Climate Chance Africa 2021: the issue of access to data for stakeholders on the continent
Climate protest: “Climate justice now!
At Merebank in South Africa.
(File image).
AFP / Rajesh Jantilal
Text by: RFI Follow
2 min
The third edition of the Climate Chance Africa 2021 summit ended on Friday, September 17.
For three days, non-state actors from the continent exchanged views on the fight against climate change during virtual conferences and workshops.
One issue was raised several times during the debates: access to climate and energy data for local stakeholders.
They are essential to develop effective environmental strategies and to be able to adapt to climate change, according to scientists.
However, this information is not always available.
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Researcher Lacour Mody Ayompe has studied the dynamics of greenhouse gas emissions in Africa over thirty years.
Essential data, according to him, to plan for the future, but still incomplete: “
Out of the 54 countries in Africa, we were able to obtain data for 27 of them.
Much work remains to be done.
Some studies cannot be carried out because the available data have not been treated with sufficient finesse to be processed
”.
Need for
"information sharing
"
Labaly Toure is the director of Geomatica, a Senegalese company responsible for collecting, processing and disseminating geographic data. He also comes up against several difficulties: “
At a certain scale, we have the graphical data. But, when we go to a finer scale, we have difficulties for these data because they are paying. Often, we have the data for today, but we do not have the data for yesterday and the day before yesterday. This is a real problem that we often have on the ground. For example, when we do wind data over a 20-year period, we have difficulty obtaining them
”.
Another problem on the continent, some weather stations do not yet digitize their readings.
There is also the question of pooling all this data.
The director of Geomatica insists on the need for
“information sharing
” between all actors rather than “
individual and partial
” work.
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See also
:
Climate Chance Africa: a hundred inspiring climate initiatives
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