In line with the UN’s global Early Warnings for All initiative, to optimize these systems (EWS) and ensure more effective early action, it is necessary to consider not only information on weather or hazard conditions, but also information on their impacts. In the Horn of Africa, a region particularly affected by disasters related to hydrological extremes, there are multiple early warning system tools and initiatives, but they need an established methodology and application.
Contributing to the EW4All initiative, the project Towards actionable impact-based early warning in Africa: integrating exposure and vulnerability into early warning systems – a pilot study in the IGAD region (EWS4IGAD) seeks to expand existing hazard-based early warning systems toward impact prediction-based systems that also consider exposure and vulnerabilities related to floods and droughts.
Goals and expected results
EWS4IGAD aims to co-design and co-develop a viable approach and methodology for EWS that optimizes existing approaches and tools of decision support systems (DSS) operating in the Horn of Africa region. Although the focus is primarily on floods and droughts, the goal is to achieve an impact-based strategy that can be extended to other extreme events and climate-related natural hazards.
CIMA Research Foundation’s contribution
CIMA Research Foundation is concerned with providing more precise information on exposure and vulnerability and, ultimately, more targeted indications of the impact of major flood events in the region. To this end, the FloodPROOFS East Africa early warning system (Alfieri et al., 2024), based on the operational impact of fluvial flooding in the Greater Horn of Africa, is leveraged as an important support in this context.
Photograph: Bianco Vincenzo/UIF
