A new project called ENANDES has been launched in the Andean countries of Chile, Colombia, and Peru, to maximize cross-border collaboration to increase the reach of climate-related information for better resilience.
ENANDES, which stands for Enhancing Adaptive Capacity of Andean Communities through Climate Services, will cover an area of 8,000km (5,000 miles). It will produce and communicate scientific knowledge that will guide societies to best adapt to the impacts of climate change.
ENANDES will address three key sectors – agriculture and food security, disaster risk reduction, and water and energy. And the project will be organized into four components.
The first aims to design, produce and communicate climate and water-related science for policy and decision-making at all levels, while the second intends to expand the tailoring of weather information by improving gridded regional datasets and validating climate change projections.
In the third and fourth phases, ENANDES will work on capacity building by running workshops and training activities to various stakeholders, including smallholder farmers and micro-hydropower operators. The project aims to produce a toolkit of science and user-friendly weather data to be used across the region to better plan growing seasons and respond to climate threats more efficiently.
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) is the leading implementing partner for ENANDES. Raul Polato, project officer at WMO, said, “ENANDES recognizes how the central role that climate plays in human welfare so far has not been matched with a corresponding ability to use information and knowledge for climate adaptation measures.”
According to Mikko Ollikainenn, executive manager of Adaptation Fund, which finances ENANDES, the project will yield tangible experience to facilitate operational implementation of climate services in Colombia, Chile and Peru, and will hopefully offer a model for other countries for replication and scaling up.