The Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region is a "Land of Contrasts and Disparities" and contains some of the areas with largest year-to-year climate variability in the world. Such variability and the expected longer-term changes in climate are putting significant pressures on agricultural production, water-resources management and human health.
The LAC Regional Program seeks to introduce IRI's Climate Risk Management approach and tools to stakeholders so they can incorporate climate knowledge into key socioeconomic sectors. The sectors we focus on include health, water resources, agriculture and fisheries. Our collaborative activities throughout the region aim to inform decision making and planning through the development of research, education and outreach networks. We partner with key national, regional and global organizations.
The growth of such networks is based on the general approach the IRI currently applies to all its regional programs: establishing demand-driven research projects with the ability to demonstrate improved climate-related outcomes and emphasizing education and training activities.
Our program strategy acknowledges two features of the LAC region:
- Presence of institutions with good (though variable) research and technical capacities to produce relevant climate and climate-related information.
- Existence of well-established institutions working in public policies and planning that can incorporate climate knowledge and products into practical decisions.
The LAC program is heavily oriented toward collaborating with institutions that possess such capacities and contributing to their development by introducing new approaches, products and decision aid tools.
Another key characteristic is the significant presence of global and regional organizations and networks engaged in development activities. The World Bank, the Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO), the International Research Center on El Nino (CIIFEN), the Water Center for the Arid and Semiarid Zones of Latin America and the Caribbean (CAZALAC), the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation in Agriculture are only a few of such institutions. Others are listed under Relevant Links to the right. The LAC program actively collaborates with these institutions for the upscaling and outreach of climate risk management tools and products throughout the region. Moreover, collaboration with these institutions facilitates the establishment of south-south cooperation activities with developing countries in both Africa and Asia.
Given the demand-driven characteristic of our research and training activities, we focus on the temporal scales that are relevant for stakeholders with whom we work: from seasonal (3-6 months) to multidecadal (next 10-30 years or Near Term Climate Change). The LAC program faces increasing demands to establish work on adaptation to climate change, and so we are collaborating with partners on all scales to apply IRI’s climate risk management practices for improving the adaptive capacity of key socioeconomic sectors.
