Building Climate Resilience in the MENA Region through Drought Risk Management

This webinar miniseries showcases experiences from four years of work with national government agencies, and other stakeholders, to strengthen capacity for drought risk management in Jordan, Lebanon and Morocco. We will reflect on learnings from various activities to:

• Develop drought early warning systems with monitoring and seasonal forecasting components;
• Undertake drought impact and vulnerability assessments at the national and local levels, and focused on economic sub-sectors, communities and their livelihoods, and water resources; and
• Develop Drought Action Plans that include preparedness and mitigation actions, triggers for drought management responses once drought has occurred, and explicit governance and decision-making frameworks regarding those responses.

The series will focus primarily on exploring how the officials and applied researchers navigated the science–policy interface and intra-governmental collaboration, obstacles they overcame during the process, and what they consider to be the greatest opportunities and needs for medium- to long-term drought risk management implementation. It will also include summary presentations of key technical and policy outputs from the project.

Each webinar will have participatory components including:

1. a round-table discussion with project participants; and
2. interactive sessions to reflect on the material and how we, as a diverse community of practice, can most effectively make progress on drought risk management.