This study analyses the climate change discourses and political dynamics in south-western Burkina Faso from three empirical entry points: (a) the production of the National Adaptation Programmes of Action; (b) climate change discourses in the Ioba province; and (c) the role of the public media. Climate change is not a popular discourse in Burkina Faso and seems limited to the national and international levels. Farmers in the Ioba province have experienced environmental degradation and changes in precipitation patterns but have not linked these to climate change, except for extreme events. Local discourses mostly focus on deforestation and express disappointment in the degree of support that the government and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) offer to producers of food crops. External support is characterized by a good knowledge base of climate change among government officials and NGO staff but also insufficient funds, a lack of coordination, shifting donor interest in development themes and little responsiveness to farmers’ concerns and needs, leading to a lack of political interest. Farmers’ low levels of understanding of elections, voting power and political accountability have resulted in little political representation of their interests. Climate change and adaptation options are disseminated via radio, drama groups, mobile cinema and trainings. These participatory formats allow top-down information flow and opportunities for farmers to publicly discuss their views, concerns and questions beyond climate change. The popularity of these formats show that farmers are eager to communicate, become informed and get active in environmental change and resources management.

Bias-corrected data set of daily precipitation for a study region in Burkina Faso and parts of Ghana, Togo and Benin. The precipitation simulations of the CORDEX Africa ensemble have been bias-corrected with a geostatistically based Quantile-Mapping with dry day correction. The distribution parameters probability of rainfall and mean precipitation on wet days were Kriged to the ungauged locations from the observed parameters of point measurements (172 stations in total) for nine season (dry season NDJF and remaining eight months individually). Observed precipitation was modelled with the exponential distribution, RCM precipitation was modeled with a Kernel Density Estimation of the CDF. Future scenarios were bias-corrected with the Double-Quantile-Mapping approach presented in http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2010WR009689/abstract All models were stretched to the Gregorian calendar (original CORDEX-RCMs are available as 360d/a, 365d/a and 365.25d/a) to facilitate running impact models. - Historical period: 1950-2005 (exception: SMHI-models start 1951) - calibration period - Future period: 2006-2100 (exception: models driven by HadGEM2 end 2099) - validation period - Temporal resolution: daily - Spatial resolution: 0.44° This is a test version - please inform me about any potential problems you may have with the data via manuel.lorenz@geo.uni-augsburg.de

Disasters, particularly recurring small-scale natural disasters of floods and droughts have been affecting West African (WA) communities, impacting particularly weak households. These losses have been significantly high over the last decade due to increasing climate variability and inherently depressed socio-economic systems. However, to date, few studies have attempted to understand the vulnerability profiles in WA to these multiple hazards across several scales. A considerable number of studies predict the impacts of droughts and floods hazards, but many do so at a very coarse scale and without any participatory process, as a result, they are unable to predict localized impacts. Despite many efforts put in vulnerability assessments, there has been limited success in simultaneously traversing scale and hierarchy and the need for upscaling risk indices is important to understand the effects of cross scale interactions. To address these gaps, this thesis (i) explored methods to involve at-risk populations in local communities in a bottom-up participatory process as opposed to the classical top-down, single scale approaches and (ii) assessed the risks from multi-hazard perspectives in a coupled Socio-Ecological System (SES). The thesis also (iii) explored appropriate methodologies that can reflect the spatial variability of flood hazard intensity at community level. Building on these investigations, the thesis finally (iv) introduced a novel risk index upscaling procedure to upscale risk and vulnerability indices across multiple scales. The thesis used several methods ranging from rural participatory methods, statistical, Geographic Information System (GIS), remote sensing and introduced the innovative concept of Community Impact Score (CIS). The results show that more than half of the designated local level indicators and over two thirds of the macro scale indicators are rarely used in present risk assessments in the region. Additionally, although an indicator may be common to three countries, their differential rankings will result in differences in explaining the risks faced by people in different societies. Empirical validation of a flood hazard map using the statistical confusion matrix and the principles of participatory GIS show that flood hazard areas could be mapped at an accuracy ranging from 77% to 81%. These high mapping accuracies notwithstanding, the flood index categories may change under conditions of very high rainfall intensities beyond the anomalies used to construct the model. To this end, studies that aim at understanding projected flood intensities under varying rainfall conditions beyond the anomalies used in this study are recommended. This is important to determine the trajectory of flood safe havens or hotspots across an entire study area. The study also develops two important indices, The West Sudanian Community Vulnerability Index (WESCVI) and The West Sudanian Community Risk Index (WESCRI). The underlying factors constituting the two indices are the elements of risk and vulnerability profiles of communities in West Africa. The WESCVI and WESCRI should help planners and policy makers to analyse and finally reduce vulnerability and risk. To evaluate the results of the risk indices, this thesis introduces a novel technique to validate the results of complex aggregation methods. Based on up to date knowledge, the CIS concept is the first in the available literature of risk assessment. The thesis also provides a theoretical concept to upscale risk and vulnerability indicators from watershed to higher spatial scales. Further studies are however recommended to apply these theoretical concepts. A conclusion of the thesis is that while it has neither been optimal to completely neglect classical approaches nor to take as an absolute fact opinion from local experts, more emphasis should be paid to the later in risk assessment that is supposed to serve the very people on whose behalf the assessment is done. Attempts should therefore be made in finding mechanisms where the two approaches could interact fruitfully and complement each other.

