Project description
Climate services and nature-based solutions for climate adaptation in Sub-Saharan Africa
Sub-Saharan African countries face significant vulnerability to climate change and weather-related disasters, with severe impacts on safety, water and food availability, exacerbating poverty and inequality. Climate-related threats spur internal migration and urbanisation, increasing risks in low-income settlements. The EU-funded ALBATROSS project aims to accelerate climate adaptation in Sub-Saharan Africa by pioneering innovative and sustainable adaptation strategies based on nature-based solutions and grounded in actionable climate information. The project will establish a Climate Resilience Development Network across Sub-Saharan Africa, integrating indigenous communities, research organisations and policy actors to co-create and deploy community-driven climate services, climate predictions and decision making relevant tools. The aim is to foster cooperation and capacity-building across borders for effective climate adaptation and sustainable development pathways.
Objective
Increasing vulnerability due to climate change requires cross-sectoral management of the territories with bottom-up approaches based on active community participation. Climate change intensifies territorial risk and impacts severely on human migration and displacement, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. Avoiding maladaptation associated to internal migration as well as to other adaptation actions which do not adopt a nexus approach (e.g. water-food-energy nexus) requires effective planning and management of migration hot spots. At the same time, it calls for more integrated strategies which simultaneously support sustainable development growth pathways and climate resilience development in the African context.
ALBATROSS aims at addressing these challenges by delivering novel, innovative and decision making-relevant tools and knowledge which will support the adoption of feasible, effective, and sustainable need-based adaptation strategies into AF policies and programs. It will do that by co-creating climate services and tools which will enable the weighting of compound and cascading impacts (benefits and threats) on ecosystem health, food security, socio-economic vulnerability while addressing specific natural hazards (e.g. drought or flood) or sectoral climate adaptation needs (e.g. agriculture) through nature-based solutions (NBS) and other climate adaptation measures. The methodological approach of ALBATROSS will be tested ad validated in different Sub-Saharan countries, leading to the co-creation and co-evaluation with key stakeholders of need-based adaptions options and plans. By combining participatory approaches with fundamental research grounded on the latest generation of observational data and modelling techniques, ALBATROSS will provide robust and science-based evidence on the degree at which NBS may perform as multifunctional adaptation strategy for counteracting forced migration, biodiversity loss and hydrometeorological risk in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Fields of science
- agricultural sciencesagriculture, forestry, and fisheriesagriculturesustainable agriculture
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesenvironmental sciencessustainability sciences
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesphysical geographynatural disasters
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesatmospheric sciencesclimatologyclimatic changes
- social sciencessociologydemographyhuman migrations
Keywords
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-RIA - HORIZON Research and Innovation ActionsCoordinator
40126 Bologna
Italy