Capacity Building: Coping with Climate and Weather Hazards

The North American Regional Climate Change Assessment (NARCCAP) is an international program that includes principal investigators from Canada and the United Kingdom. It aims to produce multiple high-resolution climate change scenarios for most of North America. The purple overlay on the figure shows the base computational domain for NARCCAP Experiment 0. Other colors indicate land height. High-resolution climate simulations performed on this region will be analyzed to study the effects of model size and boundary locations. Weather and climate can profoundly affect, among other things, natural resources, national security and local economies. Adequate preparation – and dissemination of relevant information – helps individuals and societies more easily weather unexpected natural events. While all nations may expect negative consequences to occur as a result of extreme events, developing nations tend to less be prepared and less able to bounce back from such events than developed nations.

NCAR’s Center for Capacity Building (CCB) is helping individuals, academics, and society in general prepare for and react to such events. Mickey Glantz, CCB director, began the capacity building initiative in Latin America, where El Niño and La Niña events were a constant issue. Despite the regular occurrence of these events, governments, individuals, and infrastructure were poorly prepared to deal with the results of ocean warming and cooling, and related changes in climate and weather.

With Latin America an initial focus, Glantz and his team have created multidisciplinary (science, impacts, society, ethics) activities using a ‘train the trainer’ and ‘educate the educator’ concept for their El Niño Affairs effort. Today, El Niño Affairs has led to development and dissemination of critical educational tools to Spanish-speaking populations throughout the Western Hemisphere. With this program in place, people living in these areas can better prepare for the outcomes of El Niño- and La Niña-related events.

Building on its inaugural successes, the CCB team is working on similar programs worldwide, with initiatives under way in China and Malaysia, and others planned for Vietnam and other regions in Asia, as well as Africa.

Workshop for Water Affairs held in Vietnam

Participants at Water Resources University on 7 December 2006. Click to enlarge image. A Workshop for Water Affairs was organized by Dr. Mickey Glantz and held in Vietnam for the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), in December 2006. Hydrologists from 11 countries in the region attended to discuss water issues and strategies.

Participants helped to develop an activity that will foster a multidisciplinary focus on water and water-related issues; embed hydrological science in a societal setting; educate educators and train trainers in a wide range of areas about the hidden, as well as obvious, connections among water, atmospheric processes, and human activities.