High resolution (12km) regional climate simulations were carried out by the researchers at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Institute of Meteorology and Climate Research, Atmospheric Environmental Research (KIT/IMK-IFU) as part of the West Africa Science Service Center on Climate Change and Adapted Land Use (WASCAL) Project. One of the goals of the WASCAL project is to provide the best accuracy in regional climate simulations over the entire West Africa region for a large proportion of the 21st century. The regional climate model employed in the project was the Weather Research and Forecasting Model version 3.5.1 (WRFv3.5.1) forced by three global circulation models (GCMs) under the Representative Concentrative Pathways 4.5 (RCP 4.5). The forcing GCMs are: the Max Planck Institute Earth System Model (MPI-ESM-MR, Stevens et al. 2013), the General Fluid Dynamics Laboratory Earth System Model (GFDL-ESM2M, Dunne et al. 2012), and the Hadley Global Environment Model (HadGEM2-ES, Collins et al. 2011). Further control runs with ERA-Interim reanalysis products (Dee et al. 2011) were also carried out for model verification and bias correction. Therefore, daily outputs of deaccumulated TOA incident shortwave radiation, obtained from the 3-hourly simulations of WRFv3.5.1, driven by HadGEM2-ES, are hereby presented.

Maize phenology time series (primary/raw) from central field experiment plots in the main research sites of the WASCAL Core Research Program, 2012 Function of crop rotation and residue mangement, tillage and N fertilization The data is captured at field plot level.

High resolution (12km) regional climate simulations were carried out by the researchers at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Institute of Meteorology and Climate Research, Atmospheric Environmental Research (KIT/IMK-IFU) as part of the West Africa Science Service Center on Climate Change and Adapted Land Use (WASCAL) Project. One of the goals of the WASCAL project is to provide the best accuracy in regional climate simulations over the entire West Africa region for a large proportion of the 21st century. The regional climate model employed in the project was the Weather Research and Forecasting Model version 3.5.1 (WRFv3.5.1) forced by three global circulation models (GCMs) under the Representative Concentrative Pathways 4.5 (RCP 4.5). The forcing GCMs are: the Max Planck Institute Earth System Model (MPI-ESM-MR, Stevens et al. 2013), the General Fluid Dynamics Laboratory Earth System Model (GFDL-ESM2M, Dunne et al. 2012), and the Hadley Global Environment Model (HadGEM2-ES, Collins et al. 2011). Further control runs with ERA-Interim reanalysis products (Dee et al. 2011) were also carried out for model verification and bias correction. Therefore, daily outputs of near-surface dew point temperature, obtained from the 3-hourly simulations of WRFv3.5.1, driven by MPI-ESM-MR, are hereby presented.

High resolution (12km) regional climate simulations were carried out by the researchers at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Institute of Meteorology and Climate Research, Atmospheric Environmental Research (KIT/IMK-IFU) as part of the West Africa Science Service Center on Climate Change and Adapted Land Use (WASCAL) Project. One of the goals of the WASCAL project is to provide the best accuracy in regional climate simulations over the entire West Africa region for a large proportion of the 21st century. The regional climate model employed in the project was the Weather Research and Forecasting Model version 3.5.1 (WRFv3.5.1) forced by three global circulation models (GCMs) under the Representative Concentrative Pathways 4.5 (RCP 4.5). The forcing GCMs are: the Max Planck Institute Earth System Model (MPI-ESM-MR, Stevens et al. 2013), the General Fluid Dynamics Laboratory Earth System Model (GFDL-ESM2M, Dunne et al. 2012), and the Hadley Global Environment Model (HadGEM2-ES, Collins et al. 2011). Further control runs with ERA- Interim reanalysis products (Dee et al. 2011) were also carried out for model verification and bias correction. Therefore, daily outputs of minimum near-surface air temperature, obtained from the 3-hourly simulations of WRFv3.5.1, driven by ERA-Interim reanalysis, are hereby presented.