Author: Karlina Ozolina

In this report, we highlight the stakeholder engagement and partnerships of the Abidjan City Pilot in terms of the roles, resources and expertise that would be useful for the pilot.

In this pilot, the climate service that will be designed is a particulate pollution warning system through a PM2.5 measurements network and an effective communication in collaboration with stakeholders and the local population, using a participatory approach. The stakeholder engagements are related to the different actors who would contribute to this. The pilot will make use of continuous measurements of atmospheric particles (PM2.5 PM10, OC and BC) and gases (SO2, NH3, NO2, O3 and HNO3) at various sites. Three measuring devices (CairNET) have been acquired to reinforce the measurement sites, but several instruments are needed to cover the whole city of Abidjan. The stakeholders who will contribute to setting up the climate service have been identified. Discussions have been started with some of them, including INHP (Institut National d’Hygiène Publique), CIAPOL (Centre Ivoirien Anti-Pollution), SODEXAM (Société d’Exploitation et de Développement Aéroportuaire, Aéronautique et Météorologie) and ANAGED (Agence Nationale de Gestion des déchets). These discussions focus on protocols for co-designing the climate service and on what is expected from the stakeholders. In addition, there are already measurements of particulate matter (PM2.5) and a pollutant dispersion model to be used.

Meeting the representatives of Institut National d’Hygiène Publique (INHP)

In the beginning of February, the KADI team in Abidjan met with the Deputy-director of INHP under the Ministry of Health and Public Hygiene and the discussions focused on the approach and pilot sites.

The participatory approach involves interacting and working with the inhabitants, local communities and administrative bodies on the project. The INHP trains public health workers to strengthen the system and administers a questionnaire to patients when they visit the health centres. The INHP has a sociological and scientific database as part of the projects piloted by public health in all the dispensaries and CHUs (University Hospital Centres) in the Cocody municipality. This database will be made available to the KADI team and updated with pollution-related aspects.

For this city pilot collaboration, the chosen site is the municipality of Bingerville. It is representative of the city of Abidjan, with high-standard houses as well as precarious neighbourhoods. The KADI team and the INHP team have already carried out several projects on this site.

Strengthening the partnership with Centre Ivoirien Anti-Pollution (CIAPOL)

Later in February, the KADI team met with CIAPOL, which oversees the monitoring air quality in Côte d’Ivoire. The discussions focused on the existing partnership with CIAPOL on the monitoring and evaluation of the National Observation Network of Côte d’Ivoire. The CIAPOL team and the KADI team at the UFHB are also working on other projects such as POLLUMETRE, Sustainable Cities and PTUA. CIAPOL can provide data on air pollution in the industrial sector. The UFHB team can merge the data sources to have a more complete database. CIAPOL will also help in the field with the technical aspects of questionnaires and meetings with local people. They will also contribute to dissemination as the national body responsible for air quality. The meeting was followed by the signing of an official letter of agreement for the collaboration.

Collaboration with SOCEXAM (Société d’Exploitation et de Développement Aéroportuaire, Aéronautique et Météorologie) on pollution and heatwave modelling

SODEXAM was another one of the stakeholders with whom the Abidjan team met in February. It is the Airport, Aeronautics and Meteorological Operating and Development Company in Côte d’Ivoire. It is responsible for national meteorology, airport operation and development, air navigation and aviation.

The discussion with KADI focused on the climatic and meteorological data needed for our pollutant dispersion monitoring model. Based on SODEXAM’s long experience, the model to be used for air quality forecasting was also discussed. SODEXAM is already providing forecasts on heatwaves in Abidjan which will be a valuable experience to inform the climate service design. The meeting was followed by the signing of a collaboration agreement.

Tackling residential pollution awareness with ANAGED

ANAGED (Agence Nationale de Gestion des Déchets) was one of the stakeholders with whom the KADI Abidjan team connected. ANAGED oversees the measures to control and sanction residential pollution. The KADI partners met with directors and their teams, including the Heads of operations, monitoring, regulating, sanctioning and managing all solid wastes, and communication.

The discussion focused on the identification of the different sources of pollution, mainly the residential and domestique sources.  ANAGED agreed to help ensure and take adequate measures and provide evidence of residential pollution. They could help raise awareness of the population on residential pollution and the behavior to adopt to reduce the risk. They could also support the participatory approach and facilitate meetings and interactions with the city inhabitants.

In February 2024, a research article on the African Regional Greenhouse Gases Budget (2010–2019) by Yolandi Ernst and colleagues was published in Global Biochemical Cycles. As part of the Regional Carbon Cycle Assessment and Processes Phase 2 (RECCAP2) initiative of the Global Carbon Project, the paper addresses the policy-relevant objectives of RECCAP2 through a comprehensive overview of improved estimates of CO2, CH4, and N2O fluxes and variability.

