Water Demand in the Philippines
The population of Manila has increased sharply in recent decades, and so has its demand for water. Right now, about 97% of metro Manila’s water comes from the Angat reservoir, located north of the city in Bulacan Province (map). The reservoir also serves farmers in Bulacan, who rely on irrigation water to grow their palay (unmilled rice) and vegetables, and it is a critical source of back-up hydroelectric power for the region.
Everything runs smoothly in years of normal rainfall. But when the region gets below-normal rainfall-as is typically the case during an El Niño–the situation gets contentious. Continue reading »
Index Insurance for Ethiopian Farmers
Our latest web story discusses the new collaboration between the International Research Institute for Climate and Society and Oxfam America, a nongovernmental organization that works on poverty issues.
The organization has enlisted IRI’s expertise on index insurance to design contracts for poor farmers in a remote village in the Ethiopian highlands (larger map). The goal of the project is to improve farmers’ ability to manage drought risks and subsequently gain better access to credit. If all goes well, the two organizations and their local partners hope to export the success to other villages and potentially scale up the program to cover entire districts.
Read the full story by visiting the IRI web site.
Audio slide show about Summer Institute
We just posted our first-ever audio slide show on the IRI web site.
One of our talented communications interns took all the photos, recorded the interviews and put the whole thing together in iMovie. The production process, as with anything new, didn’t go as smoothly as we had hoped, mainly because of web-related technical glitches we hadn’t anticipated. But our production aide and web team really came through in the end. The final piece fills me with pride. Hope you enjoy it too.
[Image from Daniel Yeow]
Index insurance- can it help reduce poverty?
The International Research Institute for Climate and Society and Swiss Re are jointly hosting a high-level policy roundtable on the use of index insurance for poverty reduction at this year’s Global Humanitarian Forum in Geneva. The roundtable, which takes place on June 24, will include leaders from fields as diverse as reinsurance, climate science, economics and food security, in an effort to gain insight on how index insurance can best serve today’s development needs.
What is index insurance? Click to expand.
Read the rest on the IRI features page
[Image credit: Dan Osgood]
Agricultural water management and climate risk
Feasible investments in agricultural water management are likely to bring the greatest livelihood benefit to the rural poor of sub-Saharan Africa and parts of South Asia if they are part of a comprehensive approach to managing climate risk, according to a new report from the International Research Institute for Climate and Society.
“Despite the known impacts of current climate risk and growing concern about future climate change, climate risk management remains conspicuously absent from many analyses and regional development strategies,” write Casey Brown and James Hansen, the authors of the report, called Agricultural Water Management and Climate Risk (download it here). The report was commissioned by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and will help guide the foundation’s investment strategy in agricultural and water development in the face of climate variability.
Filed under IRI related | Comment (0)IRI’s Efforts to Combat Malaria
Malaria affects between 300 and 500 million people every year, according to the WHO. It causes two percent of all deaths worldwide–among them 3,000 children a day, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. Complications from malaria, such as severe anemia, account for at least a million additional deaths. Most of the countries where endemic and epidemic malaria occurs are among the poorest on Earth. Because the disease causes widespread illness and death, it is a great drain on many national economies, consuming as much as 40% of their public-health expenditures.
April 25 marks the first World Malaria Day, created by the World Health Organization to raise global awareness of this devastating but preventable infectious disease. As a PAHO-WHO Collaborating Centre, the IRI has long provided countries the technical support needed to develop early warning systems for malaria and other climate sensitive diseases.
IRI’s diverse set of experts demonstrate ways in which climate information, such as historic variability, real-time monitoring and seasonal forecasting, improves decision making in health, agriculture and other climate-sensitive sectors.
Read all about the IRI’s malaria work here.
IRI’s Climate Briefing for March
The striking picture shown here came in yesterday’s update from NASA’s Earth Observatory. It shows La Niña’s fingerprint in southern Africa.
How does La Niña—a cooling of the eastern Pacific Ocean—affect plant growth on the other side of the globe in Africa? La Niña occurs when strong trade winds blow across the Pacific Ocean. The winds push sun-warmed surface water west towards Australia. Cool water rises to replace the surface water in the east. As a result, the Pacific Ocean is cooler than normal in the east off South America and warmer in the west off Australia. Warm, moist air rises over the pool of warm water in the western Pacific, where it generates abundant rain in eastern Australia and Indonesia. The rising air travels east in the upper atmosphere, drops as cool, dry air over the eastern Pacific, and then blows west as the strong trade winds that drive La Niña.
Click for additional excerpt…
Reason I start with this is that for the last few months the IRI team has been forecasting a strong-to-moderate continuation of the phenomenon. This image, and one of Australia, also featured in NASA’s story, helps us to understand the real world effects of teleconnections. In Africa at least, the effects aren’t limited to greener landscapes. The increased chance of rains worried the World Health Organization enough to issue an alert in January for higher-than-normal number of malaria outbreaks in the region. You can read more about climate and malaria here.
Anyway, the briefing is starting. Let’s see what Tony and the gang have for us this month….
Filed under IRI related | Comment (0)Online resources to help Uruguay’s agriculture sector
One of IRI’s goals for its work in South America is to bring state-of-the-art climate information into the hands of people and groups who can make immediate use of it. In Uruguay, the IRI has teamed up with the country’s agriculture research institute to develop a comprehensive online resource for farmers, farming cooperatives and policy makers to help them gauge climate risks and make decisions on where, when and how to grow crops.
The resource, called an Information and Decision Support System, gives users relevant information on estimated crop yields, pasture production, current climate conditions, climate forecasts and areas at risk for drought and pests. Users can access the IDSS from the web pages of the Uruguay’s Instituto National de Investigacion Agropecuaria (INIA).
Read the rest on the IRI’s web site.
IRI’s media page is here.
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