WMO leads new flood and drought management project for Volta Basin

The 32nd Meeting of the Adaptation Fund Board, which was held in Bonn, Germany on 9-12 October 2018, has endorsed a USD 7.92 million regional proposal submitted by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) entitled “Integrating Flood and Drought management and early warning for climate change adaptation in the Volta Basin.” The targeted project countries are Benin, Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Mali and Togo.

The Volta Basin project has the ambition to provide the first large scale and transboundary implementation of Integrated Flood and Drought Management strategies through the complete chain of the End-to-End Early Warning System for Flood and Drought Forecasting. The project will empower the National Meteorological and Hydrological Services (NMHSs) and other competent authorities of the six riparian countries with robust and innovative solutions for disaster risk reduction and climate adaptation, including capacity development for green solutions and gender sensitive participatory approaches.

The Volta project proposal is mainly based on the framework of Integrated Flood Management (IFM) and Integrated Drought Management (IDM) which has been promoted by the joint WMO/Global Water Partnerships' (GWP) Associated Programme on Flood Management (APFM) and Integrated Drought Management Programme (IDMP) for the past 17 years; mainly through its tools and publication series, various IFM workshops and pilot projects were carried out in previous years with the network of Support Base Partners (SBPs). The in-kind contribution of the WMO, GWP and the past donors/funders of the programmes were essential for executing the above activities, which in turn supported the development of the Volta project proposal.  

The Volta project is tentatively scheduled to start in March/April 2019 with an inception meeting and will last for a period of four years. The project will be coordinated by the WMO. Executing entities will include the WMO, the Volta Basin Authority (VBA) and the Global Water Partnerships, with active participation from the NMHSs of the targeted countries.

This is the second WMO proposal approved by the Board after the endorsement of the Agricultural Climate Resilience Enhancement Initiative (ACREI) project in 2017.