Climate Scientist to Lead International Research Institute for Climate and Society

Lisa Goddard, IRI’s new director. Photo by Brian Kahn/IRI

Lisa Goddard, a leading expert on climate change and El Niño’s influence on climate has been appointed director of the International Research Institute for Climate and Society, part of Columbia University’s Earth Institute.

The IRI is devoted to studying climate prediction and helping vulnerable societies anticipate, prevent and manage climate-related events such as droughts, floods and heat waves.

“I look forward to working with Dr. Goddard as she leads this unique and important organization,” says Steven Cohen, executive director of the Earth Institute. ”Since its founding, the IRI has worked to develop and utilize the highest quality climate science and data to address the real-world problems of sustainable development. Lisa Goddard brings the experience, expertise and energy needed to provide visionary leadership to the IRI,” he says.

Goddard says her goal for the institute is to capitalize on its existing talent and go after new funding opportunities. ”In this way, we can continue to exert a powerful influence for change in the developing world as well as in the scientific community, she says.

“I believe strongly in the mission of the IRI – in connecting science on climate variability and change to better decision-making and improved livelihoods for people throughout the world. The focus and approach of our work gives us a unique perspective that couldn’t be achieved through more traditional academic pathways.”

Researchers at the institute work on projects across the globe and are funded by U.S. government agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Science Foundation, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the U.S. Agency for International Development, as well as other national governments, including Uruguay and India. The IRI collaborates with major international organizations such as the World Food Programme, the World Health Organization and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.

Goddard, 45, joined the IRI as a postdoctoral research fellow in 1995, when the institute was in its pilot phase. She worked on seasonal prediction and its application in regions around the world. In 2003, Goddard was promoted to research scientist, and earlier this year, was tapped to lead the IRI’s Climate Program, overseeing nine researchers and support staff. She also developed and currently oversees the Post-docs Applying Climate Expertise Program (PACE), a national program that links recent climate Ph.D. recipients with decision-making institutions.

Goddard sits on five scientific advisory panels, including the National Academies of Science’s prestigious Board of Atmospheric Sciences Committee, and serves as chair of U.S. CLIVAR, a national research program that studies the variability and predictability of the global climate system.

“Lisa is on a very short list of people one thinks of when considering the intersection of climate science and societal needs,” says Jim Hurrell, who is the director of the Earth System Laboratory at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and has worked with Goddard for more than a decade. He is also the co-chair of the International CLIVAR Scientific Steering Group, of which Goddard is a member.

“She has the rare ability to really understand what decision makers need and how to convey the information we have, including the uncertainties, so that they can make the best use of the climate science and predictions that our field produces – a very rare talent,” Hurrell says.

Goddard’s research is focused on improving the quality and content of climate prediction. “When I first came to IRI, seasonal climate prediction was a fairly new concept, but it was clear there were big possibilities to improve the information being supplied to communities at risk of climate variability, especially in the developing world,” she recalls. “People needed and wanted better information, and this has continued to this day.”

She plans to continue her research that focuses on predicting the climate 10 to 20 years in the future, a relatively new field known as near–term climate prediction, or decadal variability. Prediction at this time scale is in high demand for development projects. For example, a country thinking of building a dam to meet future water and energy demands, or expanding farm production to feed a growing population should understand how the climate might change in a decade or two. Seasonal forecasts and long term climate projections such as those provided by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are useful, but inadequate in these cases.

“I’ve had the pleasure of working with Lisa over many years at IRI,” says previous director Stephen Zebiak, who is now leading a program hosted at IRI to improve the provision and development of climate services around the world. “She brings outstanding credentials, great dedication and energy to her role as director, and these will serve the institute very well.”

Goddard earned her Ph.D. from Princeton in 1995. She is also an adjunct associate professor at Columbia University’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences.

For more information, please contact Francesco Fiondella, francesco@iri.columbia.edu, 646.321.2271.

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From Birmingham to Bamako: How Farmers Deal with Drought

by Vanessa Meadu, Francesco Fiondella and Brian Kahn

The massive and wide-scale drought that has left American farmers shaking their fists at barren clouds is the fifth-worst on record for the U.S. Eight out of every 10 acres of agricultural land has been affected. As a result, farmers will pull in the lowest corn yield in more than a decade, and the soybean harvest will also be significantly lower than average. American consumers will likely feel the impact of this at the checkout counter in the months to come.

