Helen Ticehurst’s research while affiliated with Met Office and other places

Cholera remains a global public health threat in regions where social vulnerabilities intersect with climate and weather processes that impact infectious Vibrio cholerae. While access to safe drinking water and sanitation facilities limit cholera outbreaks, sheer cost of building such infrastructure limits the ability to safeguard the population. Here, using Yemen as an example where cholera outbreak was reported in 2016, we show how predictive abilities for forecasting risk, employing sociodemographical, microbiological, and climate information of cholera, can aid in combating disease outbreak. An epidemiological analysis using Bradford Hill Criteria was employed in near-real-time to understand a predictive model's outputs and cholera cases in Yemen. We note that the model predicted cholera risk at least four weeks in advance for all governorates of Yemen with overall 72% accuracy (varies with the year). We argue the development of anticipatory decision-making frameworks for climate modulated diseases to design intervention activities and limit exposure of pathogens preemptively.

Sahelian West Africa is a region of high year-to-year climate variability that can significantly impact on communities and livelihoods. Adaptive social protection (ASP) is being introduced in the region to support vulnerable people through enabling more effective responses to climate shocks, bridging social protection with disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation. The ASPIRE (Adaptive Social Protection: Information for enhanced REsilience) project aimed to provide technical support to the World Bank’s Sahel Adaptive Social Protection Programme through demonstrating the use of climate forecasts in ASP and promoting dialogue between climate and social protection stakeholders. Here we discuss lessons learned in the project, highlighting challenges and opportunities for including climate forecasts in early warning systems to inform ASP. We provide recommendations to help achieve ASP systems designed to use climate forecasts, arguing that tailored seasonal forecast products have potential in some countries to improve the lead time of interventions to address climate-induced disasters. Critical to this is continued investment in underpinning science and capacity building of climate and social protection stakeholders, as well as strengthened dialogue between actors to co-develop climate forecasts that provide actionable information.

The vulnerability of social-ecological systems in sub-Saharan Africa to climate variability and change means that there is an urgent need to better integrate weather and climate information into societal decision-making processes. Long-term climate adaptation in these regions has received increasing attention, with recent initiatives aiming to increase resilience to climate change at timescales of years to decades. Less focus has been given to weather and short-term climate information. However, users are principally interested in shorter timescales (hours to seasons) where actions can immediately reduce the impacts of severe weather events. Focusing on the priority sectors of agriculture and food security, water and disaster management, this paper uses a systematic literature review approach to analyse 61 empirical case studies drawn from academic literature and projects across sub-Saharan Africa. We identify the main users of climate services and outline current practices and reported benefits. Barriers that impede the delivery and uptake of climate services are identified and potential strategies for overcoming them outlined based on the reporting of successful practices. Our findings show that greater capacity building of personnel working for National Meteorological and Hydrological Services and Agricultural Extension staff and reinforcing and sustaining collaboration between different stakeholders (climate scientists, hydrologists, extension workers, farmers and other user groups), are essential factors for improving the uptake and utility of weather and climate services to enhance resilience to climate shocks in sub-Saharan Africa.