UNESCO demonstrates CRIDA Applications in California
As part of the ongoing Online Course on Climate Risk Informed Decision Analysis (CRIDA), UNESCO organised a webinar on 8 December 2020 to demonstrate CRIDA Applications in California. More than 60 delegates from across the globe participated in the webinar to learn about the progress of CRIDA in California and to address pending questions related to the CRIDA methodology in different settings.
UNESCO Regional Office for Southern Africa Programme Specialist for Natural Sciences, Dr Koen Verbist indicated that over 700 students from across the globe had registered for the course with over 43% female participants. A significant part of the course participants are from the Southern Africa Region. Statistics presented showed that the course was more popular with the early carrier people with 44.77% between the age of 25 and 35 years while those between 15-24 years were at 8.18%, between 36 and 40 years at 17.50% while those above 41 years represented 29.55% of the course participants. A significant number of the course participants had finished the course and received their certificates during the first four weeks of the open course.
Romain Maendly and Jim Wieking, both Senior Water Resources Engineers of the Climate Change Programme of the California Department of Water Resources Division of Planning presented the implementation of the CRIDA methodology in California. They discussed the California Water Management, the Climate Action Plan and the Pilot CRIDA Applications for the Merced and Tuolumne Watersheds. It was indicated that climate change effects in California would result in an increase of temperature of between 2.4°C -3.2°C by mid-century, and a change in precipitation pattern and a sea level rise of 50cm by 2050. The department is following the five steps of the Climate Risk Informed Decision Analysis methodology.
The CRIDA course team took this opportunity to respond to the questions raised by online course participants. The CRIDA course is a self-paced online course, aimed at introducing the participants to the Climate Risk Informed Decision Analysis (CRIDA), following the launch of the methodology in 2018. The course consists of 11 modules that present the CRIDA approach through a set of video lectures and hands-on exercises, as well as presenting a set of global CRIDA case studies.
The online course and webinar were organized as part of the UNESCO project, ‘Enhancing Climate Services for Improved Water Resources Management’ (CliMWaR), supported by the Flanders UNESCO Science Trust Fund (FUST).