Africa's climate reparations require data that doesn't exist

of confidence. We get these forecasts because the UK has a network of more than four hundred weather stations spanning the length of the country, from the Orkney Islands in the far north to the Scilly Isles in the south. The data the weather stations like these collect are invaluable. It influences the decisions of governments and companies around the world and can be used to make models that predict energy consumption, harvests, and even when countries might go to war.

As my colleague at Bloombergrain, Laura Milan puts it, what they do is really important because these data fits then into all these climate models, into the research that climate sciences do to try to figure out how the world works today, and these is the data key to figure out how it will change in the future. When it comes to making climate models, the more data you have and the longer you've been collecting it for the better

those models become. But weather stations are also expensive to set up and maintain, and many countries can't afford them in great numbers. Without these stations, it becomes difficult to provide accurate weather forecasts and makes it even harder to work out how a country will be affected by climate change. And while the UK benefits from an abundance of weather stations, many countries in Africa are severely lack the resources to

produce reliable weather and climate data. This week, Laura tells the story of weather Station six one two to three in Timbec two and what its sudden closure means for the people of Mali and climate science across the African continent. The story starts with the Arab Spring, which sparked revolutions across North Africa, and ends with how the lack of African weather data will affect the discussions at COP twenty seven. Laura,

welcome to the show. Thank you, thank you for having me tell me about weather Station six one two to three. Weather Station six one two to three was one of five weather stations in Mali that had been active for more than one hundred years. And these stations that have been operating for more than a hundred years, they're really valuable because the data that they provide is very consistence for a time. This station, in particular world was close

to the airport in Timbukto. It was set up by the French colonialists and it was in a very discret building, concrete building near the airport, so you know, no signs, know anything. One could have confused it with a warehouse or something like that. When I think of Timbuctoo, the thing that comes to mind is how Bollywood treats at Hullo. So from India. Many Bollywood songs have the word, and then it's treated as this like far far away place, which many people don't think it's real, right, And I

think it's the way it resonates in people's imagination. You talk about Timbukto in Europe and it's also this far away place, this city in the middle of the desert that no one has been to, that it's a bit mythological even, but it's an actual place. It's an actual city. It's home to around thirty thousand people. It's next to

the Nija River in northern Malis. And the reason why there are so many stories around it is because it used to be the capital of an ancient empire, and it used to be a center for knowledge and culture, especially religious studies in the Middle Ages. And so this Vali station six one two to three, why did it go silent and after one hundred and some years, Well, the reason is that the staff had to abandon it.

The people that were maintaining it, that were taking the data, maintaining the equipment, making sure everything was running smoothly, that they had been doing that for many years, they had to run. They had to fleet Timbuktu. And the reason why this happened starts in twenty eleven with the Arab spring. One is easy set himself on fire ten years ago, which he couldn't have known that a suicide into Nija

would ignize the entire region. When the regime of Mamagadafi collapse in Libya, many of the desert tribes that Khadafi had been sponsoring and supporting through the decades had to flee and became rebel fighters. Over the last few years, Mali has had a problem with militancy. In October twenty eleven, ethnic Tuaregs, mostly from the north of the country, launched

a rebellion. So one of these groups is the National Movement for the Liberation of the Azawat and their Tareg fighters, and what this group did was surround the city of Timbucto and on the first of April twenty twelve, they entered the city and took over it, took over the

main institutions. Then a few days later, the Jihadis of a radical Islamic group called ant Sharin followed in and they were waiving the black flags that were later characteristic of the Islamic state in Syria and in other places. So that meant that radical Islamis had taken over the

city of timbuktwo. And that made the employees of the state, from you know, top top government officials to the people that were just maintaining the weather station six one, two to three, they made them enemies of the invaders and so they had to flee. And so what you're describing is the start of the Mali War, which is still ongoing. And there have been multiple good thoughts that have happened since.

