EUROCLIMA+ has held a total of six meetings to address the regionalisation of climate scenarios on a Central American scale and to present the visualisation tool developed under the subregional action framework.
Panama, November 20 - The workshops for users of climate change scenarios that the EUROCLIMA+ programme has been carrying out with the six Central American countries participating in the sub-regional action Generation of Regionalised Climate Change Scenarios for Central America have come to an end. The action aims to strengthen national meteorological services, providing more accurate climate scenario projections that would allow anticipation of the local effects of transformations in the climate system to adapt more efficiently and their use by the community for impacts and adaptation.
The purpose and interest of this action was summarised by Ernesto Rodríguez in a recent interview: "We make climate change projections with the help of global models. What about global models? Well, they have a spatial resolution of 100 or 200 km and for any study of adaptation for any activity that is clearly insufficient. We need information with a higher resolution, or even information at a specific point. If I need to build a type of infrastructure, I usually want it for a specific location. We therefore need algorithms that are downscaled or regionalised.
This second round of workshops -the first took place throughout 2019, to gather the necessary inputs for the design of the scenario viewer- was held in a face-to-face mode with Nicaragua (09.03.2020) and in a virtual mode with Guatemala (31.07.2020), Honduras (07.10.2020), El Salvador (22.10.2020), Costa Rica (12.11.2020) y Panama (17.11.2020), with the participation of representatives of the different meteorological services, who are in charge of maintaining and feeding the different databases that feed the different national information systems, ministries of the environment, and potential users of these prospects, belonging to different sectors (water, agriculture, biodiversity, infrastructure). The activities were used to present the results of the action and familiarise potential users with the scenarios generated and the viewer of Regionalised Scenarios for Central America.
Also, during the month of October 2020, three specific training sessions have been held for professionals from the ministries of environment, with the aim of reviewing the concepts and methodologies related to climate change scenarios, also showing their limitations, best practices and application in sectors affected by their effects.
It was therefore a question of generating climate change projections made from global models - therefore based on absolute scientific rigor - but which allow focusing on more specific areas of interest, which provides highly accurate information when designing adaptation plans for specific areas of the countries. In this sense, the development of the Regionalised Climate Change Scenario Viewer, currently housed on the Climate Centre platform of the Central American Information System, has been a key part of the whole process. This visualisation tool is based on previous experience in the development of the AdapteCCa viewer in Spain, developed with the collaboration of Spain’s State Agency for Meteorology (AEMET).
The action has been visualised from the beginning with a participatory approach, to ensure that the development of the project would ensure a response to national needs, of the meteorological services, as well as of the sectors that may be more exposed to the effects of climate variability in the immediate future. As Ernesto Rodríguez himself commented: "users should be, and here they have been from the beginning, involved in the design of the visualisation tools".
The activities that have had technical coordination and accompaniment from Spain’s State Agency of Meteorology (AEMET), the support of the Centre for Studies and Experimentation in Public Works (CEDEX) and the International and Ibero-American Foundation for Administration and Public Policy, coordinator of the action at EUROCLIMA +.
About EUROCLIMA+
EUROCLIMA+ is a programme financed by the European Union to promote environmentally sustainable and climate-resilient development in 18 Latin American countries, particular for the benefit of the most vulnerable populations. The Programme is implemented under the synergistic work of seven agencies: the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID), the French Development Agency (AFD), Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), the German Society for International Cooperation (GIZ), Expertise France (EF), the International and Ibero-American Foundation for Administration and Public Policy (FIIAPP), and UN Environment.
Contact:
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