These harsh realities come in a country that has some of the most sophisticated data and technology for climate and weather monitoring in the world.

Diouna, Mali. Farmers here must contend with the Sahel’s dry, sandy soil and whatever rains the clouds bring to grow millet, maize, sorghum and other crops. Photo: F. Fiondella/IRI

U.S. farmers have unprecedented access to climate tools, information and forecasts. These range from a general El Niño/La Niña seasonal outlook to more regional-specific tools such as AgroClimate, a suite of easy-to-use products for fruit, corn and soy growers and ranchers in the Southeast. These tools can’t prevent a drought, but with the click of the mouse or the swipe of a smartphone, they can tell farmers in almost real-time how changing conditions will affect their bottom line, several months ahead of the harvest.

Of course, access is one thing. Knowing how to use that information effectively is another entirely. Even in a data-rich environment such as Florida, farmers are still learning how to use these tools to make meaningful decisions that can improve their bottom line.

Brehima Konaté, 70, is chief of Diouna Village. Photo: F. Fiondella/IRI

Thousands of miles away and worlds apart in Mali, farmers face a similar problem but use different methods to overcome it. Travel to the most remote parts of the country and you’ll meet farmers such as 70-year-old Brehima Konaté, chief of Diouna, a village in Mali’s Sahel region situated about 200 miles northeast of the capital, Bamako.

“We listen to the radio to hear rainfall related information and the right timing for planting. We also use traditional knowledge,” Konaté says. “We learn how to apply fertilizers at the appropriate timing. We were told to change the way we used to apply them and that we needed to do it right.”

Farmers in the Sahelian village of Diouna in southern Mali listen to the weather broadcasts as they prepare their field for planting. Photo: F. Fiondella/IRI

In 1982, Mali’s national meteorological service began supplying poor, remote farmers with agro-meteorological information to help them decide when and what to plant and when to fertilize their crops. The program arose in response to widespread, devastating famines across the Sahel caused by a series of prolonged droughts in the 1970s and 1980s. Konaté, like most of this fellow farmers in Mali and its neighboring countries, doesn’t have access to irrigation. If the rainy season starts late, or underperforms – as it did last year in the Sahel — there’s not much he can do once he has planted his crops.

Fatoumata Dembéle tends to her vegetable garden in the village of Molobal, Mali. Photo: F. Fiondella/IRI

By providing farmers with forecast information at critical points ahead of the growing season and throughout it, Mali’s meteorological agency hopes to help Konaté and his fellow farmers across the country better manage the risks associated with a highly variable rainy season.

According to the agency, more than 2,500 farmers have already benefited from the program. The services offered may not be as sophisticated as those that American farmers have access to, but they are critical to their livelihoods nonetheless. “If you apply the information rigorously, then your production will surely increase,” says Konaté.

Daouda Diarra, from Mali’s national meteorological agency, oversees a government program that provides rainfall and other climate information to farmers. The program also distributes rain gauges and trains farmers how to use them. Photo: F. Fiondella/IRI

“This type of project is vital for farmers living in the Sahel area, where extreme weather and climate events are pushing farmers beyond their natural capacity to cope with change,” says Dr. Robert Zougmoré, who leads work in West Africa for the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS).

The program brings together the world’s leading researchers in agricultural science, development research, climate science and earth system science to help farmers in developing countries overcome threats to agriculture and food security in a changing climate.

Farmers harvest okra in the village of Loulouni in Mali. They will sell the vegetable in the weekly market. Photo: F.Fiondella/IRI

“Right now, it’s possible to predict climate conditions in advance of planting seasons in much of Sub-Saharan Africa,” says Dr. James Hansen, a CCAFS researcher based at Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI), which is part of the Earth Institute. “But this information either doesn’t reach farmers, or reaches them in a form that is difficult to relate to their own farms. We’re studying Mali’s pioneering efforts in Africa to understand what made them successful and how it could become a model for other countries at risk,” Hansen says.The study in Mali is funded by CCAFS and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which is interested in enhancing food security in the region.

