East Africa Drought and Famine

Sorry for the lack of updates on this site. I’ve been keeping busy with a number of personal and work projects. Here’s a series of brief video interviews I conducted on the Horn of Africa drought that’s still ongoing. The challenge, as always, in producing multimedia for a small institution, is to turn it around quickly so that it remains timely without sacrificing content. We hatched up these interviews very early on last summer, when it was evident that a massive humanitarian disaster was brewing in the Horn. The first interview took about 6 hours to produce, from the film to the production and uploading. The last one, embedded here, took me only about 2.5 hours. Not bad!

The entire series is here: http://vimeo.com/album/1662641

Lifecycle of a Twitter campaign, using Storify

IRI’s Brian Kahn generated a neat compilation of how our Climate and Society publication, A Better Climate for Disaster Risk Management, moved across Twitter in the days after we launched it:

Climate information crucial for disaster risk reduction

Forecasts can play an invaluable role when used properly in helping humanitarian agencies and governments plan for and prevent disasters, according to the latest Climate and Society publication launched by the IRI and the American Red Cross last week in Washington D.C.

Climate and weather disasters, from the massive floods in Pakistan, Australia and Colombia, to the devastating drought in Niger, have claimed thousands of lives and caused billions of dollars in damages in the last year. According to statistics from the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters, these types of disasters have risen significantly in the last few decades. Scientists expect changes in climate will make extreme events more frequent and intense in the future.

Governments and humanitarian organizations, such as the United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the World Food Programme (WFP) and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) are placing greater emphasis on trying to prevent and minimize the impact of disasters by making earlier and better informed decisions ahead of time. The new report, called A Better Climate for Disaster Risk Management, is the latest in the IRI’s Climate and Society series. The IRI published the report in partnership with OCHA, IFRC, WFP, the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS), and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

“This is an important report that shows how scientists and practictioners can come together to describe a better recipe for meeting enormous global problems related to climate and the growth of natural disasters,” said Jan Egeland during the launch event. Egeland is the Executive Director of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, and co-chair of the High-Level Taskforce for the Global Framework for Climate Services. He is also on the IRI’s Board of the Directors. “In my view, far too little is being invested in disaster risk reduction and far too little in climate services,” he said. Watch interviews of Jan Egeland and Madeleen Helmer, who is the Director of Policies and Communication at the Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centre.

Read the full news here: http://bit.ly/kr9ALl

Climate Vs. Fragile Páramo ecosystem in the Andes

The páramo is a high mountain ecosystem in South America’s Andes rich with biodiversity and an important source of water for millions of people. It’s at risk of becoming drier because of changing climate conditions. IRI’s latest slideshow documents the efforts of Daniel Ruiz Carrascal and an international team of researchers who have been measuring how the environment of the páramo is changing over time.

I had a grand time working on this because it involved some of my favorite people. Daniel has a sick collection of photos and videos from his research sites- at last count, more than 5,000. For those of you out there who make audio slideshows, you’ll know this was a true treasure trove to play with. We knew from the beginning we wanted to have versions in English and Spanish. I decided to have Daniel narrate the Spanish version in the first person, and for the English one, we did it in the third person, conscripting Cathy V, the coordinator for IRI’s Latin America program, as debut narrator. The videos turned out as well as they did because of Jason’s skillful production and editing!

Check it out in English:

The Páramos: Climate change threatens a fragile ecosystem in the Andes from IRI on Vimeo.

Or en español:

Los Páramos: Cambio climático amenaza un frágil ecosistema en los Andes from IRI on Vimeo.

The full transcripts are here:

http://bit.ly/m4OCbG

Data as a “Classic Public Good”

Scientists basically spend their time doing one of two things: collecting new data, or doing some new and clever analysis with existing data. Data is the lifeblood of research. In developed countries, we’ve grown accustomed to having access to long, detailed records on demographics, infectious diseases, rainfall and temperature. Researchers use this raw information to spot trends, for example, or to validate or refute hypotheses, to fine tune public health systems, to optimize crop yields. Much of these data are just a mouse click away, for anyone to access, for free.

Across much of Africa, it’s quite a different story. By most measures, Africa is the most “data poor” region in the world. Wars and revolutions, natural and manmade disasters, extreme poverty and unmaintained infrastructure, have left massive gaps in the data sets. Reliable records of temperature, rainfall and other climate variables are scarce, and this is not an inconsequential matter.

Without data, policy makers can’t make smart, well-informed decisions on water management, health, and development in general.

