Harmonised observations of climate forcing across Africa: an assessment of existing approaches and their applicability

Abstract

A crucial aspect of coordinated climate action is the ability to measure, attribute, report and verify the drivers of climate change not only globally, but down to national level. This requires the enhancement of current observation infrastructures around the world, particularly in less-studied regions such as the African continent. Methodological protocols play an essential role in assuring interoperability among existing and new monitoring stations and networks. However, although the availability and accessibility of the body of existing methodological knowledge is crucial to fill existing observational gaps in a harmonised and resource-efficient way, there are very few efforts documented to systematically compile and assess it. This work aims to identify environmental observation methodologies which, on one hand, are applicable in Africa and, on the other hand, compatible with ongoing international and European monitoring initiatives. It draws from a systematic inventory of 140 environmental methodological protocols related to the measurement and estimation of the main climate forcing components within the atmospheric, oceanic, and terrestrial domains. In order to identify existing methodologies readily applicable for various observational purposes in under-studied regions, the feasibility of these protocols was determined based on a basic assessment of the financial and human resources needed for their implementation. Finally, a harmonised approach is proposed to enhance observational capacity in Africa with the differentiation of at least two types of sites. ‘Basic’ sites, where highly feasible environmental measurements can be performed to improve spatial coverage of main biomes, anthromes, and land use types, and advanced ‘key sites’, where a large set of variables measured at a high temporal resolution would enable a better understanding of driving processes in representative systems and managements across the continent, albeit requiring the application of less readily feasible methodologies.

Keywords

• methodological protocols
• research infrastructure
• environmental monitoring
• handbook
• guidelines
• manual