The authors show that Africa’s sink capacity is decreasing and that the continent most likely switched from a small net sink to a small net source during the 2010–2019 period. The authors also stressed the importance of more observations to improve the large uncertainties in their estimates.

Currently, Africa is home to approximately 1.4 billion people, with projections indicating a population surge to over 2 billion by 2040. This dramatic increase necessitates extensive land conversion for agricultural production to feed the growing populace and drive economic growth. Concurrently, heavy utilisation of land for grazing, fuelwood, and other natural resources further strains the continent’s ecosystems. There is significant global interest in leveraging African landscapes to store carbon and offset global carbon emissions. However, these efforts are complicated by the competing demands for land and resources.

Understanding Africa’s shifting role in the global carbon cycle requires robust data on carbon-cycle processes and greenhouse gas emissions to accurately quantify the net impact of these competing trends. The full article can be read here.

 

Some additional perspectives of the KADI Project on carbon markets

A reduction of anthropogenic emissions or a measure to create a carbon sink can be traded. However, it is important to respect some principles. Namely, there must be efforts to create an additional sink that would not be there otherwise. In addition, the sink must be sustained after the measure has ended with monitoring and verification by independent observations.

KADI builds the foundation for an integrated climate observation network. Independent observations cannot be paid for by single projects but require  separate funding (e.g. generated as a fee from each certificate). Independent observations (including models) are needed in the certification system.

Finally, we believe verification of the success of a measure will help avoid fraud and support the development of integrated climate services that underpin solutions with co-benefits and respective policies and initiatives.

One of the objectives of the KADI project is to support AU-EU policy cooperation. This involves liaising with other AU-EU projects or initiatives.

At the end of January 2024, KADI met with the African Union Commission to discuss collaboration with the  GMES and Africa project. GMES and Africa is for the development of services for water, natural resources, marine and coastal areas, addressing the global needs to manage the environment, and ensure civil security. GMES and Africa is made up of 8 consortia covering 5 regions involving 167 African institutions.

During the meeting, we identified the areas of collaboration in the AU-EU framework are policy, services development, training and knowledge management. Connection through these areas is possible as both projects include these components. For example, the GMES and Africa project includes an academic network of 28-32 African Universities. This type of collaboration will be mutually beneficial for the training components in both projects (and beyond) in terms of knowledge exchange and dissemination related to training opportunities.

In relation to cooperation and knowledge exchange, KADI actively participated in the webinar to commemorate the International Women’s Day 2024. The event was organised on March 7th by Women in GMES and Africa with the theme, ‘African women at the heart of climate action’.

“In its bid to enhance the opportunities from combining satellite and in-situ earth observation data in Africa, KADI actively engages with different actors and initiatives that focus on these.” said Dr. Theresia Bilola, the project manager of KADI. “Engaging with GMES and Africa presents an opportunity to strengthen and support AU-EU cooperation in earth observation using approaches that recognise and benefit from new and already existing expertise”, she added.

We are looking forward to more collaboration in the upcoming months though:

• Connecting the training components of both projects for collaboration.
• Collaborating in relation to the regional, continental and thematic workshops.
• Inviting, participating and disseminating information about both projects.
• Collaborating on the GMES and Africa joint workshop which targets a variety of stakeholders in relation to land use, water, natural resources, policy makers and service users.

Do you wish to collaborate with the KADI project? Feel free to contact us!

KADI Dar es Salaam stakeholder workshop gathered together 25 participants from various backgrounds. The workshop day was not just full of dialogue, but also good food, laughter, team building activities, brief presentations, and new connections.

One of the KADI project aims is to co-design climate services for urban context in three African cities – Abidjan, Nairobi, and Dar es Salaam. The goal is to enhance resilience against climate stressors. In the Dar es Salaam city pilot, the focus is on designing climate service for citizens for coping with current and future impacts of heavy precipitation, extreme heat, and air pollution (Figure 1).

Led by the University of Turku (UTU), Finland and Ardhi University (ARU), Dar es Salaam, the climate service design has grounds on a community-based approaches to ensure the development of a climate service with genuine potential for sustainable uptake by citizens and other actors involved in climate-related activities within the city. The design builds on the existing Tanzanian Resilience Academy approach where students from local universities, together with community members, collect crucial data on climate stressors, their impacts, city’s vulnerabilities, the urban infrastructure, and the environment using low-cost mobile tools.

Community focus group discussion and participatory mapping

To address the true needs of the urban communities, initial activities of the pilot focused on engaging relevant actors – especially the citizens – to discuss concrete needs for climate action and access to climate information. Two focus group discussions were conducted on February 6th and 7th in Tandale and Kigogo wards, both frequently experiencing floods, extreme heat, and air pollution.

