Rwanda Green Growth Strategy 18nov11 - Global Climate Change ...

Chapter 22.2 Development ChallengesRwanda is a unique country with many distinctive features that play a role in its development. Itsdemography, natural resources, current economic base and governance will largely determine itsdevelopment in the coming decades. Current challenges for economic development in Rwanda includeaccess to finance, human capacity, land scarcity and high electricity and transport costs (due to reliance onimported oil). Rwanda faces three major threats to its development that are set to worsen over the comingyears - climate change, oil prices and population growth.Climate ChangeChapter 2: Rwanda’s Development PathwayRwanda, located in the tropical belt, sits astride two key climatic regions, East Africa and CentralAfrica, each with contrasting controls and drivers on climate. There is a lack of sufficient climate data inequatorial Africa and these factors make Rwanda troublesome to simulate in climate models. Within theregion of East Africa one climate centre exists currently, the IGAD (Inter-Governmental Authority onDevelopment) Prediction and Climate Applications Centre (ICPAC) in Nairobi, Kenya. There is also a pan-African centre, the African Centre of Meteorological Applications for Development (ACMAD) in Niamey,Niger. Both centres provide meteorological and climate information that covers Rwanda, mainly in the formof observational information and seasonal forecasts. Neither centre provides detailed spatial and sectoralinterpretation of the information, which remains the responsibility of individual countries. In Rwanda, thisfunction lies with the Rwanda Meteorological Service (RMS).Records of annual mean temperature show a significant increasing trend between 1971 and 2010 of0.35°C per decade for four stations across Rwanda (Figure 6a). This increase is slightly higher than theobserved global average of 0.27°C per decade from 1979 to 2005 [6] . In contrast, no significant trend isfound for Rwanda rainfall over an earlier period of the 20th century (1931-1990) using 26 stations (Figure6b) and inter-annual variability is high. However, there was a step-change to slightly higher annual rainfalltotals in the early 1960s, which reflects a climatic event seen across much of East Africa [7] .Figure 6: Annual anomaly and trend for a) temperature * and b) precipitation # of Rwanda Data Source: RMS, data is from * 4 stations and # 26 stationsClimate projections for Rwanda reveal a warmer climate with a likely increase in rainfall, though somemodels project a decrease (Figure 7). Projections were taken from the 19 General Circulation Models(GCMs) from the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 3(CMIP3) [8] . Those shown here can be described as a ‘medium’ emissions scenario (A1B), yet still project aNational Strategy on Climate Change and Low Carbon Development 7