ACACIA Horizon Europe project

ACACIA is an ambitious interdisciplinary alliance to enhance the resilience of at-risk communities in Sub-Saharan Africa to climate impacts. Focusing on floods in the Greater Horn of Africa and floods and tropical cyclones in Madagascar, we seek to improve the ways climate services are produced, disseminated and used for making short-term and long-term decisions to diminish climate risk. Our strategy is to mitigate five obstacles to climate adaptation: 1) Temporal and spatial mismatches and lack of relevance of climate services; 2) Capacity to implement coping strategies and access to climate services; 3) Governance barriers, including fragmentation of responsibility; 4) Climate change, which can make existing coping strategies obsolete; 5) Lack of evidence on the socioeconomic impacts of climate services. Our consortium has 14 partners, with strong representation from Africa. It involves actors from all parts of the climate services ecosystem. The reason for mobilising such a broad alliance is to ensure that services and protocols are developed locally, which enables our outcomes to be sustained beyond the lifetime of ACACIA.