Day: March 7, 2023

For over a decade, WFP has been supporting climate risk insurance as an important piece of the strategy for building women’s economic empowerment. WFP presents the story of women that have access to WFP’s climate risk insurance and related interventions. The fast recovery and protection from loss and damages that access to climate risk insurance can provide helps countries and households to better manage the impacts of the climate crisis, which is why WFP is advancing financial protection as one avenue for building resilience to extreme weather events.

Insurance might not be the silver bullet, still, it is an important component to achieve financial protection and build resilience, as demonstrated by these stories that demonstrate how these women were able to safeguard and strengthen their livelihoods, ensure food security of their households, and build their resilience, even with increasing climate shocks.

WFP can greatly contribute to the economic empowerment of women and households more broadly, when it integrates insurance into a comprehensive risk management approach.

Source: World Food Programme

Tropical cyclone Freddy is continuing its incredible and dangerous journey and is on track to break the record as the longest-lasting tropical cyclone on record.

Freddy developed off the North Australian coast and became a named storm on 6 February. It crossed the entire South Indian Ocean and made landfall in Madagascar on 21 February and then in Mozambique on 24 February.

The storm spent several days tracking over Mozambique and Zimbabwe, bringing heavy rains and flooding. It then looped back towards the Mozambique Channel and picked up energy from the warm waters and moved towards the south-western coast of Madagascar.

Freddy is now moving away from Madagascar and is expected to intensify as it moves again towards Mozambique, according to WMO’s Regional Specialized Meteorological Centre La Réunion (Meteo-France). It is warning of heavy rains in the next 36 hours in southern Madagascar, with total accumulations during the episode will be close to 100 mm locally 200 mm. Freddy could possibly make landfall as a tropical cyclone at the end of the week, but the forecast is still too uncertain to be able to precise timing and exposed areas.

Satellite derived from NOAA estimates that in the last seven days, parts of southern Mozambique has received 500 mm, and in the past month up to 700mm of rainfall which is well above the annual average. Madagascar has received more than 300 mm in the last seven days, or around three times the monthly average.

Early Warnings for All

“Freddy is having a major socio-economic and humanitarian impact on affected communities. The death toll has been limited by accurate forecasts and early warnings, and coordinated disaster risk reduction action on the ground – although even one casualty is one too many,” said Dr Johan Stander, WMO Services Director.

“This once again underlines the importance of the UN Early Warnings for All initiative to ensure that everyone is protected in the next five years. WMO is committed to working with our partners to achieve this and tackle extreme weather and climate change related risks – one of the biggest challenges of our times,” he said.

Four people have died in Madagascar due to the latest rains, bringing Freddy’s death toll to least 21 people (10 in Mozambique and 11 in Madagascar), according to the latest report from OCHA on 6 March.

Mozambique’s national disaster management agency INGD estimates that 1.75 Million people have been affected, with over 8,000 persons displaced.

A humanitarian operation is underway in the region and this will be challenged further when Freddy makes landfall again. Even before Freddy hit, Mozambique had been suffering flooding from heavy seasonal rains.

Potentially record-breaking storm

Meteorologically, Freddy has been a remarkable storm. The Australian Bureau of Meteorology, which acts as a WMO regional centre, named Freddy on 6 February a few hundred kilometers off the northwest coast of Australia.

Freddy tracked across the entire Indian Ocean from east to west, affecting Mauritius and La Réunion on its long journey en route to Madagascar. This kind of super zonal track is very rare. The most recent recorded cases were Tropical Cyclones Leon-Eline and Hudah, both in 2000, which like 2023 was a la Niña year.

According to NASA, Freddy has set the record for having the highest accumulated cyclone energy (ACE) of any southern hemisphere storm in history. ACE is an index used to measure the total amount of wind energy associated with a tropical cyclone over its lifetime.

