E-infrastructure for climate adaptation policies: The UNDP/AAP activities

To effectively plan for adaptation to climate change and its impacts, decision makers require the infrastructure and tools that will provide them with timely access to current and future climate information. For example, climate scientists and operational forecasters need to access global and regional model projections and current climate information that they can use to generate climate products and services for multi-sectorial adaptation planning. Through the UNDP African Adaption Programme (AAP), an e-infrastructure capacity has been built across Africa that will provide multi-tiered access to such information and data for informed decision making. Web accessible servers provide both computational power and access to the information at many levels: including raw and processed climate model output, real-time climate conditions and products, knowledge products (technical documents and presentation) as well as decision support tools for decision and policy makers. In this paper we present (report and discuss) the results of a two-year activity in building such an e-infrastructure under the AAP program and the extensive technical support and services programme associated with establishing capacity across Africa.