This award supports Dr. Abigail Amissah-Arthur of the Department of Geography, Geology and the Environment at Slippery Rock University to organize a multidisciplinary workshop in Bauchi, Nigeria on Exploring Strategies for Managing Drought Using Climate Forecasts and Local Knowledge. The overall goal of the workshop is to draw upon the complementary expertise of U.S. and Nigerian scientists (e.g., geographers, decision/risk scientists, climate scientists, sociologist/anthropologists, hydrologists, and agronomists) in order to generate novel approaches to drought management and to develop integrated models of drought management that capture the environmental and social complexities associated with frequent droughts. The counterpart host is Dr. Saminu Ibrahim of the Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University, Bauchi, Nigeria. This workshop represents a significant beginning for a multidisciplinary effort to design and develop a practical, human-impact-centered integrated drought model which can be tested and extended to address specific problems at local, district, national and regional levels. The scientists at the workshop will include personnel who participated in the development of the Geological Society of America's recent publication, "Managing Drought and Water Scarcity in Vulnerable Environments - A Roadmap for Change in the United States"; this overlap will not only strengthen the workshop's efforts in Nigeria but also will strengthen U.S. efforts by allowing comparison of drought management models developed for very different sets of environmental and social conditions.
The results of the proposed workshop are expected to establish a research agenda on drought management and modeling that will benefit the agricultural and climate sciences, and broaden the scope of investigations of current environmental concerns in Nigeria, the U.S. and other countries in general. The workshop has the potential to impact more than the participants because the models developed at the workshop will be disseminated through the workshop website and the published proceedings of the workshop. It is expected that the workshop will enhance collaboration between US and Nigerian scientists; these collaborations can yield advances in our scientific understanding of the environment, as well as in our capacity to address key environmental issues. Two U.S. undergraduates from Slippery Rock University, a primarily undergraduate institution, will participate in this international activity and gain early career exposure to a major global environmental problem as it is being tackled by a strong multidisciplinary team of international researchers.
