The possible role of local air pollution in climate change in West Africa

The climate of West Africa is characterized by a sensitive monsoon system that is associated with marked natural precipitation variability. This region has been and is projected to be subject to substantial global and regional-scale changes including greenhouse-gas-induced warming and sea-level rise, land-use and land-cover change, and substantial biomass burning. We argue that more attention should be paid to rapidly increasing air pollution over the explosively growing cities of West Africa, as experiences from other regions suggest that this can alter regional climate through the influences of aerosols on clouds and radiation, and will also affect human health and food security. We need better observations and models to quantify the magnitude and characteristics of these impacts

REMAINS OF THE SOCIAL DESIRING THE POSTAPARTHEID

REMAINS OF THE SOCIALREMAINS OF THE SOCIAL progress in his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’. Indeed, what is explored here, in various ways, is the notion that the very question of loss, as Zita Nunes has argued, might be read not only as constitutive of, or constituted by, the social – the social produced through loss, the grave as its first commemorative sign, or the social apportioning life and death and designating its grievability – but rather as a masking of that which enables the constitution of the social: the remainder, which we propose against conceptions of mourning and its failures, melancholia and nostalgia, which one finds more frequently in studies on the social. There is an echo here, as we discuss in the introductory chapter, of Fanon’s critique in Black Skin, White Masks of the social as it is constituted through the concept of Man, an echo that brings with it not only the urgent task of posing questions of racial formations, but also a need to turn attentively to modes of narration that enable an encounter with these remainders as resistant: to read this resistance back into the social as a demand that orders a future which is, as Fanon puts it in his opening lines, always too soon and too late, out of time. Such a demand is what threads the ethical weight that the chapters in this volume bring to the question of the social.WITS University PressLP201

AMMA's contribution to the evolution of prediction and decision-making systems for West Africa

The AMMA (African Monsoon Multidisciplinary Analysis) project set out to better understand the geophysical processes which govern the evolution of the monsoon and provide the science needed to improve prediction and decision-support systems. The control exerted by weather and climate on agronomic production, water resources and public health was studied to evaluate the potential for populations to adapt. AMMA made advances which have the potential to improve forecasts from weather to climate scales. Translating them into operational tools for decision making will require improvements to the observational networks, and stronger support for the organizations which generate and disseminate application forecasts

The West African climate system: a review of the AMMA model inter-comparison initiatives

International audienceWe review the African Monsoon Multidisciplinary Analysis (AMMA) model inter-comparison activities for West Africa. The Model Inter-comparison Project is an evaluation exercise of how global and regional atmospheric models represent seasonal and intra-seasonal variations of the climate and rainfall over the Sahel. The Land surface Model Inter-comparison Project in turn focuses on modelling critical land surface processes over West Africa and on their link with the atmosphere. The CHEmistry Model Inter-comparison Project (CHEMIP) is a comparison of the tropospheric composition as simulated by a number of Chemical Transport Models (CTM) and Chemistry-Climate Models. We highlight the main model limitations and provide recommendations for future development