Are Haitians Vulnerable to Climate?
We just put out an informative Q+A over on the IRI site about the risks from climate that the people of Haiti may face in the coming year. Currently, about a 1.2 million Haitians are without proper shelter, and an additional 470,000 have been displaced from their homes, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. This situation leaves them vulnerable to storms and extreme weather events in the coming months.
Here are a few excerpts:
Q: We’re currently in an El Niño period. Is this expected to change the climate outlook for Haitians?
Tony Barnston: Haiti’s rainy season is long. As I mentioned above, it actually has two peaks, with a brief period in July that has relatively lower rainfall. We expect the current El Niño to persist through at least March, and possibly through May. During times of El Niño, the region around Port-au-Prince tends to get above-normal rainfall from late winter to around May. But we can’t be sure the El Niño will still exist in May. We’ll have a better idea in the coming months.
Alessandra Giannini: Let’s remember that we are talking about the impact of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) in its weakening phase, which is different from that in its growing phase. Right now, El Niño’s impact on Haiti is mostly indirect, resulting from warming in the tropical North Atlantic over the past six months. That’s why we also need to consider North Atlantic atmospheric circulation, captured in something called the North Atlantic Oscillation. The NAO was in its negative phase in December 2009, meaning that trade winds were weakened. This situation contributed to ocean warming, because there was less evaporation happening on the surface waters. So if the NAO lasts in its negative state from December to March, it will favor the continuation of these warm conditions, which are the basis for the above-normal rainfall predictions that Tony mentioned above.
Q: And what about the second half of the rainy season– after July?
Tony Barnston: The rainfall expectation for the second half of Haiti’s rainy season will depend in part on the direction of the ENSO state this summer– will it be toward another El Niño, La Niña or neutral? At this time of year we currently have poor predictability for ENSO beyond about May or June. An unfavorable scenario for Haiti would be for the development of La Niña during the summer. It would not only imply a wet second half of its rainy season, but also the chances for a tropical hurricane in the vicinity, or even a hurricane hit. As these maps show, La Niña conditions tend to not only increase the total number of hurricanes in the Atlantic, but also increase the number that cut across the Caribbean. In 2008, Tropical Storm Fay, Hurricane Gustav, Hurricane Hanna and Hurricane Ike pounded Haiti, leaving widespread destruction and displacing hundreds of thousands of people.
Read the rest on the IRI’s web site.
IRI’s work to benefit farmers in India
A colleague has written a nice story about a new project at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society that aims to improve forecasting of the Indian monsoon…
In May and June each year, speculation about the coming of the monsoon fills newspapers and conversations across India. Urban dwellers eagerly await respite from overbearing heat. Investors scrutinize forecasts, trying to anticipate possible impacts on food prices. But none have more at stake than India’s over 100 million farming households.
In India, where more than 60% of agricultural land is rainfed and the average farm size is only 3.5 acres, a failed monsoon often means complete loss of a crop. Recent increases in suicides among heavily indebted farmers have highlighted the extreme desperation in some areas. A lackluster monsoon can seriously impact food prices and India’s overall economic growth. For example, this year’s poor monsoon has led to increases in sugar, legume, and potato prices, and many estimate that India’s gross domestic product growth rate may drop by a full percentage point. The government also spends massive sums on drought relief. According to the agriculture ministry, relief expenses totaled about $5 billion during the last major drought in 2002.
The magnitude of these human and economic costs – particularly as concern grows over the potential for climate change to increase extreme weather patterns – has sparked interest in finding more ways to plan ahead. The International Research Institute for Climate and Society at Columbia University is partnering with Indian government agencies and universities in an innovative new research effort led by the government of India designed to improve monsoon forecasts and develop strategies that help farmers and policy makers prepare and act early, based on information tailored to their needs.
Read the rest here.
Photo: Sheshagiri Rao/IRI
Audio slideshow on Index insurance
Index insurance for development and disaster management from IRI Video Pages on Vimeo.
This is our latest audio slideshow, which Jason and I produced in record time for the launch of the Climate and Society publication at the 2009 Global Humanitarian Forum. I’ve written it before, and I’ll write it again: audio slideshows are a fantastic, low budget way to add pop to your stories. And we’ve found they’re much more virulent than traditional web stories. At IRI, we use Vimeo to share our multimedia.
Climate information hot topic in World Disasters Report
The latest World Disasters Report by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies argues that disaster-relief agencies need to shift focus from expensive response operations to cost-effective prevention measures. An important component of this, the report details, is using climate records, monitoring and forecasts to make planning decisions days, weeks, even months ahead. This, of course, is what the International Research Institute for Climate and Society is all about, and our work is mentioned numerous times throughout the document.
Read the whole story on the IRI home page.
Climate and coconuts – a Sri Lanka story
The full story is available on the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) web site.
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!
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.
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]
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