But when this happened in twenty twelve. What was going on in the minds of the people who were working on this weather station. Well, I didn't talk directly with the people that were working on the station, but I did talk to the person in the meteorological agency in Mali who was responsible for these people commodity, And obviously there was great concern. You have to imagine seeing all these news from Bamaco, from the capital news coming in.

It wasn't an immediate conquest. So the forces from the tourreg surrounded the city for a few days. The elders from Timbook too went out and started to negotiate with them to make sure that they wouldn't destroy some of the city's valuable ancient monuments and so on. So these went on for a few days, and obviously rumors came into the capital, and so this person from Mali's meteorological agency, his first concern was to get the people out of there.

He not law. Obviously, it was very important that Mali had a centennial weather station there, but it wasn't more important than the lives of that people. So he made sure he got them out of Timbook too safely and luckily he did that. Now, let's talk about this weather station. Why is it that it's so important to have had

that weather station there? So for any weather station, the most important thing is not just the data that it gathers is accurate, but that that data at any moment in time can be compared with data that has been recorded previously. Right, the weather stations that have been running for more than a hundred years, that's why they're really relevant.

They're considered like the most the most valuable ones because they allow scientists to compare what's happening today with what used to happen like kids and more than a century ago. So the loss of weather station six one, two two three was tragic not just because of that, but because they're really There are very few of those in Mali and in Africa. So if a centennial station was lost, let's say in China, where there are actually many, or in Europe or in Russia, then it's always a tragedy

because a source of information gets lost. But in Africa, where there are very very few of them, then that's an actual problem because that means that the set of data that this station has been gathering through time gets discontinued. So scientists don't have a way anymore of knowing what's happening in that place, and even immediately because this weather station is collecting local data and also helping local people,

even immediately after going offline, there were impacts, right, Yeah. Absolutely, it's not just a long term thing for climate scientists to understand a phenomenon that might run for decades or for many years, but it's actually weather stations have a very immediate application. And in the case of station six one to two three, it was very important because it helped understand when a very strong gust of wind would come through the desert into a lake Deboat, which is

Mali's largest lake. And so when the people around the lake would receive an alert from the weather station that this kind of extreme weather it was coming, they were able to alert local fishermen and then people traveling in pinas, which are kind of long boats that people traveling that

people used to transport goods and transport themselves. Even so, in twenty eleven about ten people died in wind related incidents around the lake Devout, but that number increased to seventy and the year after Station six one two three went offline, so went from ten to seventy just because that station wasn't able to alert the people around the

lake zooming back. There's the local phenomena which we talked about, but losing data from weather stations anywhere in the world, but more so in places like Mali where there are so few, also has international impacts. Right, yeah, absolutely, So all these data, all these tiny data points that weather stations gather every day. I think about them like little ants, right, Like they do their work every day. They do always

the same. It's not very shiny, but what they do is really important because these data fits then into all these climate models, into the research that climate sciences do to try to figure out how the world works today, how the climate of the world works today, how it's changing, and these is the data key to figure out how it will change in the future. Right, And so this whether data sort of becomes the ant hill, and the

ant hill certainly the thing of marvel. We know. There was a very recent study earlier this year where they found that only five percent of the deaths caused by heat happened in tropical countries where eighty five percent of people live. And that just is astonishing because that shouldn't be statistically right, and when we asked a scientist about it, she said, that's ridiculous, and the reason is because we

don't have data. That's right. And there is another study actually that looked at heatwaves around the world and it found that around the Sahara region there were no heatwaves, no heatwaves had happened according to researchers. But that wasn't the case. Obviously, in the world's biggest desert, there are heatwaves. The problem is that there are no weather stations to

record them. Now, for the story, you produced a map which I remember because it was a stunning map, and it noted the density of weather data stations around the world. And as with many other things, the continent of Africa, not just a few countries, but the continent of Africa was dark. Yes, And that like a very obvious way of showing that there are very, very very few weather stations in Africa. In particular Mali has I said before it used to have five centennial stations, for after the

