Making Decisions in Sunshine and Rain: A CIS Learning Report

Locally Led Adaptation & Resilience

Climate Information Services (CIS) is growing in importance in the wake of increasingly devastating impacts of climate variability and change.

This report presents a synthesis of CARE’s engagement in and learning from CIS work in Africa and Asia, supporting agriculture decision making and early warning early action systems towards climate resilience among climate vulnerable communities.

The report and its recommendations aim to be useful for CARE staff and partners, and all actors involved in climate information services that contribute to inclusive development and risk management in the global South.

CIS supports decision-makers to anticipate and manage the risks of a changing and variable climate. It involves a knowledge cycle of access to, interpretation, communication and use of relevant, accurate and reliable climate information by targeted user communities and their feedback on how the information is used.

CARE’s CIS work relates to this cycle, current CIS frameworks and CARE’s Climate Justice strategy and is presented through six roles and three types of CIS approaches. CARE engages in CIS through its country and regional projects supporting climate resilience, adaptation, disaster risk reduction and humanitarian responses.

In the CIS components of the projects, CARE plays multiple and all equally important roles, with a different mix and balance depending on the nature of the project, the purpose of CIS within it and the other partners involved.

CARE uses a wide range of CIS approaches which can be
categorized in three main areas:

1. Seasonal forecasts and advisories for development and investment decisions based on access and use of interpreted and localized forecasts, in particular, but not limited to the Participatory Scenario Planning (PSP) approach.
2. Early Warning Systems (EWS) for enhanced disaster risk reduction and response to extreme events, with a focus on community-based systems and forecast based early action (FBEA).
3. Communication services for short term weather and climate information such as innovations using radio, community groups (especially Village Savings and Loans Associations (VSLA)) and mobile phone platforms such as WhatsApp and SMS.

CARE’s CIS learning relates to four key themes, with an intermediary role and linking demand and supply being common threads across all.

The four themes and recommendations relating to them can be found in the learning report.