Climate risks resilience development: A bibliometric analysis of climate-related early warning systems in Southern Africa

This paper contributes to research on building climate risks resilience through early warning systems to identify hidden trends and emerging technologies that can support practitioners in the design of EWS. This review aims to contribute toward benefiting climate-sensitive sectors and helping managers with climate risk adaptation strategies. Climate risks embody hazards, exposure, and vulnerability associated with a particular geographical area. Building an effective Early Warning System (EWS) requires consideration of the factors above to help people with coping mechanisms. 

Different climate events have different characteristics, making it complex to model the development of EWS. From an Institutional dimension, it is relevant for the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region to have a supportive framework for an integrated and interactive community centric EWS. The capacity to support EWS in various communities needs ongoing training. The Social dimension includes community participation in designing warning information. It is relevant to mainstream EWS into the SADC region’s developmental agendas and encourages the use of climate information services within the SADC region. This study calls for the SADC region to proactively and effectively strengthen its early climate risk warning systems to help and enable proactive responses to multiple weather variables like the recent extreme heavy rains, which hit eastern, western and southern Africa, triggering huge crop and livestock losses, landslide and floods. Also, this study calls for the use of long-range climate forecasts models because of the benefit in ensuring a sustainable resource management (e.g., land, water, and forest) that can economically impact on lives.