The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) has said that it is ready to enhance awareness toward tackling climate change in Africa.
Dr Agnes Kijazi, WMO Regional Director for Africa, who made this known on Friday in an interview said that WMO will continue to enhance its advocacy and awareness to the communities in the region of extreme weather events through early warning and anticipatory actions.
“You may know that Africa is vulnerable to extreme weather events with attendant socio-economic impacts, she said. “We will continue to enhance our advocacy and awareness of our communities of extreme weather events through early warning and anticipatory actions”.
Speaking further, she said, “You are probably aware of the mandate from the UN Secretary-General to WMO to ensure that every citizen in the world receives an early warning in the next five years,”. “We have started this process with a ministerial meeting held in Maputo, Mozambique, in September 2022, and we intend to escalate this to the rest of the other regional economic communities,”.
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She said that WMO Regional Office was saddled with the responsibility to assist Members in developing National Meteorological and Hydrological Services (NMHSs) to enable them to play their full role in the economic and social development of their countries.
She further noted that the regional office was also assisting members to utilize the services of the Regional Offices to develop and strengthen their NMHSs, adding that the office constantly added value to NMHSs in Africa by improving the services they provided to their stakeholders in order to fulfil mandates.
“The office is currently advocating using digital technologies for effective and efficient service delivery to provide early warning services for all in National Meteorological and Hydrological Services,”. “In addition, such technologies are critical for digital data collection, processing and services delivery mechanisms, as well as data validation, data storage and handling”.
Story was adapted from NNN.