WMO is monitoring whether Freddy will set a new record as the longest lasting tropical cyclone. It is likely that the WMO Weather and Climate Extremes evaluation committee will set up an investigation AFTER the cyclone has dissipated.

The current record is held by Hurricane/Typhoon John, which lasted 31 days in 1994.

If it continues to exist, then it may be setting a record as the world’s longest-lasting tropical cyclone.

“At this time, it does appear to be a new record holder for ‘longest-lasting’ recorded tropical cyclone … but we are continuing to monitor the situation,” says WMO Weather and Climate Extremes rapporteur Prof Randall Cerveny.

The WMO Weather and Climate Extremes Archive gives details of records for temperature, precipitation, wind speed and more.

Source: World Meteorological Organization

COVID-19 vaccination coverage is on the rise in some of Africa’s most fragile humanitarian settings as a two-year project funded by the European Union enters its last four months.

At the start of 2022, the COVID-19 vaccination rate was less than 5% on average in the 16 participating countries. That rate is now closing in on 30% – the continent’s average – among the 14 countries whose data was available in January.

The countries participating in the €16 million grant project are Burundi, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Guinea, Liberia, Madagascar, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan and Tanzania.

To achieve those rising numbers, national health workers trained by WHO experts have been administering vaccines in urban hubs, remote villages, refugee and displacement camps, workplaces, public spaces and elsewhere.

“We don’t wait for the people to come to the vaccination sites. We go to the rural areas, to allow these populations to be vaccinated without having to travel and abandon their work in the fields, which is very precious to them,” said Daré Rabiou, regional director of public health, population and Social Affairs in Maradi, Niger.

Rachida Ibrahim, a nurse at a health center in Kouroungoussao, elaborated on that way of working: “Every morning we vaccinate people against COVID-19. When there’s nobody left to vaccinate, we get on the motorbike and go to a village to vaccinate there also.”

Some of the target countries now have an even higher rate of fully vaccinated people than Africa’s average. These are the Central African Republic, Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, Mozambique, Somalia and Tanzania.

In Liberia, where about 80% of the population has been fully vaccinated, health authorities and WHO staff worked with community mobilizers on outreach tactics such as home visits and vaccination campaigns in outdoor markets.

“I went from house to house in a community and met each member of the household and told them the importance of the COVID vaccine,” said Jerry Barway, a community mobilizer in Liberia.

In Somalia, 42% of people were fully vaccinated by the end of 2022. Among these were some of the hardest-to-reach communities, such as nomads, refugees and people living in camps after fleeing drought and conflict. Project teams have so far fully vaccinated almost half of Somalia’s internally displaced people.

From its start, the project has prioritized the most vulnerable, such as health workers, older people, and those living through humanitarian crises. In nine of the project countries, 56% of people of people living in refugee or displacement camps, along with their host communities, have been fully vaccinated, according to project data.

Most countries saw the biggest jump in their coverage rates after vaccination campaigns that were held from September to December of 2022. In Cameroon, for example, the number of vaccinated people doubled after a mass-vaccination campaign in November.

Mozambique has been one of the project’s success stories; nearly two-thirds of the country’s population has been fully vaccinated. Among that group is Julieta Jose, a resident of the Malika camp for internally displaced people.

“I’m very happy about the visit from the team because some people here in the community were never vaccinated,” she said. “It’s the best way to prevent COVID-19. I told everyone I know to come and get it.”

The number of health workers trained to administer COVID-19 vaccines rose from about 130 000 less than a year ago to almost 1.6 million at the end of January; about 1000 of these were deployed in South Sudan in late 2022, helping raise the coverage rate from one of the world’s lowest to about 20%. The workers had to learn the cold-chain requirements of the vaccines, service-delivery procedures and more. Among those trained was Isaac Chol.

“I know that if they all get vaccinated, my community will be free of this bad disease,” he said.

The work described in this story is made possible by a €16 million contribution to WHO from the European Commission’s Directorate-General for European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations (ECHO).

Source: World Health Organization