Climate science is a key tool for governments tasked with preparing citizens and infrastructure for the impacts of global warming.
But translating climate information into policy planning is no easy feat.
In a recent study, published in Climate Policy, we explore how climate science is – and is not – being used in national-level adaptation planning in 16 countries in southern Africa.
We find that there is often a disconnect between analysis of climate data, assessments of climate impacts and proposed adaptation options.
Adaptation plans are also often failing to look at the full range of plausible climate futures.
As well as identifying key barriers in how climate projections are being used, we offer some recommendations for how climate science could be more effectively integrated into adaptation plans, including enhancing collaboration between scientists and adaptation planners and clarifying what is meant by scientific uncertainty.
Climate adaptation
Climate adaptation can take place at many levels – from someone painting their roof white to keep their home cooler, for example, all the way up to the construction of large-scale flood defences.
Adaptation measures can include sustainable agricultural methods, including agroforestry; water collection and storage, such as dams; and public services, such as early warning systems and impact-based weather warnings.
Adaptation can be a response to current conditions, or a long-term plan based on projections of future climate change.
In many countries in southern Africa, governments face pressing economic challenges and deep structural inequalities, in addition to pronounced impacts from weather events. Long-term planning is not always at the top of priority list.
Yet, awareness of future climate might be crucial to avoid maladaptation – when adaptation interventions have negative consequences which increases vulnerability to climate change. (For example, a measure designed to increase irrigation to improve agricultural yields in a region projected to become drier, leading to increased water insecurity.)
National communications
To get a picture of how climate science is being factored into country-level adaptation planning, we analyse information in “national communications” submitted by countries to the UN, as well as conduct interviews with experts, government officials and climate scientists.
National communications are reports where countries provide updates on their vulnerability to climate change, as well as an inventory of their greenhouse gas emissions and the steps they are taking towards emissions reduction and adaptation.
Our study looks at national communications submitted by the 16 countries that form the Southern African Development Community (SADC). These are Angola, Botswana, Comoros, Democratic Republic of Congo, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Seychelles, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
Developing countries are required to submit national communications every four years to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
All southern African countries featured in the analysis have submitted at least one national communication. (Namibia and Zimbabwe have submitted five each.)
However, the UNFCCC’s guidance on how to assess climate impacts and vulnerability is very brief. It notes that countries “may use appropriate methodologies and guidelines they consider better able to reflect their national situation”.
The lack of specific guidance is perhaps not surprising, given that – currently – scientists do not have a common method for developing robust climate information to support decisionmaking. This has been recognised by the World Climate Research Programme, which has set up a working group that aims to establish what it means for a scientific product to be “robust”, or fit for informing local or regional decisionmaking.
In the absence of specific guidance, norms appear to have developed in the national communications.
Most of the national communications in southern Africa include a dedicated section on future projections from climate models. These tend to use global or regional climate models, such as CORDEX Africa.
The climate projections included in the national communications have a strong emphasis on long-term changes to temperature and rainfall.
The plot below demonstrates how temperature and rainfall projections are used in different ways in the 16 national communications in the analysis. For example, it shows that 13 reports include projections of annual precipitation variables, 10 feature projections for seasonal precipitation change and nine mention annual temperature projections.

However, we find that few countries chose to focus on other variables – such as heatwave or extreme rainfall indices – in the climate projections section of their national communications, despite these extremes often resulting in large impacts.
While there was an emphasis on flooding and drought in many reports, this was typically found in the impacts and adaptation section, which was often disconnected from analysis of climate projections.
All 16 national communications cited floods as a “top five hazard” and 13 included drought. However, in sections on climate projections, the reports rarely included analyses beyond average temperature and rainfall. Just four national communications included projections of sea level rise, while projections for tropical storms, ocean temperature and flooding were featured in one each.
We also find the impacts and adaptation sections typically lean on impact modelling and experience from recent weather events, not climate projections analysis.
