 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| . |  |
. |
Climate change venture aims to text Africans weather info
Geneva (AFP) June 18, 2009 Telecoms firms Ericsson and Zain, and the UN weather agency, teamed up on Thursday to harness Africa's booming stock of mobile phones to text-message vital weather information to villages. Brought together by former UN chief Kofi Annan's foundation, the venture is also aiming to use the equally burgeoning network of cellphone transmitters to bolster the continent's dangerously sparse cover of weather sensing stations. By early 2008 there were some 260 million cellphone subscribers in Africa, according to the International Telecommunications Union (IYU). "Today you will find cellphone towers in almost every part of Africa. We have never been able to establish weather monitoring on that scale until now," Annan said at the launch in Geneva. "The world's poorest are also the world's most vulnerable when it comes to the impact of climate change -- and the least equipped to deal with its consequences," Annan told a global conference on disaster risk reduction.0 Annan's Global Humanitarian Forum recently estimated that Africa suffered close to a quarter of the 100 billion dollars and 300,000 lives lost worldwide every year due to the impact of global warming on health and agricultural productivity. The World Meteorological Organisation has highlighted big gaps in weather forecasting in Africa, with a network eight times below an acceptable minimum. The initial deployment is underway with an eight million dollar project on African operator Zain's network in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. It will harness some 5,000 phone transmitters across Africa. Individual farmers or villages will also receive tailored information about local weather conditions, to help them prepare for extreme conditions or to tend crops and livestock. "The phones are now so widely spread that the information will get to somebody," Ericsson Chief Executive Carl-Henric Svanberg told journalists. That could offer a potential lifeline for many on the continent where 70 percent of the population, or 700 million people, rely on farming for their livelihoods, according to the organisers of the "Weather Info for All". Africa's mobile phone market is growing at twice the rate of the rest of the world according to the ITU. Share This Article With Planet Earth
Related Links Weather News at TerraDaily.com
Purdue Swept Up In Largest Tornado Field Study In HistoryWest Lafayette IN (SPX) May 26, 2009 Purdue University researchers could improve tornado warnings and unveil trends in their occurrences as part of the largest tornado and storm field study in history. A project led by Jeff Trapp, an associate professor of earth and atmospheric sciences, is part of the second Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment, or VORTEX 2, field study. The more than $9 mill ... read more |
|
|
| The content herein, unless otherwise known to be public domain, are Copyright 1995-2009 - SpaceDaily. AFP and UPI Wire Stories are copyright Agence France-Presse and United Press International. ESA Portal Reports are copyright European Space Agency. All NASA sourced material is public domain. Additional copyrights may apply in whole or part to other bona fide parties. Advertising does not imply endorsement,agreement or approval of any opinions, statements or information provided by SpaceDaily on any Web page published or hosted by SpaceDaily. Privacy Statement |
del.icio.us
Digg
Reddit
YahooMyWeb
Google
Facebook