Climate Services Stakeholders From The Tri-continental OACPS Regions Gather At The ClimSA Programme Inaugural Forum

Brussels, 2 December 2021/OACPS: Over 400 participants from the Members of the Organisation of African, Caribbean and Pacific States (OACPS) and the Europe Union (EU) gathered to take part in the inaugural ClimSA’21 Forum on 15, 16 and 18 November 2021. This fully-virtual event, with the theme of “Connecting suppliers and users of climate information in ACP regions”, was hosted by the Government of the Republic of Kenya.

The ClimSA’21 Forum is an activity of the Intra-ACP Climate Services and related applications programme (ClimSA), which was launched in March 2021. The Programme, with a budget of € 85 million over six years, is a joint initiative of the OACPS and the EU.

The intra-ACP ClimSA programme was established to support the climate information services value chain in the Members of the OACPS, through providing technical and financial assistance, infrastructure, and capacity-building to improve and widen access to, and use of climate information.

The first ClimSA Forum, ClimSA’21, was organised to identify and qualify the needs of stakeholders in targeted sectors of agriculture and food security, water resource management, public health, energy and disaster risk reduction. ClimSA’21 enabled stakeholders to share their experiences on the use of climate information, the challenges which they faced and their ongoing needs in matters of information and climate services in order to move towards a sustainable improvement of social and economic conditions in sensitive sectors and territories facing climate change.

As main outputs, the Forum formulated nine operational recommendations:

• To build capacity in Decision Support Systems (DSS) for sector-specific priorities of the Global Framework for Climate Services (GFCS);
• To improve adapted dissemination means for climate information at the regional, national and community levels;
• To increase capacity to develop climate smart agriculture in relevant sectors;
• To strengthen end-to-end Early Warning Systems (EWS) including community-based EWS;
• To convene a regional stakeholder workshop between climate experts and socio-economic sector representatives to define and validate the user requirements;
• To encourage Regional Climate Centers to extend the services to all GFCS priority sectors;
• Operationalise a collaborative platform between Climate and Health sectors to promote co-design and co-production;
• To implement a Hydrological Status and Outlook System (hydrosos) initiative;
• To assist National HydroMeteorological Services (NHMS) for institutional capacity to extend its mandate in the full GFCS sector priorities.

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