DOWN2EARTH is a multi- and inter-disciplinary project that translated climate information into useful metrics of water scarcity/food security, decision-support tools, warning systems, media communication, and policy in the context of socio-economic data and community input. Our deliverables will aid in the development of short-term adaptation responses to climatic shocks at community and governance levels, and support the creation of policies and far-reaching methods of communication designed to achieve long-term resilience to climate change within rural communities of the Horn of Africa Drylands (HAD). Key attributes of this project will ensure its long-term success: gendered community input and communication; a novel, efficient, and open-source, co-designed regional modeling structure for impact-based seasonal forecasting, hosted and implemented on servers at ICPAC; and a social media chatbot for delivering seasonal water and food security forecasts to agro-pastoralist end-users.
A critical deliverable in the project was the Climate into Useful Water And Land Information in Drylands (CUWALID) modeling framework, which incorporates stochastic climatic drivers that filter climate forecasts generated in advance of key rainy seasons at ICPAC to assess the impacts of the seasonal forecast on water and food security. The broader innovation here is the generation of information that translates climate information into something that is actionable by governments, NGOs, and rural communities. We deliver this now as part of an operational workflow at ICPAC throught the Greater Horn of Africa Outlook Forum (GHACOF) and through the WujihaCast chatbot (on Telegram). The latter is designed to support 5 languages across the HAD (English, Swahili, Amharic, Somali, Oromo) and to generate outputs on surface and groundwater availability, flood hazard, crop status, and pasture/browse status at county (Kenya), zone (Ethiopia), and region (Somali) scales. This new forecasting and delivery system was developed through extensive model-building efforts that take advantage of state-of-the-art knowledge of dryland hydrology and climate forcing (including new knowledge gained from analysis of historical trends and patterns), as well as through interactions with numerous stakeholders who specified their informational needs and workflows. These outputs are shining examples of DOWN2EARTH's successes in delivering on what we promised.
We have also contributed to regional and national policy development through a series of policy analyses and briefs, and through agent-based modeling (ABM) that can explore the range of potential outcomes for rural community adaptation to climate change based on a set of policies and climate forcing. We also invested in an expanded network of new automatic weather stations for Somali, a sparsely gauged area. Additionally, we did substantial work in rural communities, both in terms of researching the challenges faced and the barriers to adaptation, as well as in outreach events aimed at informing these same people about the project learnings and the potential utility of certain outputs.
In terms of communication and dissemination, DOWN2EARTH has participated in multiple Greater Horn of Africa Outlook Forums, as well as in multiple UNCC Conference of Parties (COPs). We also presented our research and project outputs in numerous academic and non-academic conference settings, as well as in many stakeholder events. We also co-developed a new massive open online course (MOOC) designed to train journalists to report on climate (in English, Swahili, Somali, Oromo, Amharic). We also worked closely with EU Horizon 2020 sister projects, CONFER and FOCUS-Africa, to create a series of webinars and podcasts, and held a final information-sharing meeting in Brussels after which we briefed the EC and other stakeholders. Additionally, the project produced several films that tell important stories of how rural communities are affected by climate change in the HAD. These films are now part of BBC Media Action's Living Climate Change series.
