Imperative 4: Capacity building

Prepared by: V. Detemmerman, L. Goddard, F. Zwiers and H. Cattle

Rationale

To achieve the goals of the other three scientific frontiers and three imperatives requires a global network of scientists with detailed understanding of the major climate issues. Thus the role of WCRP should be to identify needs and advocate the importance of raising the capacity/capability to continue to undertake climate research, prediction and services. Two different categories of requirements must be satisfied. There must be qualified people in the developed world and institutional capacity in developing nations. Particular attention should be directed at developing the scientific capacity in model development, computational science and climate services in order to meet societal needs from regional to local spatial scales.

Scientific Background and Major Challenges

Climate indices: Effective adaptation to the changing climate requires not only more and better information about future changes in climate from improved climate models, but also requires better information about past and current climate. To address this need the CLIVAR/CCl/JCOMM Expert Team on Climate Change Detection and Indices (ETCCDI) has coordinated the formulation of a suite of climate indices that describe different aspects of temperature and precipitation extremes, including frequency, intensity, and duration. Environment Canada also developed open source software for the calculation of indices and for climate data homogenisation, and has made this software freely available. These tools, together with a series of ETCCDI-coordinated regional capacity building workshops, have played and will continue to play an important role in monitoring changes in extremes, climate model evaluation and assessment of future climate, which in turn provide climate information that is required for climate change adaptation.

Major challenges: The WCRP Implementation Plan 2010-15 sets out WCRP’s approach to capacity building, within which CLIVAR will be a partner. In particular it will carry out activities to help meet WCRP’s major objectives and overcome historical challenges to capacity building:

• Broaden the reach of those involved in WCRP activities;
• Provide vocational training through opportunities for early career scientists and scientists in the developing world to attend training seminars and participate in CLIVAR-sponsored meetings, workshops, summer schools, and conferences;
• Promote helping climate practitioners to be able to better analyses and interpret climate information products; and
• Seek to make research results useful and easily accessible to end users such has adaptation planners, policy and decision makers.

Strategic Plan

In developing its capacity-building activities further, CLIVAR will scope various suggested approaches, including:

• Contributing to the education of the next generation of climate scientists with a particular focus on interdisciplinary studies and scientists from developing countries. CLIVAR panels and working groups will be encouraged to organise workshops targeted at graduate students and post-docs that have a high interdisciplinary content and, where practical, involve contact with operational activities.

• Providing global and regional fora for the exchange of ideas and knowledge amongst climate researchers and students. Support will be sought to bring young scientists and those from developing countries to CLIVAR meetings and conferences.

• Encouraging extended visits to research labs through exchange programmes for young scientists.

• A programme to support experts in selected areas of climate science from developed countries to spend a few weeks (2-3) in climate research institutions to provide training for targeted groups of scientists based in developing nations. This should be sustained through train-the-trainer programmes. For instance, in Sub-Saharan Africa, the experts from developed nations could be based at ICPAC, ACMAD, etc. and given a specific mandate to provide specialised training for African climate scientists (identified in collaboration with National Meteorological and Hydrological Services). This paradigm of training the trainers in African institutions would be more effective than the common practice of organising short-term training visits abroad. The advantages are twofold: one, the cost of such training will be reduced significantly; and two, this model of home-based training will have a multiplier effect both in helping leverage training facilities locally, but also trainers will have to improvise to meet their training objectives under limited resources.

• Encouraging useful and easily accessible research outputs for the broader scientific community and for end-users such as adaptation planners, policy makers, and decision makers in climate-sensitive sectors such as agriculture, energy, and construction.  A few targeted workshops to bring together climate scientists and specific sector user communities will provide fora for communication, with a focus on developing a common understanding of uncertainty in climate forecasts. A specific activity could be to extend the ETCCDI indices workshops to include comparisons with model outputs. This activity could be held in conjunction with the Regional Climate Outlook Fora organised by WMO.

• With initial focus on sub-Saharan Africa, developing capacity that targets scientists working on climate change adaptation using outputs from models and observations and encourages interaction with interdisciplinary groups from water resources, agriculture, marine sciences, etc. This type of capacity-building activity will enrich the CLIVAR (WCRP) contribution to the next IPCC AR5 report that will be focusing on assessment of regional climate change impacts on Africa. Furthermore, it will ensure training of a critical mass of local scientists who can appropriately merge local knowledge and expert training to interpret climate change information and uncertainties for adaptation purposes.

• Exploring the feasibility of a summer School on regional climate change scenarios and adaptation in collaboration with ICTP. ICTP has a long experience in organising such workshops targeting mainly young scientists from developing countries and therefore well placed to rally effective participation of scientists from developing countries as well as facilitators from the advanced climate centres. If funding is available this could be an annual activity.

Targeted training workshops (TTWs) on prediction and predictability of monsoon on intraseasonal, seasonal, and decadal time scales may be held for monsoon countries. While the hosting country may contribute significantly to funding such TTWs, WCRP should motivate some of the leading scientists to commit to spend some time and lecture in these workshops. The goal would be to build capacity in the developing countries to make these predictions using state of the art tools and not just be limited to analysing outputs from other centres.

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