Anthropogenic climate change and its associated environmental changes and impacts on biodiversity and humanity are among the principal determinants of the environmental futures in the watershed regions of the East African Great Lakes (Gordon et al., 2012). Climatic warming and major shifts in hydrological regimes are now recognized as inevitable consequences of anthropogenic perturbation of the global climate system, with impacts to biota and human systems certain to be experienced across all of the lake basins. The provision of ecosystem services of all types is almost certainly to be affected, and in many circumstances, upended, by changes in baseline climate state and variability from human-driven climate change.
As highlighted in assessments on climate change adaptation performed by the Wildlife Conservation Society (Seimon et al., 2012) and Africa Biodiversity Collaborative Group (Seimon et al., 2011), effective adaptation to climate change by the biodiversity conservation communities throughout the region has to date been severely hindered by lack of baseline data resources and modeling guidance of adequate spatial resolution to serve conservation planning needs.
The EAGLE Project has been designed to address these needs by generating state-of-the-science climate and environmental predictions, improving monitoring of climatic conditions, and using these resources to create informational products that can help guide environmental planning under the challenge of human-driven climate change.
This website includes a description of our methods, the data products generated and data access tools where users can select specific regions of interest and examine and compare predictions for a variety of environmental variables across the course of the 21st century.
The EAGLE Project gratefully acknowledges the generous funding support of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation that has made our program possible.