Welcome to the webinar “Bridging Data and Action: Leveraging Greenhouse Gas Research to Drive Policies and Renewable Energy in Africa” on 29th January 2025, 11:00-13:00 CET. This webinar is jointly organised by LEAP-RE programme and the KADI project and is aimed at EU-funded projects addressing climate-related topics in Africa.
The LEAP-RE programme and the KADI project represent pivotal initiatives in tackling climate change and advancing renewable energy solutions across Africa. This webinar explores the intersection of these efforts, highlighting how data-driven strategies can guide policies and innovations critical to achieving sustainable energy and climate service goals. Click here to register.
KADI project facilitating the clustering activities in LEAP RE: Climate change cluster
KADI (Knowledge and climate services from an African Data and research Infrastructure) is a follow up Horizon Europe project to a previous ICOS-coordinated Horizon 2020 project, SEACRIFOG. In SEACRIFOG, the aim was to carry out a conceptual study of what a greenhouse gas observation network in Africa could look like in order to meet the needs of decision-makers, particularly in terms of food security. One of the results of the project was an exhaustive inventory of all GHG measurements that already exist on the African continent (https://seacrifog.saeon.ac.za/).
The KADI project extends the objective of SEACRIFOG, but with a slightly ‘reversed’ approach. The starting point is the analysis and definition of the needs expressed in terms of climate services, to deduce what needs to be measured (and how) to obtain a scientifically robust co-designed climate service. The project includes 4 pilots to test these approaches:
- Cities pilot focusing on challenges specific to urban environments, such as air quality and heat resilience, with Abidjan, Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam as pilot cities.
- Coastal Southern Ocean Biogeochemistry pilot, focusing on an area of the world that is particularly important in terms of climate change, but which is also particularly under-observed. The pilot is quantifying key components of the coastal carbon cycle that are relevant to the regulation of climate change and focuses on carbon cycling and other greenhouse gas measurements.
- African Earth System model pilot aimed at improving a climate model and adapting it to the African context. This entails parameterisations of land-surface characteristics and land-atmosphere fluxes in an Earth System Model.
- Pilot focused on lessons learned from existing collaboration on long-term atmospheric and ecosystem observations by MET services. In this pilot, KADI assesses the value and derives lessons-learned from the existing long-term climate and atmospheric composition observations provided by national meteorological services, using the collaboration between the Kenyan Meteorological Department with its Swiss counterpart, MeteoSwiss as a case study.
The project also includes a ‘policy cooperation’ dimension, in which the contribution to the Africa-Europe strategy plays an essential role, and an ‘knowledge exchange and training’ component for African and European researchers.
The upcoming webinar is the first step: identifying and engaging with similar existing initiatives from the LEAP-RE programme as well as other related projects such as Focus-Africa, Down2Earth, CONFER, ALBATROSS, SAFE4ALL, GMES and Africa, HABITABLE, TEMBO Africa and SINCERE.
Be part of the dialogue and register by clicking here.