(Impact models are used to test how climatic changes might influence other systems, for example crops, water resources or human health. These impact models sometimes use climate projections as an input – but not always.)
In the national communications, we find that, in some instances, there was a clear link between the climate projections section and impacts assessment. However, this was not always the case.
Accounting for uncertainty
We also find that most national communications are not adequately accounting for uncertainty in climate projections.
Climate projections are generated by running climate models with hypothetical future scenarios. These scenarios take into account different socioeconomic pathways the world may take, with implications for the amount of greenhouse gases emitted and the amount of global warming.
Such is the complexity of the climate system and the many unknowns of how global society will develop in future, there is a wide range of uncertainty in the projections that models produce.
While temperature projections tend to be relatively consistent across different climate models, rainfall projections – especially in regions such as southern Africa – carry much greater uncertainty. For many countries, some models suggest it will be wetter in future, while other models suggest it will be drier.
However, we found this uncertainty was not always stated in national communications. For example, some national communications use only a single model, the average across a collection of models or a single emissions scenario – meaning the range of climate futures and risks countries could face is not always being considered.
To best support adaptation planning, climate projections should be combined with interpretation. When climate projection data are presented on their own, they only tell us what the models show. Interpretation is needed to help decisionmakers consider what this data can tell us about the real world.
(There is a good example from South Africa’s third national communication, which uses a relatively novel approach for representing uncertainty. It uses “narratives” to describe the different climate futures that are possible in each province, such as “hot and dry” or “warmer, wetter”.)
Overall, it is not clear if the climate science set out in national communications is being used when deciding on adaptation options – raising the question of what role future climate information is playing in the documents.
Barriers
Climate science is complex – communicating and interpreting findings, as well as uncertainties, can be challenging. Uncertain rainfall projections in southern Africa in particular is making decisionmaking difficult.
To understand the barriers to integrating climate projections into adaptation decisionmaking, we interviewed 18 experts. This included government decisionmakers and technical experts, as well as climate modellers and applied researchers tasked with translating science for government officials.
One impact modeller told us: “The [climate projection] results are not agreeing. So then the question is, which results do you adopt at national level?”
We find that end “users” of future climate information, such as governmental adaptation planners, are not always able to interpret complex or uncertain findings – and have trouble accessing spatially-detailed information they require.
In some sectors, such as water and infrastructure, users and decisionmakers are knowledgeable and accustomed with uncertain climate projections – but officials in sectors such as health are less familiar.
Meanwhile, the flow of information from climate scientist to decisionmaker is not always direct. Instead, experts in third-party organisations – such as applied researchers or impact modellers – play a role in passing on information.
These external experts – which we refer to in the study as “boundary agents” – can improve the translation and dissemination of information between scientists and decisionmakers. However, in some instances, information is lost.
Our analysis shows that climate projections can become increasingly more certain as they are passed along by boundary agents. As one experienced climate scientist who has helped develop numerous national documents to the UN explained:
“Sometimes you use words like: ‘This looks like [a] plausible [pathway], this is one of the likely [pathways] that this signal is going to look like’ … But even if you have tried to maintain that these are probabilistic statements…don’t be surprised when you go some pages down the line [to read]: ‘this region is likely to get warmer by 5C’. Then you get a statement that says, ‘according to the climate model, we’re going to experience 5C warmer temperatures in the future’.“
Lessons for the future
Our study analyses tips from experts on how climate science could be more effectively used in adaptation planning, based on real-world experience.
The measures highlighted by the experts include:
- Creating spaces for collaboration between scientists and adaptation decisionmakers.
- Inviting adaptation decisionmakers to be included in the development of scientific analyses, to boost their understanding of uncertainty and different climate variables. This could also help scientists better understand the information needs of adaptation decisionmakers.
- Explaining climate science jargon, including by avoiding abbreviations such as DJF (meteorological nomenclature for December, January and February) or SSP (for shared socioeconomic pathways).
- Clarifying what is meant when discussing uncertainty, given that climate scientists are likely to be discussing uncertainties in climate modelling while adaptation planners uncertainty in governance and finance.
