IRI’s first Q&A

We just kicked off a new series on our home page. Over the next year, I’ll be interviewing many of the luminaries that pass through our halls here at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society. My goal is to give a big picture perspective from big thinkers in the field of climate risk management and adaptation. Rather than write a full story, I’ll post Q&As, which I think can be effective tools for time-strapped science communicators. I also think serve as good resources for journalists, because the content is primary–straight from the scientists’ mouths.

Here’s an excerpt from my interview with Graeme Hammer…

It isn’t the climate forecast, stupid!

Information graphics + science = Communication

For my current job, I’m mostly a writer, sometimes a graphics designer and occasional photographer. I don’t get many opportunities these days to create information graphics, so it’s always a treat when I get to help one of our scientists communicate through visual information.

Here’s a chart that a colleague made and used many times to illustrate the relationship between rainfall anomalies (an anomaly is the difference from the average) and occurrence of peatland fires in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia.

My main issue with the chart is the confusing double axis and the overuse of loud colors. The eye is constantly forced to consult the legend to figure out what is being shown. The point we want to make with this graphic is: drier-than-normal years have an influence on fire activity. With this in mind, I made this version:

We’ve helped this chart out heaps just by teasing apart the two data sets onto separate axes. Alternating vertical bands help the eye follow the data across different years. And to really hit the point home, I added the circles and dark text.

I also tinkered on the wonderful Many Eyes site to show the data in a slightly different configuration:

This scatter plot shows the hotspot densities as circles of different sizes, which enables one to see immediately that most of the larger circles are tied to negative (drier) rainfall anomalies. If I could customize the chart further, I’d fiddle with the y-axis and change the awful intervals (where’s the zero line?)

What do you think?

Audio slideshow about Ethiopia’s water resources

My colleague Jason and I put together an audio slideshow about an IRI scientist’s trip to Ethiopia. The scientist, Paul Block, is trying to help he country better manage its scant water resources. He came back with a nice collection of photos for us to sift through and frame out a story. We sat him down in front of our trusty Edirol digital recorder (pictured in the “reporter’s toolkit” section to the right) and had him narrate the piece. We were lucky in that Paul can speak quite eloquently off-the-cuff, so the whole thing took only a few tries.

In areas where Paul didn’t have appropriate photos to tie in with what he was saying, we went to outside sources, including Flickr. NGOs and universities also usually make many images freely available. Click on the image to view the slideshow. Hope you enjoy, and as always, feedback is appreciated.

IRI at COP14 in Poznan

The International Research Institute for Climate and Society’s participation at this year’s Conference of the Parties (COP14) in Poznan, Poland centers around two side events that highlight the importance of climate risk management for adaptation. One is on index insurance, the other is on using climate information to help prevent humanitarian disasters

Read more on the IRI news page.

[Image from COP14/Poznan 2008 gallery]

Index Insurance: a tool against poverty

This week’s web story on the IRI site gives an update to our work on using index insurance to protect farmers against some of the climate risks they face.

Index insurance remains a promising new tool to help alleviate poverty by reducing the impacts of climate shocks in the developing world. It may even increase the poor’s resiliency to climate change. In October, the International Research Institute for Climate and Society co-hosted a workshop to discuss the technical challenges that currently preclude the use of index insurance on a large scale.

“During the workshop, we learned about some of the scientific innovations that could help overcome the hurdles to scaling up insurance programs,” says IRI’s Molly Hellmuth, one of the event’s organizers and editor of the Climate and Society Publication. “However, the innovations must be balanced with the reality on the ground: we need simple, understandable and trustworthy products if impoverished communities are to use index insurance successfully.”

More than 30 experts from fields as diverse as reinsurance, climate science, economics and food security participated in the two-day workshop, which was co-hosted by the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions. Among them were representatives from the World Food Programme, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, the United Nations Development Programme and Oxfam America.

Click to get a more detailed description of index insurance.

Read the rest of the story on the IRI features page.

