance Computing. 
3. Processing of Copernicus Data is also another work area. The WMO suggests an objective seasonal forecast that must be traceable, reproducible, and quantifiable: one of the greatest achievements for CONFER is acquiring the verification matrix for their seasonal probabilistic forecast. ICPAC partnered with the Norwegian Computing Centre and developed a seasonal forecast evaluation tool called SEAVAL which is operational at ICPAC and is used by the National Hydrological and Meteorological Services (NHMS), thereafter, several trainings have been done. A standalone Machine learning-based seasonal forecast, which is a prototype and is under development with the same team. 
4. Training and Capacity Building where CONFER conducts annual foundational training and workshops to enhance the capacity of NHMS in partnership with other projects and organizations like ClimSA and the UKMet office. One of the successful trainings was done in November 2023, where scientists from ICPAC, the UK, Norway, Europe, and the USA were invited, and it was mainly on the Foundation of Seasonal Forecasting. There have been 5 synergy building trainings covering 200 journalists, 60 policymakers, and NHMS staff. There is an online course called Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) developed in collaboration with other partners for journalists to communicate climate information to the public. 
5. Communication, dissemination, and exploitation: CONFER plays a pivotal role in supporting ICPAC's communication efforts and ensuring the effective dissemination of climate information to stakeholders. ….. This has been done through ICPAC social media and CONFER website updates, better engagement of sectors and end users, mainly through collaborative webinars, and translation of GHACOF Press Releases into distinct languages, including French, Swahili, Arabic, and Somali.  
6. Up to 10 publications as part of all work packers have been published in well-established journals. 

To ensure sustainability:

CONFER has successfully collaborated with ICPALD and the University of Sussex to acquire a grant for PASSAGE project funding by the CLARE program. The ICPAC's role in PASSAGE is to conduct research on heat stress variability and predictability, including understanding the role of heat stress in drought complications, particularly its impacts on animal and human health. Moreover, ICPAC will lead and organize the sub-regional climate outlook forums (sub-COFs) in the IGAD transborder regions to enhance the uptake of climate information and services. The recent sub-COF was successfully conducted from 13-14 March 2024 in Moyale, Kenya. 

ICPAC, through CONFER, partnered with various European institutions and secured funding for the ACACIA project under the EU's Horizon 2023 Research and Innovation program. This project is expected to be launched in September 2024.  Additionally, ICPAC, through the CONFER program, collaborated with the UK Met Office and secured a WISER small grant.  This funding supported the successful organization of the 6th foundational training workshop, pre-COF66 and GHACOF66.  Building on this collaboration, ICPAC is now working with UK Met Office scientists to develop a new project called the Pan-African Seasonal System (PASS). This project aims to ensure the long-term sustainability of ICPAC's capacity-building efforts.  PASS will encompass several key activities, including workshops to promote the use of climate services, sustaining foundational training workshops, pre-COFs, and knowledge-sharing initiatives on objective seasonal forecasting to benefit other Regional Climate Centers (RCCs) across Africa.  

In conclusion, the CONFER approach to collaboration and innovation has illustrated the power of synergy in enhanced climate services within the GHA region. Through co-production, CONFER has improved climate forecast accuracy and fostered partnerships and knowledge exchange internationally. Forecasting methodologies have been enhanced by integrating machine learning models and operationalizing verification tools (SEAVAL). This trickled down to the empowerment of stakeholders, particularly in building the capacity of the National Meteorological and Hydrological Services. For a sustainable future, collective action and collaboration are vital in tackling the complex challenges posed by climate change.