one that we've mentioned in Timbuktu went. But in total it has thirteen active weather stations, compared to Germany, for example, in Europe, a country that's one third the size of Mali. Germany has almost two hundred main weather stations, so that's more than ten times what Mali has. And then it's not just a matter of quantity but also of quality. So the World Meteorological Organization says that weather infrastructure in Africa is literiorating very fast, only twenty two percent of

the station's met global reporting standards in twenty nineteen. And again this represents a very big problem for the scientists trying to study the phenomenon, weather phenomenon and climate phenomenon going on in Africa and in the rest of the world. So this lack of data, how is that feeding into or not feeding into climate science that looks at global

phenomena and looks at many different time periods. So the data is necessary to produce climate science, and all the scientific papers are gathered once every five years by the IPCC into climate reports. The problem is that if there is no data from Africa, the representation Africa has on reports, very important reports like the IPCC is very very small. Now, what's being done about the situation? The good thing about all of this is that there's a lot of very

smart people trying to fix this issue. One of the difficulties of this problem is that national meteorological organizations in Africa are often underfunded, and setting up a station that is valid for the WMO that can take reliable whether data is not cheap. It can cost more or less around twenty thousand dollars for every station just to set it up, and then it comes maintenance and the staff needed to maintain in it. Weather stations are not always

a priority. If you have a government that's struggling with conflict in the case of Mali, or with natural disasters in the case of many other African nations, then weather stations figuring out how hot or how cold or how humid is in certain places doesn't necessarily come on top of mind for the people governing, right if you would use that money twenty thousand dollars, there's a lot of money I do think that are really important on the ground as needed, that's it, and and that are more

urgent or that feel more important, like for example, you'd set up schools, or you're set up food relief programs or any any sort of program that solves an immediate need, whereas often the weather and climate are seen as something that's almost a luxury. But there is technological programs that's happening that's helping. Yes, that's right. So what's been happening in the past few years is that technology has made some of these instruments used to measure climate and weather data.

It's made them cheaper, and it's also made it possible for these instruments to actually send the data remotely, so you wouldn't need a person doing the maintenance or being there every day all day recording the sets of data. One of the people I found in my reporting is Nick Vanda Gisen. He's a professor in the Netherlands and he has set up something called the Trans African Hydrometeorological Observatory, and this is a network of weather stations across Africa.

They can work remotely, they use modern equipment, and they are much much cheaper than the traditional ones. And how much cheaper are we talking here? So we've said that a traditional weather station costs twenty thousand dollars. Their goal, Tahama's goal is for one station to cost around two hundred dollars. That's a lot, that's a lot cheaper, and

they're not there yet. So they've been able to produce weather stations at the price of around two thousand dollars and they have installed around six hundred of these across Africa since you reported the story last year. Have there been any updates? Yesn't know. The main headline is that station six one, two two three is still offline. When I talk to the people at Malimtoto, you fully maintaine

or minimum. What they told me was that bringing it back online would require a significant investment because this sort of equipment is very delicate, and so when it goes offline for a while and no one maintains it, then it requires either huge maintenance or just completely new equipment. That hasn't happened. The security situation in Mali hasn't improved either, so people might have read in the news how French troops and troops from the European Union have left Mali

as well. And actually one thing that happened is that I wanted to go physically to Mali to report on this story, and a few weeks, I think even just a few days before, I was thinking about that tree and trying to figure out how the logistics would work. A French journalist was kidnapped by rebel groups, and then that meant that the safety of journalists in that part of Molly could not be guaranteed, so we could never

travel there after the break our. Timbuctoo's historical records the answer to Mali's lack of weather data and what does the lack of accurate climate models across the continent of Africa mean for discussions of loss and damage. Of course, weather stations aren't the only way in which we can

gather data. Of course, current data is gathered from weather stations, but there are other approaches to try and understand what's happening to the continent right absolutely, and one way to do that, and it's not just in Africa, it's being done everywhere are historical documents. So if you go back in time, people have been recording what the weather has been like for hundreds and even thousands of years, and

