Enhancing Resilience to Agricultural Drought in Africa through Improved Communication of Seasonal Forecasts (ERADACS)

ERADACS is a novel, multi-disciplinary project that brings together:

- a light-weight but powerful forecast system, state-of-the-art land surface data assimilation using NASA soil moisture data
- new methods for visualizing and communicating forecasts, co-developed with farmers in Africa
- socioeconomic studies on building resilience through early warning and incentivizing action on forecasts

The project will be led by the University of Reading and carried out in partnership the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), a leading Ghanaian university; and Evidence for Development, a well-established NGO.

The impact of agricultural drought on the world's poorest communities can be devastating. Changes in weather patterns due to changing climate can mean that decisions about when to plant and how to manage crops based on experience of weather in recent years are not reliable. Timely forecasts of the developing likelihood of agricultural drought have the potential to have a significant positive impact on the lives of small-scale farmers and their surrounding communities during such events.

The ERADACS project will develop a forecast system for agricultural drought using multiple streams of satellite data, the Met Office land surface model (JULES) and state-of-the-art mathematical techniques (Data Assimilation) to combine these. The resulting forecast will use climatological information from the 30 year TAMSAT data record to predict likely trajectories of rainfall. These seasonal forecasts will be produced across Ghana and made available openly via the TAMSAT website. Beyond the lifetime of the ERADACS project we will sustain the forecast system via the operational TAMSAT platform.

A key aspect of the ERADACS project will be a pilot of how this information might be useful to specific communities in Ghana that are reliant on subsistence farming practices. We will visit and collect socioeconomic information from a number of communities to establish their vulnerability to agricultural drought as well as using serious game play to elicit likely responses. Our forecasts, and their likely uncertainties, will be discussed with the farmers and we will trial different methods of presenting this data. We will use feedback from these groups to refine the means of communication and to tailor the information produced from the forecast system. The work in Ghana will be carried out by KNUST and Evidence for Development, both of whom have many years experience of capacity building in Africa.

Ghana, like many countries in Africa, experiences severe droughts, which affect the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of farmers across a range of income levels. For a large proportion of these people farming is their primary means of subsistence and hence they are extremely vulnerable to drought.

The agricultural drought forecasts we will provide will ultimately allow decisions to be made regarding the planting and management of crops that take into account the future evolution of the available soil moisture. In the lifetime of the project the farmers themselves will contribute to the design of the forecast system via tailored feedback to the ERADACS team during focus group exercises carried out in several communities. During the focus groups, a range of techniques will be deployed to incentivize farmers to act on early warning. In this way we will directly contribute to building the resilience of these communities to drought events.

In addition to the direct impact on farmer livelihoods in Ghana, the scientific advances promised by ERADACS will facilitate the provision of climate services by agencies in the UK and overseas. Specifically, the datasets generated during the project will be made freely available along with the JULES-EMPIRE data assimilation system and the forecasting software will be released for use within the scientific community. The forecasting and data assimilation system will continue to be run operationally by TAMSAT after the end of the project, guaranteeing long-term, sustainable impact.

The impact of ERADACS will be enhanced by a range of dissemination activities targeted at specific stakeholder groups. These include:

- in-country focus groups to solicit the opinions of farmers using early warning systems
- a project workshop, which will include meteorological service staff
- attendance at the PRESASS regional outlook forum to disseminate project findings to a wider community of meteorological services and policy makers

As well as the traditional academic routes of journal publications, ERADACS will produce outputs aimed at a wider audience, including:
- a policy brief to be presented at the PRESASS meeting
- a dedicated project website
- social media, via the Walker Institute

The ERADACS team is ideally placed to guarantee sustained impact. PI Quaife and Co-I's Black and Cornforth lead operational early warning systems (TAMSAT and Rainwatch) capable of continuing and extending the operational provision of forecast products. The partnerships with an NGO, active in the region and a leading Ghanaian university will also facilitate uptake and continued use of the ERADACS research.