Prior these discussions a participatory mapping campaign was conducted in October 2023, revealing valuable information not previously recorded regarding the spatial occurrence of poor air quality, extreme heat, and floods, which were used as a basis for the focus group discussions. The participatory mapping campaign was conducted by ARU students who had previously attended Resilience Academy data collection activities.

As it is evident that the climate itself – high temperatures or amount of precipitation – cannot be changed, the focus group discussions highlighted that the communities’ needs for adapting to and coping with climate stressors are tied to improved urban planning. Issues such as proper solid waste management to prevent drainage blockage and flooding emerged as crucial. Lack of proper waste management also leads to continuous burning of solid waste which is a constant source for air pollution and additional heat in the neighbourhoods. In addition to solid waste management, the communities emphasized the importance of overall better urban infrastructure, including improved drainage networks, liquid waste management, regulations on land building, flood barrier construction, and better management of the natural rivers flowing through the wards.
Most importantly, the discussions underscored the significance of transferring local knowledge to formats interoperable with existing and new climate data, and urban plans. The KADI Dar es Salaam city pilot concentrates on this very element where the vast local knowledge could be integrated in creating actionable climate services that combine climate information with contextual neighbourhood-level information for genuine and sustainable transformation.

Stakeholder workshop

The stakeholder workshop that followed the focus group discussions was held on February 9th and involved representatives from citizen communities, academia, the Tanzanian Meteorological Agency, ward-level environmental offices, and urban planners (Figure 3). The workshop delved deeper into concrete steps for meeting community needs, emphasizing collaborative efforts of the governmental offices and the local communities. Solving the urban planning challenges for improved climate resilience require a lot of human resources, time, money, political will, and data and information of the occurrence and impacts of climate stressors in the city.

For example, the following questions were discussed:

• What are concrete steps that needs to be taken to meet communities’ needs?
• Who are needed to carry out these steps?
• What data or information must be collected, and what is already existing
• What immediate actions could be taken, and which are more long-term goals?

As another important discussion note, the workshop highlighted challenges in the information flow from the Tanzanian Meteorological Agency to communities regarding climate-related warnings (Figure 4). Discussions centred on improving this flow which currently is time-consuming or behind a paywall. Communities suggest the involvement of local informants who could communicate the situations in neighborhood-level in real time, which aids TMA in down-scaling forecasts, warnings, and climate projections to be more useful to communities in different parts of the city.

Final note from the perspective of execution of the workshop is a shoutout for the ice-breaking exercise that initiated the day. Participants discussed and listed challenges they meet in their daily lives (not only climate-related!) on post-it notes (Figure 5). During breakfast break, the challenges were clustered to thematic groups, and after the break each challenge was discussed and marked whether they are somehow related to climate, urban planning, or both. Almost each challenge mentioned were definitely related to both, and many of the challenges were also heavily interconnected. This initial ice-breaker exercise was aimed to take maximum 20 minutes – just to get conversation flowing – but ended up taking much more time and laid solid ground for the rest of the day. The success of this approach is credited to the KADI WP1 Wits team for their valuable advice, and we can highly recommend similar approach for other stakeholder/actor workshops coming along the KADI project.

Lessons learned and next steps

Looking back to organising this workshop, there are things we would do differently. We did include three presentation slots to the day to introduce the KADI project, climate service concepts, and the activities we had done prior the workshop. However, kicking off the day, conducting the ice-breaker exercise, having food breaks, and discussing the intended themes took much longer than anticipated. These things were important, and giving them time was purposeful, and thus presenting so many slideshows could have been organised with another approach. Also, not everyone invited to the workshop arrived. This was somewhat managed by inviting two individuals from desired organisations, and at least one representative arrived from each organisation, except from the city’s disaster risk management office, and from an NGO with expertise in community development and participatory mapping.

From now as the KADI Dar es Salaam city pilot progresses, the research team design a climate service concept that incorporates local knowledge to the whole lifecycle of the climate service. The Tanzanian Resilience Academy approach, involving local students in data collection, is a potential avenue, but various community-based methods are also incorporated to the design, such as citizen weather stations (CWS) and participatory online platforms for information sharing.

We want to give a sincere thank you for everyone who have been part of our activities during these last months. The communities’ views on climate and other everyday challenges are often asked, and the most pressing issues in the neighbourhoods are known. However, concrete actions are lacking behind. Climate services are not the sole solution in solving the challenges, but they are an important building block for data-driven and knowledge-based collaborative action by various actors in the local context, and give tools for climate adaptation for the urban communities.

