Over the last year, the financial instruments sector team at IRI has been working in the Dominican Republic to design an index insurance product for the country’s dairy producers. This work has been part of the Climate Resiliency and Index Insurance Program, funded by the USAID office in the Dominican Republic. In a new video, we show how researchers and dairy producers worked together to design and test the insurance product in the spring of 2014. In the months that followed, the team worked to further refine the product, and now they are currently marketing it to dairy farmers in the Northwest region of the country. Learn more.
A record thirteen IRIers made the trans-continental trek from the cliffs of the Palisades to the Presidio in San Francisco for a week packed with scientific breakthroughs, engaging discussion and fruitful side meetings at the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting. We've compiled highlights from the event into a beautiful story on Medium.
Based on the latest models, the chance of an El Niño developing during the current (December-February) season is over 80%, up slightly from last month. These odds for the current season are also higher than those issued by the NOAA Climate Prediction Center/IRI forecast on December 4. Our full summary and video here.
NOTEWORTHY
Fourth International Conference on Climate Services
ICCS 4 (#ICCS4) took place in Montevideo, Uruguay from December 10 through December 12. More than 180 participants from 31 countries attended the conference, which featured 100 speakers on topics such as data-driven climate services, innovative decision-support solutions, and ethics.
The conference was hosted by the Uruguayan Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries, with support from the World Bank, the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security and a host of other local and international organizations. The conference is convened by the Climate Services Partnership, an informal network that works to advance the provision and delivery of climate services around the world.
Visit the Climate Services Partnership website for the conference agenda, photos and blog updates. The Ministry of Agriculture's Youtube channel has the conference's opening and closing sessions.
Seasonal Drought in the Greater Horn
A new paper published in the Journal of Climate gives an extensive review of the climate forces that drive seasonal drought in Africa’s Greater Horn. It also provides more evidence that natural, multidecadal variability in the tropical Pacific—not anthropogenic climate change—is the primary cause of the decline in the "long rains” season (March-May) observed since 1998.
Understanding the causes of drought and being able to provide early warnings is critical for this region, where the livelihoods of three out of four people depend on smallholder, rain-fed agriculture.
“We're unravelling what led to an abrupt decline in East African rainfall,” says IRI’s Bradfield Lyon, the study’s author. “The role of climate change in intensifying recent droughts and altering the future climate of East Africa is where we're headed next."