Researchers like Hansen and Zougmoré say that government ministers and donors need to consider investing in such tools as relatively low-cost means to rapidly and effectively improve food security in an increasingly uncertain world. This is as important in Mali’s Ségou Region as it is in the parts of the U.S. currently afflicted by the drought, and parts of the country like the Southwest, which will likely see drought occurring more frequently and severely due to climate change.

Read more:

Policy Brief: Agro-climate tools for a new climate-smart agriculture

Vanessa Meadu manages communications for the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS). Francesco Fiondella and Brian Kahn run communications for the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI).  

This post originally appeared as part of the Climate Change SOS series on the Daily Kos.

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Farmers in Senegal Use Forecasts to Combat Climate Risks

Category> Agriculture-Food, Climate, Poverty / Economic Development   Tags> Africa, agriculture, Climate, climate matters, farming, forecasts, IRI, sahel, Senegal, training

Climate in Africa’s Sahel region varies dramatically from one year to the next and often threatens farmers’ livelihoods. In Kaffrine, Senegal, the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security, the Senegalese National Meteorological Agency, the country’s agriculture extension service, the Earth Institute’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society and many farmers groups, are working to equip farmers with the information needed to better manage droughts and other climate risks.

The partners have held training workshops to teach farmers about the probabilistic nature of seasonal climate forecasts, and in turn, the researchers have learned about the farmers’ traditional climate knowledge and management responses. By engaging with farmers in this way, the researchers now have a better understanding of community needs and have built common ground between scientific forecasting and traditional knowledge. The farmers emerged from the trainings with an increased level of trust in seasonal forecasting, which has opened doors to improved agricultural management options.

A new video illustrates this participatory approach to making climate information accessible to farmers:

To learn more about the work, head over to the CCAFS blog:

http://ccafs.cgiar.org/blog/providing-climate-services-make-sense-farmers

http://ccafs.cgiar.org/blog/senegal-farmers-use-forecasts-combat-climate-risks

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Poor Ethiopian Farmers Receive ‘Unprecedented’ Insurance Payout

Last week, Oxfam America and the Rockefeller Foundation announced a weather index insurance payout of unprecedented scale directly to poor farmers. Thanks to a groundbreaking new program that relies on advanced satellite technology, more than 12,200 farmers in 45 villages in Northern Ethiopia will benefit from drought protection.  As a result of this year’s drought conditions each farmer will receive a share of the total $322,772 in payouts offered through the Horn of Africa Risk Transfer for Adaption Program, known as HARITA, to help cover crop losses.

A farmer signs his name indicating he received compensation for participating in games run by IRI and REST to determine how farmers perceive economic risk and value compensation from insurance at different timescales. Brian Kahn/IRI

In many rural areas, disaster often strikes poor farmers hard, forcing them to make choices that drag their families deeper into poverty. To survive, they might have to sell their tools for cash to buy food, or take their children out of school to save on fees. With weather insurance, farmers can protect the investment they make in their crops, and feel confident in taking out loans for fertilizer and better seeds to improve their harvests.

 “We used to be blocked because it was too expensive, if not impossible, to get drought and crop loss data in time to help the farmers,” said Dan Osgood, an economist at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society, who leads a team that helped design the insurance contracts for the farmers. “This payout was triggered by rainfall estimates measured by the same cutting-edge satellite technology used by NASA and NOAA, but engineered together with Ethiopians to target their risks and vulnerabilities. This allowed us to calculate the payouts just as crops were beginning to suffer, so farmers will get the money when they need it most,” he said.

Oxfam, with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, partnered with Swiss Re, the International Research Institute for Climate and Society, the Relief Society of Tigray, Dedebit Credit and Savings Institution, Nyala Insurance Company and Africa Insurance Company to start HARITA in 2007. Last year, the United Nations World Food Program, supported by United States Agency for International Development and Oxfam expanded HARITA, now known as the R4 Rural Resilience Initiative, to help poor farmers protect their crops and livelihoods from the impacts of climate variability and change, including drought.

Visit the Oxfam website for more details on the program and the historic payout.

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The Sahel Is Getting Wetter, But Will It Last?

