Climate Change Futures Project, Vanuatu
FrontierSI was recently engaged by CSIRO to develop a portal for delivering Climate Information Services (CIS) tailored to the needs of sectoral stakeholders in Vanuatu as part of the Green Climate Fund (GCF) Van KIRAP (Climate Information Services for Resilient Development in Vanuatu) project. The project is being led by the Secretariat of the Pacific Environment Program (SPREP), in partnership with the Vanuatu Geo-Hazard and Meteorological Department (VMGD), the CSIRO Climate Science Centre, Australian Bureau of Meteorology and the Asia-Pacific Climate Centre. The project will enhance Vanuatu’s understanding of climate variability and change over multiple timeframes (seasonal to multi-decadal) to ensure adaptation planning and policy implementation is informed by accurate climate data, information and decision support tools in the form of science-based services. The Van KIRAP portal will be central to the delivery of the CIS for sectors to be developed by the project. FrontierSI will partner with NGIS Australia to work with CSIRO to further develop their existing Coastal Risk Vanuatu platform as the starting point.
As a first step in the project, Nathan Quadros (FrontierSI) and Nathan Eaton (NGIS) participated in a mission with CSIRO to Vanuatu in November. The mission was focused on working with SPREP, the VMGD and the agriculture, fisheries, infrastructure, tourism and water sectors to understand their requirements for CIS. To underpin their planning, the sectors were particularly interested in the acquisition and accessibility of LiDAR and other geo-spatial imagery data for Vanuatu. There were also discussions around the establishment of a UAV capability in Vanuatu to capture high resolution imagery data of coastal infrastructure and natural resources to supplement the existing LiDAR datasets which FrontierSI and NGIS delivered to Vanuatu in 2015.
Through this project there is an opportunity to embrace a user-driven web-based platform approach to developing a portal that specifically addresses the CIS needs of the key sectors. Now the immediate activity is to update Coastal Risk Vanuatu portal and to extend its capabilities to demonstrate additional climate projections and high value data and associated CIS capability by February 2020. The project will then be extended for a further three years as CSIRO and partners work with the FrontierSI-NGIS team to develop actual CIS to assist the key sectors in Vanuatu for building resilience to climate change.
Above from left to right: Olivia Warrick (Red Cross NZ), Celine Becker (Bureau of Meteorology), Nathan Quadros (FrontierSI), Nathan Eaton (NGIS) and Geoff Gooley (CSIRO).