- Ensuring that maps and figures designed to communicate uncertainty are intuitive to people outside the world of climate science.
Overall, our research shows that there are adaptation processes in southern Africa where future climate projections are being included. However, it raises questions about how far the implications of future climate change are being integrated and understood.
Work is needed to incorporate a broader range of climate projections into planning – in particular, variables related to extreme weather such as heatwaves and flooding, which lead to large impacts, such as heat-related deaths or destruction of crops.
The uncertainties in climate projections must also be better considered, communicated and understood. This challenge is not unique to southern Africa; scientists around the world have important work to do to figure out how to communicate “robust” future climate information to decisionmakers.
Enhanced collaboration between climate scientists and planners, improved communication approaches and effective use of “boundary” organisations can help remove some of the barriers to the effective use of climate science in national adaptation planning in southern Africa.
The post Guest post: How climate science is – and is not – shaping adaptation planning in southern Africa appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Guest post: How climate science is – and is not – shaping adaptation planning in southern Africa
Climate Change
Scientists Outplant Experimental ‘Flonduran’ Corals in Florida’s Dry Tortugas National Park
Researchers are testing whether cross-breeding elkhorn corals from Florida and Honduras can help restore lost genetic diversity and improve the threatened species’ ability to withstand warmer waters.
Nearly three dozen young lab-grown elkhorn corals were outplanted onto reefs in Florida’s Dry Tortugas National Park this spring, including a group of “Flondurans,” marking the first time this experimental cross-breed of Florida and Honduran elkhorn corals was introduced to the remote park about 70 miles from Key West.
Scientists Outplant Experimental ‘Flonduran’ Corals in Florida’s Dry Tortugas National Park
Climate Change
DeBriefed 29 May 2026: Europe’s ‘mind-boggling’ May | Indian heat deaths | Nigeria’s solar mini-grids
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
UK, Europe and India battle heatwaves
‘MIND-BOGGLING’ MAY: The UK and continental Europe have set “mind-boggingly crazy” temperature records for May amid a deadly heatwave, reported the Financial Times. According to the Associated Press, the UK “smashed a century-old temperature record for the second time in 24 hours on Tuesday”. The newswire added that records “also fell in France, where temperatures reached 36C on Monday in the country’s south-west”. On Wednesday, Portugal hit a record May temperature of 40.3C, said BBC News.
‘BRUTAL REMINDER’: In parts of Italy, the heatwave triggered blackouts, reported Reuters. The heatwave has also been linked to more than a dozen deaths in the UK and France, including from people drowning and suffering heat-related deaths while competing in sporting events, said ABC News. Simon Stiell, the executive secretary of UN Climate Change, said the intense heatwaves were a “brutal reminder” of the cost of global warming, reported Politico. Carbon Brief has in-depth coverage of the record-shattering heatwave.
INDIA’S DEADLY HEAT: In the southern Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, more than 100 people died within three days following an intense heatwave, reported the Khaleej Times. The publication noted that authorities urged people to stay indoors and avoid direct exposure to the heat. Meanwhile, some parts of India are “grappling with power cuts as record-breaking heat has pushed electricity demand to an all-time high”, reported Reuters.
Around the world
- CRUDE DIPS: The International Energy Agency (IEA) said global investments in oil projects will fall below $500bn in 2026, continuing a three-year decline, reported Bloomberg. Carbon Brief’s analysis of the data shows the US’s “data-centre boom” means it is now investing more in fossil-fuel power than China.
- DODGING NET-ZERO: The world’s biggest miner, Australian giant BHP, has backtracked on climate action by halting or delaying projects to cut “vast” amounts of emissions, according to a Guardian investigation.
- SOLAR SLIP: China’s new solar installations dropped for a fourth straight month, reflecting weakening domestic demand, said Bloomberg.
- NO LOGGING: Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon fell last year to its lowest level since 2019, according to a new report, said Agence France-Presse.
