Issues related to Africa's capacity to understand projected impacts include:
Data Needs: The potential exists to develop environmental information
systems on the basis of satellite data products and geographic information
systems at small management units such as river basins, with socioeconomic
and biophysical attributes as required in analyses of impacts and management.
Current impact assessment models are limited by input data, limiting their
use to fairly general questions. Examples exist where detailed spatial databases
have been built and are being used to run integrated agrohydrological models,
such as in South Africa (Schulze, 1997; Schulze and Perks, 2000). Monitoring
of environmental processes as well as increased weather observation are required.
Coordinated collection of integrated data sets for subregions or in connection
with an extreme event such as a drought or a flood is highly desirable and
would contribute to understanding of adaptation and response strategies and
regional integrated modeling.
Human Capacity: There is great need for increased African capacity
to study the more fundamental science issues of global change and its impacts.
There is great capacity at the applied management level in Africa, and this
must be strengthened by a strong science capacity. The increasing number of
international environmental treaties and agreements will require an even greater
capacity for analysis and delivery of timely reports. There also is great
need to apply science findings in policy analysis and international negotiations.
Integrated Analysis: It is becoming increasingly clear that most
environmental problems such as climate change require integration of many
disciplines and methods of analysis. There also is a shift in interest and
focus from global scales to regional and local scales. Models that help to
integrate science findings with management and policy issues are needed. These
models, called integrated assessment models, are required at regional and
subregional levels and should include all important linkages between the socioecological
and economic sectors. Given the unique combinations of factors in subregions
of Africa (climate, economics, infrastructure), it will be necessary in future
assessments to develop and apply regional assessment models that reflect key
factors for each subregion, and these models will need to be built around
issues of sustainable development rather than emissions reduction. Linking
climate change (and other environmental issues) to sustainable development
is not going to be easy, but it should spawn a rich body of research to define
methods and approaches that will work.
Literature Written in French: It is recognized that there is a rich
body of literature that is written in French, and although efforts were made
to capture these studies, it simply was not possible to conduct an exhaustive
synthesis of that body of work. This represents a major challenge for Africa-wide
assessments.
