Clim-Health Africa, established in 2013, is a multi-stakeholder initiative bringing together African technical institutions and international partners to guide and strengthen the public health resilience of African countries and communities. It intends to serve as a virtual hub, where expertise is shared in order to develop the capacity of African health and climate communities, institutions, practitioners and partners to understand and integrate climate change challenges into policy, socio-economics, planning and programming.

In 2017, a roundtable of Clim-Health Africa consortium discussed key emerging issues, including (1) the emphasis on early warning systems (EWSs) than other uses of climate information such as real-time climate monitoring, (2) the need to engage climate change and health work in Disaster Risk Management Coordination mechanism and (3) the need of more capacity building to allow climate service development and uptake in a
comprehensive, multipronged, and strategic approach.

Six years after Clim-Health Africa roundtable of 2017, the present meeting will provide an opportunity to review operational research and weather forecasting programs implemented so far for early warning of climate-related disasters, food insecurity and epidemic prevention in Africa. It will also address the challenges faced by professionals in the field of health emergency in terms of emergencies’ prevention using weather information and will outline avenues of collaboration between Clim-Health Africa consortium and the emergency actors in Africa.

Finally, the meeting will discuss the capacity building needs for the multisectoral work necessary to properly take into account the climate dimension in the resilience of health systems as stated by the COP26 health initiative to which 24 African countries have already subscribed out of 65 worldwide.
This workshop is funded by the Welcome Trust as part of the project entitled “Building the Climate Change and Health Field: Placing Health at the Centre of the Global Climate Negotiations”.