Climate change projections point towards increasingly devastating heatwaves occurring in Africa in the decades to come. In cities, exposure to extreme heat is exacerbated by the phenomenon of urban heat islands and poor housing conditions, inducing health and other impacts, and affecting vulnerable population groups in particular.
Yet, today, the formulation of effective climate resilience measures is strongly hampered by a lack of suitable and accessible urban climate information. The ambition of u-CLIP is to meet this data need, aiming to support the formulation of adequate resilience measures by policy makers and other stakeholders.
The u-CLIP project will implement a digital platform containing detailed urban climate projections and associated sectoral indicators (e.g., number of heatwave days for the health sector, cooling degree days for the energy sector, …) for Niamey.
The platform will be co-designed with representatives from the City of Niamey and other stakeholders, including city quarter councils, youth organisations, urban planning professionals and other sectoral experts. Being openly accessible to anyone, the platform will be equipped with functionalities to explore and analyse the urban climate projections in a comprehensible manner.
The main expected outcome is that urban stakeholders, by exploration of the u-CLIP platform’s data and scenarios, will be in a position to take better informed decisions with respect to urban adaptation policy and the development of suitable and effective climate resilience measures. Moreover, u-CLIP will be designed as an instrument to raise awareness and support local authorities in gaining access to international climate funds, thus allowing to actually implement resilience measures.
