Macron and Wang Yi vow stronger trade ties and global cooperation
French President Emmanuel Macron and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi met in Paris to discuss enhancing trade, multilateralism, and cooperation on glo...
Chad’s weather agency struggles with broken equipment and lack of funding, reflecting a broader issue across Africa, where limited data hampers disaster preparedness. At COP29, urgent calls were made to improve early warning systems, aiming for universal coverage by 2027.
The deputy director of Chad's National Meteorological Agency waggled his finger up and down to demonstrate how a motionless humidity gauge at the agency's headquarters should have been working.
The broken hygrothermograph was among the dustblown outdoor equipment in the capital N'Djamena that is meant to help the agency known as ANAM to track weather patterns.
The situation in Chad is replicated across much of Africa, a continent sorely lacking the reliable forecasts that are a keystone of disaster management as climate change makes extreme weather more frequent.
At COP29 climate talks on Wednesday, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called for urgent action to overcome a shortage of data and funding. The aim is to meet a target for universal protection by end-2027 from early warning systems to help preparation for extreme weather events.
For Chad, that appears a particularly ambitious goal.
Around 80% of the devices at the agency's site in N'Djamena are not operational, Deputy Director Hamid Abakar Souleymane told Reuters in October, as Chad battled another season of devastating floods.
"The reliability of weather information depends on the resources invested in producing it," he said, describing a relentless push for more funding and trained personnel.
Africa, a continent of 1.5 billion people, has the world’s least developed weather and climate observation network with fewer stations operating to global basic standards than Germany, according to the World Meteorological Organization.
"There are many declared stations that exist or may not exist. In fact, many of them are not sharing data," said Albert Fischer, director of the WMO Integrated Global Observing System division.
As of the third quarter of 2024, only two out of 53 African WMO countries were compliant with basic requirements for ground-level observation stations, Fischer said.
Being unprepared has deadly consequences. Floods not only happen more often across Africa than in Europe and North America combined, but they kill four times more people on average due to a lack of preparedness and warnings, a 2023 article in the journal Nature said.
"NO ONE WARNED US"
Good weather data alone is not enough, as evidenced by deadly floods in October in Spain when some local authorities were blamed for failing to raise the alarm in time.
Chad's plight nevertheless shows the scale of what can happen when disaster strikes one of the most vulnerable and data-poor regions on earth.
Heavier-than-usual seasonal rains in parts of West and Central Africa drove rivers to break their banks in recent months, leading to floods in every one of Chad's provinces with 1.9 million people affected, over 570 killed, and 72,000 heads of cattle swept away.
"Everywhere is flooded. We have lost our fields of sorrel, beans, and grain. Everything is destroyed now because no one warned us of such a catastrophe," mother-of-four Josiane Allasra said, speaking at a makeshift camp for displaced people on the outskirts of N'Djamena in late October.
"We're hungry and we have nowhere to shelter our children."
ANAM did not have the resources to track the worsening conditions as the disaster unfolded across a country the size of France and Spain combined.
"We have significantly less than we need. We need stations and we need funding," Souleymane said during a tour of ANAM's N'Djamena facilities, where stacks of old weather data spilled out over the floor of the archive and packaged equipment gathered dust.
A 2023 review of Chad's hydromet capacity, found that it had just two trained forecasters, making round-the-clock forecasting and warning impossible.
The agency also lacks the financial and technical means to maintain a network of new automatic weather stations from the U.N. Development Programme, which anyway only covered the south and centre of the country, the report said.
"There's a lot of wasted investment and infrastructure that is scattered ... around Africa," said Ana Heureux, programme management officer at a U.N. fund that supports countries like Chad to close their vast data gaps.
Under a five-year programme, the Systematic Observations Financing Facility (SOFF) plans to help Chad upgrade or launch 34 weather stations to global observation standards. Chad currently has one surface-land weather station.
To avoid a situation in which authorities find themselves with technology they do not have the expertise and funds to maintain, SOFF's strategy includes making use of advisers from developed countries. Once up-and-running, countries will continue to receive SOFF support provided they share their data internationally, Heureux said.
"Finally, we have one fund that's really dedicated to long-term support," said the WMO's Fischer.
Since mid-2022, SOFF has supported 23 African countries. However, its own funding outlook is uncertain. Since 2020, it has raised $94 million out of a target of $200 million by 2025.
There "has been a bit of a challenging fundraising donor environment, with everything happening in the world," said Heureux, adding that SOFF hoped to close the gap including via a big fundraising push at COP29.
The European Commission is set to propose allowing carbon credits from other countries to count towards the EU’s 2040 climate target, according to a leaked internal document.
A magnitude 5.5 earthquake struck off Japan’s Tokara Islands on Wednesday, with no tsunami warning issued but residents advised to remain vigilant.
The United States has rescinded licensing restrictions on ethane exports to China, allowing shipments to resume after a temporary halt and signalling progress in efforts to ease recent trade tensions.
Italy plans to grant approximately 500,000 work visas to non-EU nationals between 2026 and 2028, as announced in a cabinet statement. The initiative aims to address labor shortages by expanding legal immigration pathways
A malfunction in the radar transmission system at the Area Control Center in Milan suspended more than 300 flights at the weekend, across northwest Italy since Saturday evening according to Italy's air traffic controller Enav (National Agency for Flight Assistance).
Australia has pledged $283 million to support a green hydrogen project led by explosives manufacturer Orica, aiming to boost renewable energy production and reduce industrial emissions.
Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on Friday proposed creating a low-emissions corridor and regional climate initiatives under the Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO), warning that climate change is severely affecting food security and livelihoods across the region.
Australian researchers have pioneered a low-cost and scalable plasma-based method to produce ammonia gas directly from air, offering a green alternative to the traditional fossil fuel-dependent Haber-Bosch process.
The world’s largest climate fund approved a record volume of climate finance for developing countries, scaling up its efforts in response to growing global demand for climate finance.
A second person has died in a wildfire in Türkiye as the country battles a seventh day of blazes across several regions. The latest death is a firefighter who was tackling the flames in western İzmir province on Tuesday.
You can download the AnewZ application from Play Store and the App Store.
What is your opinion on this topic?
Leave the first comment