The Fifth International Conference on Climate Services (ICCS 5)

Walker Institute are at the Fifth International Conference on Climate Services (ICCS 5), held at Cape Town from February 27 to March 3.

During the ICCS 5 we will be sharing some of our projects and communication approaches in Africa with stakeholders and communities.

These projects include RAINWATCH. RAINWATCH is a simple, low-cost and real-time rainfall monitoring system. It permits the tracking of critical rainfall and temperature attributes and serves as an early warning system that addresses extensive drought and excessive flooding beneficial to different users such as farmers, scientists and policy-makers. At the ICCS 5 we will be discussing the RAINWATCH experience and ongoing efforts, and the important questions it has raised, such as how to better integrate climate-science policy to develop locally relevant adaptive capacity.

Walker Director Ros Cornforth has been invited to talk on a panel about ClimHealthAfrica. This session will share the strategic priorities of ClimHealthAfrica and key messages from several recent user-forums and experiences in Africa in order to identify emerging issues, and guide discussion on how to make climate services more responsive to user needs in Africa.

Ros will also talk about the importance of integrating climate science in health systems, particularly in East and South African countries, who face challenges of health emergencies and basic healthcare and public services alongside with climate variability. She assesses the current situation in Uganda and Malawi regarding the challenges of integrating climate information services with health systems and looks forward for working with national institutions to drive nationally prioritized systems via collaboration between climate and health sectors and integrated implementation. 

Finally, we will be presenting the CAULDRON game at the marketplace. The CAULDRON game aims to foster cross-sector discussion around the science of extreme weather event attribution and its potential for use in policy-making, especially in UNFCCC Loss and Damage Work Programme negotiations. The engaging and fast-paced game encourages players to understand the role of climate change and extreme events against a backdrop of changing risk.