UN weather forecast fund aims to fill climate blind spots

As climate change whips up increasingly ferocious floods, storms and heatwaves, developing nations facing the severest impacts face another challenge -- a lack of weather data to help them see what is coming.

Filling in these gaps in weather and climate observations is the goal of a new financing project launched on Wednesday by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations.

This will "deliver tangible benefits in terms of lives saved, improved disaster management, livelihoods, biodiversity, food security, water supply and economic growth," said Inger Andersen, head of the UN's Environment Programme.

The organisations behind the facility said it would not just help poorer nations beef up their own data, but would feed into global weather forecasts, early warning systems and climate information.

The prime minister of Cape Verde islands, which lie off the west coast of Africa where some of the most powerful Atlantic hurricanes are born, said the project was crucial as continuing emissions keep turning up the global temperature dial.

"Even bold mitigation actions cannot spare us from the significant impacts of climate change for decades to come," said Ulisses Correia e Silva.

"But we cannot adequately adapt if we cannot adequately predict. And we cannot predict, if we do not have sufficient data."

Currently, less than 10 percent of basic weather and climate observations are available from the poorest states, according to WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas.

Organisers said the new initiative, called the Systematic Observations Finance Facility, would support 55 countries in improving their weather and climate observations in the first three years of operation from June 2022.

Programmes will include the rehabilitation of up to 400 data-gathering stations, enabling them to generate and internationally exchange data that is missing today.

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