Chief of Party, ATLAS Project at Chemonics International

My name is Chris Prane. I'm currently the chief of party for a US agency for international development funded project that works on climate change adaptation. And we work globally basically to do climate risk analysis in various economic growth and social development sectors. So we'll look at like a particular geographic area in say Mozambique, and we'll try and determine whether for example certain agricultural value chains, particular crops are viable in a changing climate going forward. That sort of thing. We also do similar work in the health sector looking at the impacts of climate on biodiversity, you name it. Mostly we rely on secondary data. These are data from national meteorological services in various countries which give you, usually daily rainfall and temperature data. So that gives you a pretty good historical perspective and in most countries, even in developing countries, which is mostly where I work. So what we normally will do, we'll conduct an assessment that typically is known either as a climate vulnerability assessment, or a climate risk assessment. The terms tend to be used somewhat interchangeably, although a vulnerability assessment tends to be a bit more robust. And then from those assessments where we might come up with findings of things like more intense rainfall at more intense and more infrequent rainfall events. More intense and more frequent droughts. You know, various types of impacts that are projected. We'll come up with what are called adaptation options to address those impacts. So we like to provide not an out of the box solution, but a set of options that the stakeholders, whether that's a foreign government or even private sector companies and things can look at those options and see what makes sense for them.