there are clues in historic documents. In the case of Mali and of Timbuktuo specifically, Timbuktu was a cultural center and one of the main cities in North Africa, so people would go there to study many many things and they would leave written record of what was going on. There are some stunning architectural buildings that still stand in Timbuctwo. Yeah, absolutely,

and they're actually protected by UNESCO. So they are ancient shrines and churches that could be visited, and they're of a characteristic architecture made with mud, very very typical of Timbuktu. And so what used to happen in around the sixteenth centuries that people like I said they would travel for weeks and for months through the desert to learn from the wise men in the city. They would learn everything

from Islamic theology, history, philosophy, anything. And then the city was also across roads for tribes that lived in the desert, so you can think that they used to be lots of camel caravans and that would carry salt and gold, even slaves across the desert and they would be traded in Timbuktu. That left a very big pay portrayal in the form of manuscripts that describe what life was like at the time and that tried to register things from

agriculture techniques and obviously the weather. So we have these historical documents from centuries ago that have detailed weather conditions in them. Have we ended up using them in some form?

Not yet, And that's another fascinating part of the stories, and something I find fascinating about Timbook two, and it's that what we call the Timbook two manuscripts that people might have heard or read about them, is a huge collection of documents, not just from Timbook two, but from the whole region that have been preserved within families for centuries.

So families will be guardians or custodians of a certain set of documents that gets passed through generations, and academics have only started to describe the surface of the wisdom and the contents of these manuscripts. So I talk to some researchers in the US that are digitalizing these documents, so basically scanning them and making sure they don't get lost, they don't get burned or stolen or anything like that,

and then analyzing the contents. They have made it possible for people to search online certain keywords on these documents. So if you do that search for rain, for example, you'll be able to find that there are a bunch of documents that rain and rain changes and so on. But no one as far as I know, has gone as far as to put that into scientific research. But

that has been done with ancient documents. In European nations like Germany and the UK, people have gone to monasteries and looked at the annotations of what the weather was like centuries ago and produce scientific research out of this. So it's certainly possible to find better models eventually once

the stata has been translated into a usable form. Yes, absolutely, it won't be as thorough as if you had had someone recording the temperatures every day for the past five hundred years, or water levels for the past five hundred years, which you know there are places in the world that have been recording for many centuries. But at least you can have an idea on whether rivers were bigger or smaller, whether rain was more frequent, the winds, etc. And then

that could help scientific research definitely. So there's the story I find fascinating, which is in eighteen fifteen, Mount Tambora, which is a huge volcano, went off and put all these sulfur related compounds into the atmosphere. Caused what is now known as the year that had no summer across

the world. There were famines, deaths, etc. But it also changed art because researchers have now analyzed paintings from that era compared them to the pre eighteen fifteen era, and essentially the skies turned more orange because there was more sulfur and that's what the painters were reflecting in their paintings. So there's all these downstream impacts that happened from whether and are they're recorded in these weird forms which may not be data, but it's still data if you want

to interpret it that way. Yeah, and maybe we're going a bit tough topic either know. But there's also research on the legends that Aboriginal Australians tell each other and have been telling each other for millennia, because you might know, the Aboriginal Australians are the longest running people or civilization on Earth, and researchers have analyzed what they thought were legends and found that they actually tell the story of

the land. And so that these stories correspond with changes on rivers and mountains and on the sea that actually happened eighties and eighties ago. It's not just weather station's recording the changes and the data there's these changes can be found everywhere. Now we are about to head into another cop meeting, which is this annual climate conference that

the UN organizers. This time it's in Egypt November, called COP twenty seven because it's a twenty seventh time it's happening and it's the fifth time it's being hosted by a country in Africa. How does the lack of good weather data fit into this international climate discussions and negotiations. It's at the heart of it, because if you don't

have the data, then there is no discussion possible. We tend to say that Africa is the continent suffering the most from climate change, but the one that has contributed less to it. So the second part we know for a fact that it's the one that has contributed less to it. The first part of the sentence, it's suffering the most, is the hard one to prove because we have this intuition, but actually there isn't that much hard data on it. And the reason is again weather stations.

