Blog

In a paper published in Earth’s Future in July 2023, scientists with the Famine Early Warning Systems Network explain how they use climate change-driven insights to predict extreme weather events long before they occur, giving organizations like USAID adequate time to respond.

• 08/07/2023
• Hannah Button

Tremendous progress has been made globally to reduce the burden of malaria. Between 2001 and 2013, the world saw a 47 percent decline in malaria mortality.

• 03/31/2021
• Sophia Dahodwala, Fernanda Zermoglio

Agricultural production in most developing countries is largely dependent on rainfall.

• 01/28/2021
• Mponda Malozo

Improving access to and use of timely, accurate, and actionable weather and climate information is essential to building resilience to climate change and strengthening livelihoods across Africa. Collaborative partnerships between the public and private sectors can foster innovative, sustainable, and cost-effective approaches to weather and climate services systems.

• 06/04/2020
• Ali Blumenstock

In Southern Malawi, the United in Building and Advancing Life Expectations (UBALE) project, completed in 2019, helped over 240,000 families in three districts produce more abundant harvests, increase income from agriculture, and learn important skills to help cope with changing climate patterns. The project linked agriculture with nutrition interventions to maximize the impact the program had on family nutrition.

• 03/02/2020
• Dooshima Tsee

The game is simple. On a brown digital grassland with a single tree, tiny goats mill back and forth. When you decide how many of those goats to buy or sell and how many to insure, clouds float across the screen and one of two things happens: the clouds stop and rain falls, roughly doubling the goats and producing milk for sale, or the clouds move steadily across the screen and half your herd is wiped out.

• 01/15/2020
• MRR Innovation Lab, Alex Russell

Since 1991, USAID has been investing in actions that help the Agency in understanding climate change risks and opportunities to reduce vulnerabilities.

• 12/05/2019
• Stephan Hardeman

The Rwanda Climate Services for Agriculture project, funded by USAID, has been supporting farmers to use weather and climate information through participatory group processes and innovative radio programming.

• 11/19/2019
• James Hansen, Jacquelyn Turner, Gloriose Nsengiyumva, Desire Kagabo

As the frequency and magnitude of climate-related hazards increases, these changes are affecting people’s livelihoods, particularly those of rural and vulnerable populations more than ever.

• 10/24/2019
• Jeff Ratcliffe, Marie-Claire Tuzeneu

The Climate Hazards Center (CHC) has been using the CHC Early Estimates for agroclimatological monitoring and forecast-plus-observation rainfall scenarios since late 2018. The CHC Early Estimates are regional maps that show rainfall conditions for multiple accumulation periods, which are useful for agroclimatic monitoring.

• 09/05/2019
• Agrilinks Team

The Ferlo region of north-central Senegal is a vast expanse of dry savannah covering over a third of the country’s total area. With only a few small, scattered settlements, this region is almost exclusively reserved for pastoralism, both by tradition and government policy.

• 05/23/2019
• Agrilinks Team

Face-to-face participatory processes, merging weather station observations with satellite data, and bridging the supply and demand side of climate information services (CIS) are some of the promising options for improving CIS.

• 02/12/2019
• Isabela Barriga

The Global Resilience Partnership-funded 1-6-1 platform has built resilience in Uganda.

• 10/23/2018
• Frank Annor, Dr. Nick van de Giesen, Dr. John S. Selker, Patrick Kibaya

During the July Adaptation Community Meeting, SERVIR presented its approach to delivering “space to village”: equipping decision-makers with geospatial tools, and the capacity to use them, in response to locally expressed needs.

• 10/17/2018
• Katherine Casey

Under the USAID-funded Climate Information Services Research Initiative (CISRI), a Mercy Corps-led consortium is piloting a participatory systems mapping methodology to investigate how climate information reaches smallholder farmers.

• 06/18/2018
• Kelly Kurz, Kristin Lambert