ACDI's Dr Marie-Ange Baudoin  from  will be giving a talk on “Hydro-Meteorological Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change: Lessons Learned for Resilient Adaptation to a Changing Climate."

The talk presents the results of a 2-year project, “Hydro-Meteorological Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change: Lessons Learned for Resilient Adaptation to a Changing Climate”, aimed at assessing the current state of disaster risk reduction (DRR) in different regions of the Global South. The study was conducted by the Consortium for Capacity Building, University of Boulder, Colorado and funded by the Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance (USAID/OFDA). The project focused on Hydro-Meteorological Disaster Risk Reduction programmes implemented by OFDA in Central America, the Greater Horn of Africa (GHA), South and Southeast Asia. In the GHA, the program ‘‘Regional Climate Prediction and Risk Reduction in the Greater Horn of Africa’’ implemented by ICPAC (Climate Prediction and Applications Center) in the early 2000 served as a case study to analyse the practice of DRR in the region. Results highlight significant improvements in the climate-forecasting capabilities since the 2000s; yet, the practice of DRR remains technology driven and impacts on the ground are limited. The key findings highlight the significant communication gaps that exist between the producers of climate information and their end users, the communities at risk. Similar results were found in the other case studies, as well as in the literature.  Questions around the production and use of climate information that is relevant for decision-making are not new, which indicates that so-called ‘lessons learned’ are often not valued, used, and shared by institutions working in the field of DRR. A follow-up event to this study was the set up of an Expert Forum on DRR, held in February 2015 in Antalya, Turkey, and focusing on ‘Lessons learned about lessons learned for climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction’.