[Image designed by Jason Rodriguez/IRI]

Predicting and preventing climate-driven epidemics

Exciting news for the International Research Institute for Climate and Society:

Google.org, the philanthropic arm of the Internet search company, has awarded the IRI $900,000 to work with its partners to improve the use of forecasts, rainfall data and other climate information in East Africa, and to build stronger connections between weather, climate and health specialists there so they can better predict and prevent outbreaks of infectious diseases.

The award is part of Google.org’s Predict and Prevent program, which funds projects and technologies that help map “hot spots” of global emerging infectious diseases and develop improved early-warning systems that predict potential disease outbreaks.

Climate plays a critical role in determining the distribution of many of Africa’s epidemic diseases, such as malaria and meningitis. Their transmission is dependent on prevailing environmental conditions such as rainfall and temperature. Year-to-year variations in the amount of rainfall and temperature can therefore change the pattern and timing of epidemics. This makes it difficult for poor countries to plan their public health strategies.

But the link between climate and some diseases means that seasonal forecasts, satellite measurements and other data can be useful in making decisions about how much resources to allocate for an upcoming epidemic season, and when and where to allocate them.

Read more about the Google.org grant.

Be sure to dowload a cool new Google Earth layer that shows the locations of each grant project.

Disasters: Shifting from Response to Prevention

I posted a web story on the IRI home page about the wonderful work of a few of our interns completed during assignments in West Africa and Central America…

Torrential rains lashed West and Central African countries this rainy season, setting off flooding and causing considerable damage. On the evening of June 26th alone, nearly 200 millimeters of rain fell on the villages of Malem Hoddar and Malem Thierigne in eastern Senegal. The ensuing flash floods killed at least one person, displaced dozens of families and destroyed hundreds of homes and livestock. As usual, the regional Red Cross office in Dakar mobilized its vast network of donors and volunteers to respond to this and other events. But this season, the organization also did something fundamentally different in its operations.

“It’s a revolution,” says Pablo Suarez, Associate Program Director at the Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Center. “Not only was this the first time a particular zone in West Africa used a particular forecast, it was the first time in the history of the Red Cross/Red Crescent movement that science-based information about something likely to happen was used to ask for aid,” he says.

A key player in this transformation was an IRI intern and Climate and Society masters student named Arame Tall. In early June, Tall went to work with the Disaster Management Unit of the Red Cross office for West and Central Africa (IFRC-WCAZ), based in Dakar, to find ways to incorporate forecasts and other climate information into Red Cross decision making.

Halfway across the globe, Tall’s classmates, Sarah Abdelrahim and Lisette Braman, were on a similar mission in Panama, working with forecasters at the Water Center for the Humid Tropics of Latin America and the Caribbean (CATHALAC).

The internships were the latest example of the ongoing, expanding partnership between the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies and the IRI.

Complete story on the IRI features page.

Photo: Courtesy IFRC

Reducing peatland fires in Indonesian Borneo

In early August, the provincial governor of Central Kalimantan, located on the Indonesian part of Borneo Island, issued a decree that had the Asia Program folks at IRI jumping for joy. Ok, scientists at IRI aren’t really in the habit of jumping about their work. But they did get quite excited about the governor’s statement.

“The decree is a landmark document on at least two counts: it moves away from previous government approach that banned the use of fire by farmers to one of controlled burning, and, it specifically mentions the use of climate information beyond weather–both of which we advocated in our work,” says Shiv Someshwar, head of IRI’s Asia and Pacific program. “Our efforts have translated into changed policy.”

Indonesia has faced increasing pressure from other Southeast Asian countries to get its fire problem under control. In turn, it has put pressure on its provinces to act. As a result, the Central Kalimantan government banned farmers from using fires in 2006. But the strategy, sporadically enforced, imposed serious burdens on poor farming communities, who claim the ban significantly decreased their livelihoods.

Now that the ban has been lifted, tensions should ease. But challenges remain. The decree doesn’t give details on what “controlled burning” entails, which authority will monitor or oversee the burning and how exactly climate information will be incorporated into decision making. There are other issues as well, which I will get to shortly. But first, some background on the situation.

Continue reading »