So if you don't know whether a heat wave is happening, or why people are dying in a certain place, or why crops are failing, then it's really hard to attribute these effects to climate change. And so a lot of what will be discussed in COP this year will hopefully be around that, around the need to have better data coming from Africa in order to know more the effects

of climate change and what's happening there. And then the other effect that the lack of data is having is that in the IPCC reports there is lots of research reflected on America and Europe and developed nations, but then developing nations have less of an importance because of that

lack of data. Something that's happened over the last few years that's really changed the way we talk about climate change is this phenomena of attribution studies where climate scientists can look at an extreme weather event, maybe that's a heat wave, maybe it's a flood, and tell you just how much worse they were made by climate change. Yes, and again Africa, it's so important to have these sort of studies about things that happen in Africa, about extreme

weather events in Africa, and we're not seeing them. And again we're not seeing them because we don't have the data to produce these studies. And the implications of that are huge. It's not just a matter of scientific knowledge, but African nations and this is going to be a really important issue at COP twenty seven, that meeting you

mentioned before in Egypt, in November African nations. One of the things that they want is something that again sorry to bring up the jargon, but it's something called loss and damage, which is the developing nations suffering from the effects of climate change should be compensated by developed nations that caused climate change in the first place, or that are the main contributors to climate change. But if you can approve that something has been caused by climate change,

and then how can you get compensated? Right? So this is why again data is so important, so you can produce studies, including attribution studies, that would then later allow a country to go to developed nation and say these extreme events, say a heat wave or a typhoon, or a storm, or a flawed or anything, caused this amount of damage to my GDP, to my crop production, an ex amount of deaths of that number of people lost

their homes, all these very tangible, very real effects. And I have this scientific paper which has been peer reviewed and authored by reputable scientists saying this event was made much worse by climate change. So how are you planning to compensate me? So if a country cannot do that, then the injustice in the system remains what's a climate story that you found meaningful? I think the story that changes the way I see climate and the way see

climate journalism. Was the first story that I read about how climate had impacted and contributed to the Arab Spring. So that's when I started to think that climate and climate change had a huge impact into everything that happens in our lives, in a small way but also in a big way. And there's a more personal connection there. Because the Arab Spring is what drew you into journalism, that's it. Well, I was a journalist before, but I happened to be in Cairo when the Arab Spring broke.

I wrote about it for two years, and I am slightly ashamed to say that I never made the climate connection. It was later when the reports started to come out about how if I remember, well, two thousand and eight had been a really dry year, and that drought had continued and had impacted with prices and how bread had

become more expensive. That's when I made the connection. But yeah, absolutely, there's there's a very personal side to it that this event that I lived in such an intense way was so affected by climate change, and I just lived through it without realizing it. A lack of good climate dation might sound like a wonky subject, but as Laura's reporting shows,

it has huge consequences for those without it. Access to good weather data should be as much a part of climate justice discussions as say, ensuring coal miners are not left behind or developing countries have enough funding to move to clean energy. For more. You can read Laura's story on bloomberg dot com slash green. It's also linked in the show notes. Thanks so much for listening to Zero. If you like the show, please rate, review and subscribe, tell a friend, or write it in a diary that

may be found in five hundred years. If you've got a suggestion for a guest or topic, or something you just want us to look into, get in touch at Zero Pod at Bloomberg dot net. Zero's producer is Oscar Boyd and senior producer is Christine driscoll Our. Theme music is composed by Wonderlely. Many people help make the show a success this week, thanks to my colleague at Bloombergreen, Eric Austin, who has everything in his brain that I wish I had. I'm Aukshatrati back next week