The Sahel is a semiarid region south of the Sahara Desert that stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea. In the 1970s and 1980s it was hit by a series of persistent droughts and recurring famines, epitomized by the 1984 famine in Ethiopia. The Sahel remains one of the poorest and least developed regions in the world. It’s also one of the most vulnerable to climate change and variability. One bright spot for the region is that since the mid-1980s, average rainfall has increased steadily [see this animation]. People engaged in sustainable land management techniques such as agroforestry have been able to take advantage of it, rebuilding their livelihoods.

IRI scientist Alessandra Giannini explains her recent work on the natural forces that influence climate in the Sahel in a video abstract.

Scientists investigated many theories about the cause of the droughts in the years and decades since their inception. Initially they blamed it on land degradation from decades of poor land management made worse by rapid population growth. But ten years ago, Alessandra Giannini, a scientist at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society conclusively showed that changes in global tropical sea-surface temperature were are all needed to explain the shifting rainfall patterns in the Sahel.

Since then, Giannini and others have been trying to understand what specifically about the oceans and their behavior could lead to droughts in one decade, and rainfall in the next.

Giannini’s latest study, published in Environmental Research Letters, makes a strong case that the answer lies in the North Atlantic–more specifically, how it behaves compared to tropical oceans elsewhere. She and her colleagues analyzed climate model simulations of the 20th century as well as projections for the 21st century. They discovered that by simply looking at what North Atlantic sea-surface temperatures were doing relative to those in the rest of the world’s tropical oceans, they could explain not only the Sahel’s climatic ups and downs of the 20th century but also tie in to the observed trend of increasing rainfall in the region, and to projections of wetter conditions.

“For the first time, we have a unified, sensible explanation of the past, present and future climate of the Sahel,” Giannini says. She explains her results in this video abstract.

Bucking the Trend

In the 20th century, while the global tropical oceans grew consistently warmer because of greenhouse gas emissions, the North Atlantic changed little and in some areas even became cooler.

“Why? Because sulfate aerosols–essentially pollution from fossil fuel burning in North America and Europe–stopped the sun’s radiation from reaching the surface there,” Giannini says. “Normally, the North Atlantic will feed moist air in monsoon flow into the African continent, which is ultimately carried across the Sahel and gives it its rainfall.”

From the 1960s through the 1980s, Giannini and colleagues hypothesize that the aerosols over the North Atlantic ocean significantly reduced evaporation, cutting off the supply of moisture to the Sahel and throwing the region into a state of persistent drought.

Since the passing of the Clean Air Act and other environmental legislation in the U.S. and Western Europe, aerosol concentrations have steadily decreased. As a result, the North Atlantic has been warming up, actually outpacing the warming occurring in the global tropical oceans. With its moisture supply back online, the Sahel’s average annual rainfall has crept back up.

“The North Atlantic makes or breaks the deep convection that brings rain over the Sahel,” Giannini says.

“The mechanism proposed by Dr. Giannini should be further evaluated in both models and observations, but already the connection of rainfall to a warmer Atlantic should allow us to better gauge the reliability of  future projections and to understand the sources of current uncertainty in our models,” says Michela Biasutti, a climate scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory who studies the Sahel and was not involved in the study.

‘Seeing’ Climate Change

Climate change scenarios for the region indicate that average annual rainfall will increase  throughout this century if the North Atlantic continues to warm.

Giannini’s coauthors, Seyni Salack and Tiganadaba Lodoun, Ph.D. students at universities in Dakar and Ouagadougou, respectively, found that these projections were remarkably consistent with current rainfall trends. They looked at actual rainfall measurements across West Africa over the last 60 years and found that the increased average rainfall is caused by fewer, more intense bursts rather than more rainy days.

“Not only has rainfall been increasing, but interestingly,  the increase is better explained by increased intensity of rain events, rather than by more rainy days,” says Giannini.

This is markedly different than the wetter Sahel of the 1940s and 1950s, before the droughts. Back then, the higher rainfall came from more frequent rain events. But it is consistent with the general expectation from climate change that a warmer, moister atmosphere may lead to more intense downpours.

The increase in rainfall doesn’t necessarily bring only good news for the people of the region, however. The more intense downpours have led to recurrent flooding in recent years, causing loss of life, crops and infrastructure.

