Rondrotiana Barimalala
Country (Nationality)
South Africa
Grantee Title
Project - Climate Resilient development for Southeastern African islands. (CRISTAL)
Grantee Description
Barimalala is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Oceanography, University of Cape Town. She is part of the team working on “uncertainty reduction in climate models for understanding development applications” over central and southern Africa, a consortium under Future Climate for Africa. Barimalala received her PhD, focusing on tropical Atlantic teleconnection and its impacts on the Indian Ocean interannual variability, from the joint program between the University of Trieste and the International Center for Theoretical Physics, in collaboration with Georgia Institute of Technology. She is a lead author for the IPCC 6th assessment report, Working Group I, AR6 Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis.
Project - Climate Resilient development for Southeastern African islands. (CRISTAL)
The CRISTAL project aims to enhance a climate-conscious development in the southwest Indian Ocean (SWIO) region. The economic growth of the African island states over SWIO is threatened by the impacts of climate change. There is however a limited understanding of the basic mechanisms that drive the climate variability in the area; analyses of conventional climate model outputs, both present day and projections under different global warming levels are very scarce. The critically limited climate information available for major climate-sensitive decisions hampers these countries’ efforts toward sustainable development. With a focus on Madagascar, CRISTAL will contribute on scientific understanding of the climate variability and change in the island. It will also build an effective transdisciplinary research to integrate a science-based knowledge into the country’s climate-sensitive decisions, climate change adaptation and mitigation plans as well as on the national risk awareness.