The first Africa Climate Summit opens Monday in Kenya to highlight the continent that will suffer the most from climate change while contributing to it the least. But most of Africa's 1.3 billion people live with little advance knowledge of what's to come.
Europe has 345 radar facilities. North America, 291.
Kenya, the host of the climate summit, is one of the few countries in Africa seen as having a relatively well-developed weather service, along with South Africa and Morocco. Kenya has allocated about US$12 million this year for its meteorological service, according to the national treasury. In contrast, the U.S. National Weather Service budget request for fiscal year 2023 was US$1.3 billion.
Now, 13 of the most data-sparse African countries, including Ethiopia, Madagascar and Congo, are getting money to improve weather data collection and sharing from a United Nations-created trust fund, the Systematic Observations Financing Facility. An older funding mechanism with many of the same partners, Climate Risk & Early Warning Systems, has supported modernizing meteorological systems in a half-dozen West and Central African countries.
"To be clear, TAHMO can never be a replacement of efficient and effective national weather services," van de Giesen said, adding that many African governments still don't have the needed resources or funding. Cyclone Idai was the costliest disaster in Africa, at US$1.9 billion, in the period from 1970 to 2019, according to a WMO report on weather extremes and their economic and personal tolls.
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