Building a climate change impacts portal for Senegal to promote decision making

International audience

In recent decades, West Africa has experienced some of the most extreme rainfall variability anywhere in the world with adverse impacts on different sectors such as food security or water resources. Climate projections for the 21^st century tend to show that the future could be even worse. Better access to reliable climate information underpins effective climate change adaptation in a variety of sectors. However the data needed are often hard to find and there are major obstacles which limit the confidence and use of this information in decision-making processes: climate data use requires very good IT skills and climate knowledge. Effective and easy to use climate tools require a clear need for interactive climate portals that allow data visualization and download for further analysis. Although, some climate portals already exist in West Africa, most of them suffer from major flaws or were not designed based on user’s needs. To address this challenge, IRD together with ANACIM (Senegalese Meteorological Service) co-designed a Web-portal in Senegal with high quality simulations and following three steps to make it usable by stakeholders: (i) build a dialogue with relevant stakeholders, (ii) develop methodologies for using climate and impacts models and (iii) perform capacity building and training activities. This talk will illustrate those three steps of the design of the Web-portal.