The East African region needs to come together, develop strong policy frameworks and implementation structures for early warning and action systems that prevent the devastating impacts of climate change, the Coordinator for Eastern and Southern Africa Consortium of International Agricultural Research Centers (CGIAR) told ENA.
The CGIAR coordinator, Dawit Solomon, said that “in Eastern Africa, we should go beyond predicting and beyond forecasting, and really develop a strong policy framework and implementation structure and put in place a preparedness and early action system. East African governments need to come together and put that in place.”
According to him, it is crucial to subscribe and perhaps adopt the World Meteorological Organization’s new early warning system.
“The key point in all of these things is really to subscribe and perhaps adopt the new initiative by the World Meteorological Organization, which regional offices here in Ethiopia say early warning for all. So, early warning in principle should be a right for all Ethiopians, for all East Africans, and for all colleagues who are in the greater Horn of Africa and beyond.”
The coordinator further underscored the need to build overall capacity and take coordinated action in partnership with concerned actors.
“But having the early warning by itself is not a solution. So, once we have that, we need to have a clear-cut anticipatory action policy. We need to have clear-cut preparedness and a need to have clear-cut action to act early. So early warning, preparedness, and early action are critical. So I think we need to work to really build infrastructure, and technical capacity around this thing, and make sure that every citizen will get early warning, and then on the government and also on the international development side and NGOs and civil societies,” he elaborated.
Dawit added that the financial and technical support of international development partners and governments should be used to develop a very clear-cut policy framework, implementation strategy, effectively develop human, capital, and infrastructural capacity.
The coordinator, who claims that his organization is working by focusing on knowledge generation in this regard, revealed that in Ethiopia, for instance, “we’re developing next-generation drought forecasting systems” like developing flash flood contextualizing and flash flood forecasting tools.
He further noted that Ethiopia is at the forefront of climate change effects, and has put Food Systems Transformation policy that is admirable.
So,”we are involved in the knowledge generation innovation to the generation and research or development. We build the capacity, we link these things with a transfer system. And our goal is how we move from accessing technologies to uptake and use and for that what we do is we work with national governments, we look at their strategies, we look at their aspirations, and then we also look at their major initiatives and products. We link ourselves with these technologies.”
The coordinator finally noted that besides the efforts at national, sub-regional, and regional levels, the Intergovernmental Organization on Development’s Climate Prediction and Application Center has well established early warning system that can support the efforts at national and regional levels.
Source: Ethiopian News Agency