El Niño Ready Nations and Disaster Risk Reduction

Prof. Dr. Michael H. Glantz is Director of the Consortium for Capacity Building (CCB), an educational, outreach, and networking organization at the University of Colorado – Boulder in the USA. Earlier he was a Senior Scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), where he served as the Head of the Environmental and Societal Impacts Group (ESIG). The author has been the only Senior Scientist from the social sciences in NCAR’s 50-year history.Until August 2008, Prof. Dr. Glantz served as NCAR’s Director of the Center for Capacity Building, an innovative program focused on, but not limited to, undergraduate educators and students. His research and applications activities center on how climate, water, and weather affect society as well as how society affects climate. The author’s research relates to African drought and desertification; food production problems and prospects; societal impacts of climate anomaliesrelated to El Niño and La Niña events, climate variability and change; to the development of methods of forecasting possible societal responses to the regional impacts of climate variability and change; and the use of climate-related information for economic development. He also has coordinated joint research in the Central Asian Republics of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. Prof. Dr. Glantz, who was honored with the United Nations Environment Program’s Global 500 Award in 1990, has authored or edited over 30 multidisciplinary books on climate and development- related issues.

• 1. Introduction.- 1.1 Meta-Observation.- 2. What it Means to be El Niño Ready.- 3. Case study overviews.- 4. Africa.- 4.1 Ethiopia.- 4.2 Kenya.- 4.3 South Africa.- 4.4 Zimbabwe.- 5. Asia.- 5.1 China.- 5.2 Vietnam.- 5.3 The Philippines.