- EXECUTIVE ACTION: Puerto Rico’s governor announced a state of emergency to fight a surge in coastal erosion, citing the need to protect natural resources and vulnerable communities, reported the Associated Press.
Four million
The number of homes in the UK with air conditioning, double the figure from three years ago, reported the Guardian. There are 29m households in the UK.
Latest climate research
- Carbon Brief will soon be launching a new fortnightly newsletter focused on climate research. Sign up for free today.
- LGBTQ+ households in the US are “significantly more likely” to face energy poverty and insecurity than the general population | Energy Research & Social Science
- Global rice-paddy greenhouse gas emissions have doubled over the past six decades | Nature Food
- Vegetation greening and human-caused warming are the “main drivers” of a surge in flash floods over the last decade | Science Advances
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured

A Carbon Brief investigation has shed light on the impact of weather-related flooding on National Health Service (NHS) facilities across the UK. At least 67 NHS hospital wards, departments and other sites have been forced to temporarily close or relocate due to weather-related flooding. The chart above shows sites of weather-related flooding incidents at NHS facilities. The size of the circles indicates the number of incidents reported at each site.
Spotlight
How solar mini-grids can ‘help boost’ Nigeria’s economy
This week, Carbon Brief covers a new report on Nigeria’s solar mini-grid industry.
Amid the impact of the US-Iran war on the Nigerian economy, a new report has argued that solar-mini grids can help to reduce the country’s reliance on fossil fuels and create more than 200,000 jobs.
In Nigeria, Africa’s third-largest economy, the war has led to an increase in energy prices and a decrease in petrol consumption. Petrol is one of the country’s main sources of transport and household fuel. According to one estimate, prices have surged by up to 40% since the conflict commenced in February.
Although the Nigerian treasury has benefited from rising crude oil prices – the country is a major exporter of oil and gas – the impact has been most visible on the wider population.
Rising energy prices “have affected the purchasing power of workers”, Agnes Funmi Sessi, a labour union leader in Lagos, told Carbon Brief.
However, scaling the deployment of solar “mini-grids” could help the country move away from fossil fuels, stimulate rural economies and improve livelihoods, according to the new report authored by the thinktank, the Africa Policy Research Institute.
“We estimate that, by deploying over 10,000 mini-grids, the sector could create 212,688 direct full-time informal and productive-use jobs across the off-grid and under-grid market segments,” the report said.
A nascent industry
Solar “mini-grids” are small-scale, localised electricity generation and distribution systems powered by solar panels.
The report positioned Nigeria’s mini-grid sector as one of the fastest-growing in Africa, with the country having just 11 mini-grids in 2015 and 155 by 2024, along with at least 42 active developers.
Many of the companies within the sector are young and apply novel local techniques in their deployment of solar technology, the report said.
However, access to finance remains a huge barrier. According to the report, the sector may require up to $8bn to connect 35.4 million people to mini-grids.
“Most Nigerians want solar power in their homes, but it is a capital intensive business for vendors and customers,” Dr Ben Iheagwara, a renewable energy entrepreneur and policy analyst, told Carbon Brief.
The report urged the Nigerian government and its international partners to “attract private capital by de-risking investments and ensuring regulatory clarity and long-term planning”.
Other key recommendations for policymakers and stakeholders include investment in skills development and paying attention to the gender gap.
Powering rural communities
Many rural communities, which make up about 37% of the country, are disconnected from the national grid system, so often have to generate their own electricity through mini-grid systems.
According to Nigeria’s electricity regulator, NERC, a mini-grid is defined as a power generating system with an installed capacity of up to 10 megawatts.
A mini-grid can be powered by fossil fuels such as diesel or petrol, but solar power is now considered a cheaper and cleaner source.
With more than 80 million people lacking access to electricity in Nigeria, solar mini-grids are increasingly viewed as the lowest-cost electrification solution, the report said.
Watch, read, listen
MOVING FORWARD: The Energy Transition Show dug into electricity reform in South Africa, discussing the country’s coal legacy and the role of renewables.