And yet it would be unfair to say that all of Africa is data poor. Some countries have records that are quite long, detailed and reliable–oases of measurements, blooming in an otherwise numberless desert. Unlike in the U.S., however, data sets compiled by most African national meteorological agencies are considered proprietary. Anyone who wants to use it must pay–even scientists, who have neither the funds nor the inclination to do so. So the result is the same: valuable research that could help save lives and improve well being, goes undone.

Researchers have long called for freeing up of this locked data, among them, a group at IRI. In a newly published commentary in Nature, Madeleine Thomson and other IRIers argue that climate data is a “resource for development” and “a classic public good” that increases in value the more times it is used.

Good climate information, if freely available, could transform the way in which the health community does business. For example, it could improve health calendars for seasonal diseases. It could lead to better timing of the distribution of bed nets, local public awareness campaigns, and drugs with a short shelf life…It would also enable better mapping of regions and populations vulnerable to emerging health problems such as meningococcal meningitis epidemics, which favour the hot, dry and dusty Sahel, a region that may be expanding due to climate and environmental change.

Read the Nature paper here.

Read a nice write-up about it in the GlobalPost.

Image taken from the IRI Data Library.

Video: Climate+Public Health Pros Train Together

Climate and public-health communities are learning to speak each other’s language to improve decision making. Learn more: Watch a short video that the IRI communications crew put together. We used a Nikon D90 and Panasonic LX-3 for photos and some of the videos. We made the interviews with our trusty Canon Vixia.

Onward, La Niña

Just posted a piece on the IRI home page about the latest La Niña. The map I show here tells us where and when in the world we can expect shifts in rainfall due to La Niña. We also produced a set of three video interviews of IRI scientists Lisa Goddard, Brad Lyon, Dave Dewitt and Paul Block, who share their knowledge of the La Niña – El Niño phenomenom, aka ENSO.

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La Niña and Rainfall. For high res PDF (3.2mb)

As of mid-January, moderate-to-strong La Niña conditions continue to exist in the tropical Pacific. Scientists at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society expect these to linger, potentially causing additional shifts in rainfall patterns across many parts of the world in months to come. These shifts, combined with socioeconomic conditions and other factors, can make some parts of the world more vulnerable to impacts. However, La Niña conditions do allow the IRI and other institutions to produce more accurate seasonal forecasts and help better predict extreme drought or rainfall in some parts of the world. This enhanced predictability could help societies improve preparedness, issue early warnings and reduce any potentially negative impacts from La Niña.

“Based on current observations and on predictions from models, we see at least a 90% chance that La Niña conditions will continue through March 2011,” says IRI’s chief forecaster, Tony Barnston.

The term La Niña refers to a period of cooler-than-average sea-surface temperatures in the eastern and central equatorial Pacific Ocean that occurs as part of natural climate variability. This situation is roughly the opposite of what happens during El Niño events, when waters in this region are warmer-than-normal (see our past story on El Niño). Both are part of a larger climate cycle known as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, or ENSO. Because the Pacific is the largest ocean on the planet, any significant changes in average conditions there, such as those that occur during La Niña or El Niño, can have consequences for temperature, rainfall and vegetation in faraway places.

Read the rest here.

Important Gains in Global Effort to Control Malaria

From the IRI web site

A massive scale-up in the distribution of insecticide-treated mosquito nets and other control programs are helping to protect more than half a billion people in sub-Saharan Africa against malaria, according to the World Health Organization. In its latest World Malaria Report, the organization cited these efforts as contributing to significant but fragile decreases in malaria cases and deaths in the region.

Worldwide, the WHO estimates deaths from malaria in 2009 were 781,000, about 200,000 fewer than they were in 2000. The most significant gains were made in Africa, where the disease extracts the heaviest burden on society. There, eleven countries saw cases and deaths drop by at least half between 2008 and 2010. Additionally, in 32 countries outside of Africa where malaria is considered to be endemic–occurring year-round–the number of confirmed cases also dropped by more than half. However, some countries, such as Rwanda, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Zambia showed a worrying reversal to this trend in malaria cases in 2009, highlighting the need for constant vigilance and careful assessment of the roles that socioeconomic and environmental factors, including climate, play in driving these changes.

“The news coming out of the WHO report is overall very encouraging, but we still need to know if any of the changes in malaria trends are really a result of the interventions and not due to other factors, such as a drought,” says Madeleine Thomson, a senior research scientist at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society, which is also a PAHO/WHO Collaborating Centre for Climate Sensitive Diseases. “Knowing this would improve the quality of our impact assessment,” she says.

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