This is why it’s critical we understand the nature of climate variability and change in the Sahel, and help develop sound adaptation policies, so that people aren’t pinned between drought-induced famine one year and losing their homes to floods the next.

In addition to this scientific research, in part funded by the National Science Foundation, IRI has a number of ongoing training and data-sharing activities in the Sahel that are helping the region build its capacity to better predict changes in rainfall and temperatures over the short, medium and long term. This work is being funded through a number of partners, including the U.S. Agency for International Development, the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security, and the the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

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IRI Names New Deputy Director

Category> Climate, Donor and Partner News, General Earth Institute   Tags> Adaptation, Climate, Development, IRI, law

Haresh Bhojwani, IRI Deputy Director. Photo by Brian Kahn

Haresh Bhojwani has been appointed to be the Deputy Director of the International Research Institute for Climate and Society, part of Columbia University’s Earth Institute. He will coordinate IRI’s connections with development and humanitarian organizations so that IRI’s research can target the needs of those vulnerable to climate impacts, especially through the institution’s international collaborations.

“Haresh has helped IRI transform itself and has fostered strong relationships with development organizations,” says IRI director Lisa Goddard. “These relationships have positioned us to fulfill our mission to improve people’s lives and livelihoods in areas of the world plagued by recurring droughts, and floods and extreme weather.”

In his previous roles as IRI’s International Development Officer and more recently, as Director of International Partnerships, Bhojwani worked to ensure the institution’s ideas and approach about climate risk management and adaptation left their imprint on key global discussions such as the World Climate Conference-3 . IRI was recognized as an important international institution by the conference’s International Organizing Committee. Under this designation, Bhojwani was able to participate in the two-year planning process leading up to the conference, which ultimately developed the Global Framework for Climate Services.

He also played an important role in organizing the International Conference on Climate Services and establishing the new Climate Services Partnership . Efforts such as these have helped convince major development organizations that IRI and its research scientists are effective partners that can help them achieve their development objectives in the face of climate variability and change.

“As USAID and other agencies direct increasing attention to addressing climate change impacts, it is critical that the development and climate science communities understand each other,” says John Furlow, a climate change specialist at the U.S. Agency for International Development. “Haresh has played a great role in facilitating that communication and helping us move toward a model of collaborative learning.”

The agency has asked IRI to develop a range of new climate services to inform its decision making and help vulnerable communities anticipate and effectively respond to droughts, floods and other climate-related impacts.

At Columbia University, Bhojwani will work with Lisa Goddard on connecting IRI’s climate-related work to other units of the Earth Institute, such as the Columbia Water Center, the Agriculture and Food Security Center, the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions and the Mailman School of Public Health.

“Haresh has the rare ability to see what IRI scientists could bring to a problem and explaining so that funding partners can see it too,” says Mark Cane, G. Unger Vetlesen Professor of Earth and Climate Sciences at Columbia University, who was instrumental in founding IRI.

Prior to joining IRI in 2005, Bhojwani worked on issues of economic development and environmental conservation in Latin America – managing a network of sustainable development organizations in the Andean region under the banner Tropical Nature. He has represented human rights victims in Europe, Central America and the United States and has worked in indigenous and land rights in Latin America and the USA. He received his J.D. from Marquette University Law School and his B.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.

“IRI is helping to solve problems that have beleaguered societies for centuries,” says Bhojwani. “We are a unique institution whose ideas and approach on helping society better cope with climate impacts continue to gain traction around the world. I will work to strengthen the dialogue between the scientific, development, climate change adaptation and humanitarian communities.”

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Improving the Water Outlook in the Himalayas

Category> Climate, Water   Tags> American Geophysical Union, water matters

Andrew Robertson, a climate scientist at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society, discusses his research on helping reservoir managers in northern India make better planning decisions by improving their ability to predict how climate change will influence water availability. In order to do this, Robertson worked with colleagues at the Columbia Water Center and the Tree Ring Laboratory. The team reconstructed 500 years of past streamflow from tree-ring records collected in Pakistan and then combined this data with weather and seasonal forecasts to generate preliminary water scenarios for the region going out ten years.

Watch the interview below, and view the full poster.

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