Ghana is one of two countries in West Africa to host
supersites for a major research to develop a comprehensive dataset for the next
generation of weather and climate models.
Benin is the other country involved in the three-year project
funded by the European Union at a cost of 7million euros.
Massive economic and population growth and urbanization are
expected to lead to a tripling of human emissions in southern West Africa
between 2000 and 2030. The impacts on human health, ecosystems, food security
and the regional climate are largely unknown.
The Dynamics-Aerosol-Chemistry-Cloud Interactions in West
Africa (DACCIWA) project, therefore, aims to provide “a comprehensive
scientific assessment of the impacts of the projected rapid increases in anthropogenic emissions on
air quality, human health, ecosystems, agricultural productivity, water
availability, energy production and local to regional climate.”
The host of the project in Ghana is the Meteorology and
Climate Science Unit of the Department of Physics at the Kwame Nkrumah
University of Science and Technology (KNUST), where an intensive field campaign
is underway to assess the impact of population growth on the climate.
“Local farmers are going to get better forecast products;
they are also going to have direct interactions with experts and good
scientific papers and policy briefs are expected to come to inform policy,” said
Dr. Leonard Amekudzi, project scientist and a climate change and atmospheric scientist.
According to him, ground-based data from the soil to the top-elm
atmospheric measurement will help understand the processes that are inducing
the changes in the climate system over the entire region.
Climate change is a long-term shift in the weather
conditions, caused by both natural and human factors that lead to the emission
of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
Arguably, the largest single source of uncertainty in the
study of global climate change is the effect of aerosols on clouds.
The surface observations to be made at the supersites
include a ceilometer to measure cloud top and base heights, a sounding system
for launching balloons with radiosondes, a weather station and other
instruments to measure surface radiometric properties and atmospheric
composition.
Dr. Barbara Brooks of the UK’s National Centre for
Atmospheric Science explains the research activity will ultimately lead to
reduced uncertainties in climate predictions which impact on agricultural
production, health and livelihoods.
“We do the measurement, we do the science; we then try to persuade
the people who can actually made decisions – politicians – to do something, to
put policies in place, so they can mitigate any changes that you see,” she
said.
Climate change has emerged as the biggest global management
challenge, affecting livelihoods, environment and economies.
Climate finance and technology transfer remain critical for
vulnerable economies in Africa and other developing economies to survive the
future.
The World Bank has warned that the current level of climate
adaptation funding which is insufficient could trigger extreme poverty in
Africa by 2030.
Without coping mechanisms in place, there will be lower crop
yields, higher food prices and negative health impacts from climate change.
The comprehensive dataset from the proposed field campaign under
the DACCIWA project provides a wide range of modeling activities that will help
improve the monitoring of climate and atmospheric compositions.
The most important goal is to
inform local stakeholders about the effects of rapid population growth on human
and ecosystem health in southern West Africa.
By Kofi Adu Domfeh
No comments:
Post a Comment