The project dedicated to flood and drought risk management in the Volta Basin concludes in Accra with two days of workshops and a meeting with the technical advisory committee and partners. As part of this project, CIMA Research Foundation has implemented a platform for monitoring and forecasting floods and droughts to support inter-institutional coordination at transboundary level.
The project Integrating Flood and Drought Management and Early Warning for Climate Change Adaptation in the Volta Basin (VFDM) comes to an end after five years of activity. The final event takes place from June 19 to 21 in Accra, Ghana, featuring a technical workshop and a concluding meeting of the Project Technical Advisory Committee (PTAC).
Initiated in 2019, the project was funded by the Adaptation Fund and led by the World Meteorological Organization, Global Water Partnership, and the Volta Basin Authority. Risk reduction and climate change adaptation were the two key goals guiding the project’s activities. The Volta Basin covers a vast area (approximately 400,000 square kilometers), traversing regions with extremely varied climatic characteristics, ranging from semi-arid to semi-humid. The Volta River is the main river in Ghana, but it also runs through five other countries: Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, and Togo
Over the last twenty years, the Volta Basin has been affected by increasingly frequent floods and droughts due to the climate crisis. These phenomena have severely impacted local populations, who have an extremely fragile socio-economic fabric. The project was created precisely to strengthen the area’s resilience, supporting the six regions of the basin in coordinated, collaborative efforts to develop management plans for risk reduction and climate change adaptation. Working actively with the project partners and the various stakeholders, represented by including national meteorological, hydrological, water management, civil protection and agricultural authorities, the project focused on improving the Early Warning System (EWS) for floods and droughts.
“In particular, the first year of activity focused on analyzing local realities through in-depth consultations with each involved country. We then dedicated to risk assessment, developing probabilistic risk scenarios for floods and droughts,” says Anna Mapelli, a researcher at CIMA Research Foundation, one of the project’s partners. “Simultaneously, we began implementing the myDEWETRA.world platform at the basin level, named myDewetra-VOLTALARM.”
This process led to the development of an impact-based early warning system at the basin scale, focused on flood forecasting and drought monitoring, based on myDewetra-VOLTALARM. The system allows for the prediction and monitoring of events and the issuance of information bulletins that enable timely risk mitigation actions.
“In 2023, the modeling chain for flood forecasting was implemented, with real-time impact assessments, and the issuance of the dedicated flood bulletin began. It is a tool co-produced by the Basin Authority with various national agencies, allowing them to input local information and facilitate inter-institutional coordination. One of the most significant aspects of this work is that, thanks to a step-by-step implementation with the bulletin users themselves, the operational issuance phase began extremely quickly and with total stakeholder autonomy,” explains Dr. Mapelli.
At the end of 2023, activities began to make the drought bulletin operational, following the same co-production methods as the flood bulletin. The first two days of the June meeting are dedicated to the drought bulletin, featuring a workshop focused on the latest developments in the drought monitoring system and considering possible impacts on the population and agricultural production.
On June 21, the members of the Project Technical Advisory Committee (PTAC), representing various national and regional agencies of the Volta Basin, as well as the project partners, will meet. The PTAC provides strategic guidance and support to ensure the VFDM project’s s objectives are achieved. As the project comes to a close, the PTAC meeting will discuss the full-term final evaluation study of the VFDM, which will be conducted at regional, national, and local levels, to review the activities carried out, the challenges faced, and potential synergies with other projects.
The event concludes with the signing of a memorandum of understanding between the Volta Basin Authority and CIMA Research Foundation. This agreement signifies the ongoing collaboration for the continuous enhancement of the myDewetra-VOLTALARM system and its use to protect local communities from floods and droughts.