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.

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.

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.

Eyes in the (Sheltering) Sky

In many regions of the developing world, there is a scarcity of ground-based measuring stations to record environmental conditions such as rainfall and temperature. These data are desperately needed to inform decision making in agriculture, water resource management, energy generation and other sectors.

In the last three decades, institutions have relied increasingly on satellite-derived estimations of environmental conditions. While these data sets are a welcome alternative in areas that have little or no ground-based coverage, their accuracy has not been evaluated properly.

Read the rest on the IRI’s web site.

IRI’s media page is here.