A new paper “Tailored climate projections to assess site-specific vulnerability of tea production” has just been published in the journal Climate Risk Management. The paper, led by Neha Mittal with a team that included Katharine Vincent, draws on research conducted across a variety of contexts conducted under the Future Climate for Africa programme, explains the process of co-producing decision-relevant climate information to enable adaptation within the tea sector in Malawi and Kenya.
Tailored climate change information is essential to understand future climate risks and identify relevant adaptation strategies. However, distilling and effectively communicating decision-relevant information from climate science remains challenging. The paper presents the development and application of an iterative stakeholder engagement approach and a Site Specific Synthesis of Projected Range (SPR), to co-produce future climate information for Africa’s largest tea producing nations – Kenya and Malawi – for the mid-and late-21st century. SPR demonstrates site-specificity, showing risks of large changes in tea crop sensitive metrics, notably substantial increases in heatwave days and large decreases in cold nights by 2050s compared to the current climate. Having this information enables stakeholders in the tea sector to identify location-specific adaptation strategies and investment priorities, potentially safeguarding supply- chains and millions of livelihoods.