processes of climate change in the tropics

The stated goal of this project was to reduce uncertainty in projections of precipitation change in the Sahel through a mechanistic understanding of the response of the West African monsoon to global emissions of greenhouse gases and aerosols. A secondary interdisciplinary goal naturally developed from a research collaboration that the principal investigator had just started before moving to France, aimed at characterizing climatic impact on food security in the Sahel.

At the encouragement of the MOPGA program coordinator, equal time was dedicated to disciplinary/climate and interdisciplinary/vulnerability objectives. The project enabled the principal investigator to settle permanently in France, to maintain her research collaborations in the US (notably at Columbia University and at Arizona State University), and to strengthen and extend her collaborations in France and in Senegal, not only with colleagues in climate labs at Sorbonne Université (LMD and LOCEAN) part of the original proposal, but especially with the addition of the CNRS IRL Environnement, Santé, Société, at Université Cheikh Anta Diop, in Dakar, to the consortium.

Despite the complexity of CNRS budget management, which significantly slowed down the project at a critical juncture, the two early-career scientists hired at IRL in the last year and a half critically delivered on project ambition, with: (1) an improved characterization of the direct/fast/atmospheric and indirect/slow/oceanic mechanisms of monsoon response to warming, which forebodes the potential for a return of drought, but only to the western Sahel, and (2) a historical analysis of climate and policy factors influencing the post-Independence evolution of agricultural production in Senegal that puts the recent return of government intervention in the agricultural economy in context of the post-drought recovery of the rains and potential warming-induced disruption.