COP31 - Financing the weather, climate and water Intelligence
Thank you, Daniel. And thank you to our hosts.
Just like the water on our planet, every forecast travels in a cycle. It starts as a measurement, in one country. It rises into one shared global system. And it comes back down as a forecast, to every country.
At its best, it ends as a decision that leads to action. A farmer plants later. A family leaves in time.
Tonight brings together two parts of that cycle. One is close to our hearts: the warning that reaches a family before disaster hits.
The other, almost nobody sees: the global system that makes that warning possible.
Let me tell you about Togo, and about CREWS, the early warning fund co-hosting tonight.
With CREWS support, Togo turned its weather service into an agency in its own right. Weather, water and civil protection now issue warnings together, in local languages. Farmers can confirm or challenge forecasts.
And they use them. The share of households using forecasts went from one in five to more than half. Those results helped unlock a 25-million-dollar Green Climate Fund project to take this nationwide.
But Togo's forecasters don't start from a blank page. Every day, they build on information from regional centres in Dakar and Niamey, and from global centres in Europe and the United States.
That is the cycle at work.
CREWS turns local data and forecasts into protection. It has done this for ten years now. Thank you, Luxembourg, and every partner who made it possible. We deal with the last mile, and we must continue to do so.
Another part of the cycle is SOFF: SOFF supports the first mile of this cycle: the observations on which everything else depends. It helps countries with the biggest gaps collect the data the whole world needs.
But no country can forecast the weather alone. Something has to hold the whole cycle together. That is what our new fund – the WMO Commons – is for.
It pays for the standards that let every country’s data speak the same language. For the systems that turn national observations into forecasts everyone can use. And for the research and new tools, like AI, that make those forecasts better so we can save more lives.
CREWS invests in countries. The WMO Commons invests in what connects them.
And every country benefits from this shared foundation, donors included. The forecast on a phone in Luxembourg and the warning in Togo come out of the same cycle. And if your business plans around the weather, you are already part of it.
In the next hour, CREWS and our partners turn to the national side of the cycle: putting a realistic cost on what countries need, so that a finance ministry or a climate fund can say yes.
That’s one cycle with three ways to invest.
So my ask tonight is simple – invest in what kickstarts the cycle in the first place - the WMO Commons. And continue to invest in programmes, in countries, in Early Warnings Systems that help this cycle reach the last mile. It does not matter whether you are governments, companies and foundations. The threat is existential, and so requires a response from us all. Our planet's cycles don't work in pieces. Neither does this one.
For me, the magic happens at the very end of the cycle: the moment a farmer, or a family, understands a forecast Well enough to act. Every part of the cycle exists for that moment.
So let's fund the whole cycle, until that magic reaches everyone.
Thank you.
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