All these activities were carried out by our KADI Dar es Salaam climate service city pilot research team:

Venla Aaltonen
University of Turku
voaaal@utu.fi

Dr. Nelly Babere
Ardhi University
gathiharry@gmail.com

Dr. Lukuba Sweya
Ardhi University

Prof. Niina Käyhkö
University of Turku

Hilary Mvungi
Ardhi University

Msilikale Msilanga
University of Turku

The conference organisers are pleased to open the Call for Abstracts to ICOS Science Conference 2024!

The conference takes place 10-12 September in Versailles Palais des Congrès, France, and online. With the overarching theme “From GHG observations through science to services”, the sessions cover ICOS’s three domains – Atmosphere, Ecosystem and Ocean.

Abstracts from KADI participants are warmly welcomed, as the session list includes many topics that are relevant to our work. You will also find many familiar names as session conveners.

Here are a few picks from the sessions list that might be of interest to you:  

5. Impact of climate extremes on GHG fluxes: understanding driving processes and responses across scales
7. Carbon Cycling along the Land Ocean Aquatic Continuum
9. Combining data and models to improve estimates of regional to global GHG budgets and trends
12. Translating Scientific CO2 Emission Research into City Services
13. In situ data for climate and other environmental services and policy support
15. Science communication and outreach to increase the impact of climate research

Click here for the full list of sessions and their descriptions.

The Call for Abstracts is open until Monday, 8 April, 13:00 CET. More information on how to submit an abstract can be found here: https://www.icos-cp.eu/news-and-events/science-conference/icos2024sc/call-for-abstracts

Late last year, over a hundred ocean carbon scientists from around the world met at Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ) in Oostende, Belgium, to review the status of the Surface Ocean Carbon Value Chain and decide on specific improvements to the structure, process and information sharing. Now they have released a declaration for focused international and intergovernmental efforts to create a robust, resilient and sustainable surface ocean carbon observing system. 

The Global Carbon Budget reports that in the last decade the ocean alone takes up about 26% of the CO₂ emitted to the atmosphere every year, thus limiting greater climate change. However, ocean CO₂ uptake varies significantly in time and space and a large number of high-quality continuous measurements is needed to monitor and predict the ever-changing scales and patterns of the air-sea interactions and to monitor and predict any adverse impacts of this uptake such as ocean acidification.

Over the past three decades, the community of ocean carbon experts and stakeholders has developed a multi-component system capable of measuring, storing, synthesising and mapping ocean-related carbon parameters, enabling their use in the annual Global Carbon Budget, model projections, and inversion systems. These activities together are referred to as the surface ocean carbon value chain. Despite the long-standing success in delivering critical information, the surface ocean carbon value chain is configured as a loose affiliation of observing systems and data synthesis elements that lack global integration.

In recent years, recognition of the fundamental value of accurate, systematic and robust ocean carbon information has increased significantly across managerial and policy-making scales, and as a result demands for ocean carbon data products continue to increase. Because of this, the ocean scientific community found it timely to review the operating model of the surface ocean carbon value chain.

In this so-called Oostende Declaration, published by the International Ocean Carbon Coordination Project, the scientific community share an ambition to completely transform the ability to deliver an integrated global ocean carbon monitoring system, helping countries to better understand and manage the causes of climate change in a timely and efficient manner. In order to do so, they request that all national and regional funding agencies and structures, global and regional intergovernmental agencies, as well as global and regional coordination bodies take note of this ambition and provide necessary support.

Click here to read the full declaration.

Earlier in January, a new review article written by Mounia Mostefaoui and colleagues was published in Earth System Science Data.

The aim of the publication was to assess African anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and removals by using different data products, including inventories and process-based models, and to compare their relative merits with inversion data coming from satellites. Their results show a good match among the various estimates in terms of overall trends at a regional level and on a decadal basis, but large differences even among similar data types, which is a limit to the possibility of verification of country-reported data.

Click here to read the full article.

The organisers are excited to invite the scientific and research community to propose sessions for the ICOS Science Conference 2024!

ICOS Science Conference 2024 will be a hybrid event held at the Versailles Palais des Congrès, France, and virtually on 10-12 September, 2024.

The overarching theme of the conference is “From GHG observations through science to services”.

How to submit a session proposal

Please send your session proposal in the following format:

• Title of the session
• Name of convener/co-convener(s) (affiliation and email) willing to review abstracts
• Session description (max. 200 words)

Send your submissions, along with any questions you may have, to our conference team via email at conference@icos-ri.eu.

Submissions will be considered on their scientific merits and the significance of their respective themes. If accepted, they will be incorporated into the final programme.

The deadline for submissions is noon (12:00CET) in Thursday 23rd of November, 2023.

You can see examples of potential session themes on the ICOS Science Conference page.