ENERGY POVERTY: In an opinion article for Project Syndicate, executive director of the African Climate Foundation, Saliem Fakir, argued that the energy transition in emerging and developing economies is driven by economics and security rather than emissions targets.
VANISHING CITY: BBC News reported on a coastal community in Nigeria where the ocean has “already swallowed more than half of the town”.
Coming up
- 31 May: Colombia presidential elections
- 31 May-5 June: Global Environment Facility council meeting, Samarkand, Uzbekistan
- 2-5 June: The Venice Agreement for Peatlands workshop, Kisumu, Kenya
Pick of the jobs
- National Oceanography Centre, engagement assistant (external communications) | Salary: £28,254. Location: Southampton, UK
- Dangote Industries, decarbonisation specialist | Salary: Unknown. Location: Lagos, Nigeria
- City of New York, chief decarbonization officer | Salary: $261,469. Location: New York City
- Climate Central, writer and associate editor | Salary: $72,000-$75,000. Location: US (Remote)
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s weekly DeBriefed email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.
The post DeBriefed 29 May 2026: Europe’s ‘mind-boggling’ May | Indian heat deaths | Nigeria’s solar mini-grids appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Climate Change
Q&A: How can African electricity access power jobs not just lightbulbs?
At the African Development Bank (AfDB) annual meetings this week, several African leaders called for investments in electricity infrastructure which go beyond lighting homes to powering economies.
Applauding the AfDB for its energy programmes like Mission 300 – which aims to provide electricity access to 300 million Africans by 2030 – the Central African Republic’s President Faustin-Archange Touadera said that without power supply “we will not be able to achieve development”.
Speaking alongside him, the Republic of Congo’s President Denis Sassou Nguesso echoed this, saying that “as we need to help our people to turn towards agriculture, to turn towards livestock rearing, we also need to provide power to them.”
As the Mission 300 initiative advances, attention is increasingly shifting from simply connecting households to ensuring that electricity access translates into economic opportunities and livelihoods. That shift is driving the launch of a new Centre of Excellence for Productive Use of Energy being developed under Mission 300 by the philanthropically funded Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet (GEAPP).
In an interview with Climate Home News, Carol Koech, GEAPP’s vice president for Africa, said the initiative is designed to ensure that electrification supports income generation, agriculture and local economic development rather than only basic household access.
Q: What is the Centre of Excellence for Productive Use of Energy aiming to achieve with Mission 300?
A: Mission 300 is increasingly being seen as a job platform and so the role of the Centre of Excellence in translating those electricity connections to jobs. So we want the centre to do four things. First, as a delivery engine, which enables countries to embed a cross-institutional advisor that supports the electrification components, but also other components that are happening in the country.
Second, we want the centre to be an innovation and strategy hub. Today, there’s really no place where you can go to find the state of the industry for productive use of energy across the globe, and we want to make the centre of excellence the place where you can go and get information about what technologies are available, where deployment is happening and how much is being deployed.

(Photo: Lighting Global/SunCulture/World Bank)
The third pillar is to coordinate and mobilise capital. We anticipate the centre coordinating internally within the ecosystem but also mobilising additional financing to help productivity. The last piece is how to scale businesses, enterprises and partnerships around this centre because we anticipate that as we grow this space, new industries will emerge and those industries will need to be supported.
Q: Why is productive use of energy becoming important under Mission 300?
A: Mission 300 gave us a bigger platform to demonstrate that energy is truly an enabler for economic development. It’s not sufficient to just provide a connection, but it is required that that connection truly translates to economic development for the communities that benefit.
We shouldn’t bring electricity and then start thinking about what people can do with it. We need to think about both at the same time and ensure electricity arrives together with the things that will make a difference in people’s lives. Historically, we’ve brought electricity and imagined a miracle would happen, but we know that hasn’t been the case.
