Sub-Saharan African Cities: A five-City Network to Pioneer Climate Adaptation through Participatory Research & Local Action. Climate Change Projections for Port Louis: Adding value through downscaling

Abstract

Climate change is expected to have severe physical, social, environmental and economic impacts on cities worldwide, both directly and indirectly. Although there are some uncertainties surrounding the understanding of earth’s complex systems, there is strong evidence in current literature and climatic measurements to demonstrate that, as a result of increasing green house gas emissions, atmospheric, land and sea surface temperatures are rising. Global model projections have demonstrated that temperature and rainfall changes throughout Africa, increased frequency of storms and sea-level rise in sub-tropical Oceans, will expose current vulnerabilities of coastal (and other) cities, whilst also potentially heightening risks associated with food security and water resources. Global Climate Model projections of change are presented and discussed in ‘the baseline climate report for southern African countries including: Namibia, South Africa, Mozambique, Tanzania and Mauritius. This report shows the results from applying a downscaling methodology developed at the University of Cape Town to nine GCMs and the observed rainfall and temperature data from stations near Port Louis. The downscaling relates daily weather systems to the observed rainfall and temperature at each location on each day (to a point-scale). This report will outline impacts and vulnerabilities that the recently results may imply for Port Louis, whilst also discussing constraints, given the paucity of available climatological data (there were only 5 stations form which data was available for the entire Republic of Mauritius) and the limitations of the current methods