The “Climate Services Adaptation Programme in Africa: Malawi & Tanzania” was the first multi-agency initiative to be implemented under the Global Framework for Climate Services. This flagship Programme helps develop user-driven climate services for food security, health and disaster risk reduction in Malawi and Tanzania.
Flash floods are among the world’s deadliest natural disasters with more than 5 000 lives lost annually. Their social, economic and environmental impacts are significant. Accounting for approximately 85% of flooding cases, flash floods also have the highest mortality rate among different classes of flooding, including riverine and coastal. Flash floods differ from river floods in their short time scales and occurrence on small spatial scales, which makes flash flood forecasting a different challenge from large-river flood forecasting.
The overarching goal for the programme “GFCS Adaptation and Disaster Risk Reduction in Africa” is to provide timely and accurate climate and weather services for disaster risk reduction and increased resilience in agriculture.
The World Meteorological Organization is setting up an expert committee to evaluate whether tropical cyclone Freddy has broken the record as the longest-lasting tropical cyclone on record. It has been a named tropical cyclone for 33 days, crossed the entire South Indian Ocean and travelled more than 10,000 kilometers. The accumulated cyclone energy (index used to measure the energy) is the equivalent of an average full North Atlantic hurricane season.
Climate change made extreme rainfall heavier and more damaging during five back-to-back storms in January and February in Madagascar, Malawi and Mozambique, according to rapid attribution analysis by an international team of leading climate scientists. More than a million people were affected, with 230 reported deaths.
The bulk of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region is likely to receive normal to above-normal rainfall between October to December 2021 and January to March 2022, according to the climate outlook for the rainy season issued by weather and climate experts and supported by the WMO community.
Tropical Cyclone Eloise made landfall early morning on 23 January near Mozambique's city of Beira, causing widespread damage and flooding on a long swathe of coastline. The storm is also bringing heavy rainfall to neighbouring southern African nations.
As the recognition of the dependence between climate change and variability and human welfare grows, climate action continues gaining importance on the global development agenda
