Climate Monitoring in the Southern Africa Development Community

Abstract

The Drought Monitoring Centre (DMC) is a specialized institution in climate diagnosis, prediction and applications for the Southern African Development Community (SADC) comprising 14 member states with well over 220 million inhabitants. SADC is largely semi-arid to arid. The SADC countries, therefore, experience recurrent vagaries of climatic extremes such as droughts, floods, tropical cyclones and tsunamis. Consequently, there are far-reaching negative impacts on socio-economic development of the member states and the well being of most of the inhabitants of the region. Impacts can easily exacerbate land degradation. The main objective of the DMC is to contribute to minimizing negative impacts of the climatic extremes on the socio-economic development of the region; and for the rational use of natural resources. This is achieved through the monitoring and diagnosis of near real-time climatic trends, and generating mediumrange (10–14 days) and long-range climate outlook products on monthly and seasonal (3–6 months) timescales. These outlook products are disseminated in timely manner to the communities of the SADC principally through the national Meteorological/Hydrological Services (NMHSs) regional organizations, relief and international development partner agencies. The provision of early warning for the formulation of appropriate strategies to combat the adverse effects of climate extremes affords greater opportunity to decision-makers for development of prudent plans for mitigating the negative impacts. The main activities of the DMC are described with suitable examples. The DMC is continuing to transform itself into a centre of excellence in climate analysis, prediction and applications with particular emphasis on the extremes across the SADC. It develops the capacity of the SADC NMHSs scientists on climate diagnosis and prediction; and users in climate applications.