The question is how to ensure universal access in the cheapest way while still transforming communities. Some mini-grids have been deployed in places where demand is extremely low, making them too expensive to sustain. But when mini-grids are paired with productive uses, the economics start to change. If businesses currently running on fossil fuel generators move to solar or renewable energy, operating costs fall and the business case for mini-grids becomes much stronger.
Q: How could this work in practice for agriculture and rural communities?
A: I’ll give you a practical example in our pilot country Zambia. Zambia has two programmes, they have the ASCENT programme for energy access and they also have the Zambia agribusiness and trade platform (ZATP). Some of the components of the ZATP programme – which is an agri-business program to help farmers to be productive – have a productive use component but don’t have an energy supply component. So we’re offering things like mills, processing facilities, irrigation and others. In some parts of Zambia, these productive use equipment has been supplied but has not been powered, so communities are not benefiting from that.
So the whole point is if we coordinate where the agribusiness programme is deployed together with where the energy access programme is deployed and layer those two programmes together in one place, then you could solve the energy access problem and solve productive use together and therefore have really meaningful outcomes for communities.
Q: How will the centre help both households and small businesses use electricity productively?
A: The question on whether we should electrify households or businesses is neither here nor there. We need to electrify all. The argument is really once we electrify businesses, the owners of those businesses will be able to pay what they need for their households as well as increase production for their businesses.
Electricity consumption is usually an indicator of economic development and by pushing productive use into households, especially where households are also smallholder farmers, the question becomes: how can electricity access translate to additional economic development for them? If you are connected onto a mini-grid, then you can actually use that connection to run irrigation, put in a dryer, or a cold storage system, whatever you require to improve your income but the fact that you have energy means that you can access productive use. Now, we need to ask ourselves how do these farmers or these households then get access to these appliances, because that’s another barrier.
Q&A: Will subsidy cuts for Chinese clean-tech exports hurt Africa’s solar boom?
The cost of these appliances is usually extremely high, and when you have programmes such as the ZATP running in Zambia, that’s already a public funding approach to making these appliances available and potentially reachable for farmers, either at household level, at farm level or at community level.
Q: How does this complement the already existing Mission 300 national energy compacts designed by countries?
A: Each of the national energy compacts have a productive use component, a pillar that talks about distributed renewable energy, productive use, and clean cooking. This is actually complementing the work of the countries, and this centre is like an available support, back office for countries to tap into as they implement their national energy compacts, if they have specific requirements and support for that pillar three.
So the advisers that will be embedded into countries, their role is to coordinate within country programs that are running where energy could make a difference. The advisers will be sourced from the country and so they will make sure that the donor money is coordinated to benefit the country fully. Their role will include going to ministries of agriculture or any related ministries and understanding where they are prioritising programmes that require electrification. In many cases, programmes and money have already been allocated, but this component is about how do we deploy it in a way that it actually truly brings a difference, so those advisers will do that.
Q: How will the centre address financing and private sector investment challenges?
A: What we’re really looking at is different financing mechanisms. In the past, we have provided subsidies and results-based financing to suppliers, distributors and manufacturers to help create markets for productive-use appliances. I see this as one mechanism the centre could use, but the bigger opportunity is aligning public funding across different programmes so that more of it can support productive uses, either through direct funding or subsidies.
Nigerians bet on solar as global oil shock hits wallets and power supplies
When it comes to private sector investment, the reality is that Africa’s energy sector still faces serious constraints. Most private investment has gone into power generation, particularly through independent power producers, and even then that has only been possible in places where the off-takers, usually utilities, are bankable.
To unlock more private capital, countries need the right policies, reforms and regulations, but even more importantly, utilities must become financially viable. If the off-taker is not bankable, then the project is not bankable.
Another major question is how to attract private investment into transmission infrastructure. There are different models being explored, but the reality is that public funding alone is not sufficient to achieve Mission 300, so finding new ways to mobilise private capital will be critical.
The post Q&A: How can African electricity access power jobs not just lightbulbs? appeared first on Climate Home News.
Q&A: How can African electricity access power jobs not just lightbulbs?
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