The four-day, multi-stakeholder National Workshop on Weather Forecasting will get underway on Tuesday, 28 July, in Pretoria.
It will be jointly led by the Minister of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs, Velenkosini Hlabisa, and his counterpart from the Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment, Deputy Minister Bernice Swarts.
The workshop will bring together more than 100 stakeholders from disaster management, government departments, civil society and the media to review the current Impact-Based Forecasting (IBF) system and explore mechanisms to transform it into an Action-Based Forecasting (ABF) system.
In a statement released by the South African Weather Service (SAWS), the organisation said there is an urgent need to improve the IBF system, which was introduced in 2020.
“Although the system remains effective, there is a need to strengthen it, particularly in the areas of forecast and warning accessibility, interpretation and understanding, as well as operational capacity across different disaster management structures. The ABF approach is aligned with the Action First in Africa initiative, which represents a transition from producing forecasts to ensuring they are actionable, co-produced with users and embedded in decision-making systems,” SAWS said.
The workshop follows an El Niño alert issued by the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
The weather phenomenon is expected to influence global weather patterns, resulting in adverse rainfall or heatwaves in various regions.
The UN has urged governments to strengthen their disaster response systems to protect lives and help communities withstand the impacts of climate-related disasters.
