september 25, 2025
WASCAL WRAP 2.0 OFFICIAL LAUNCH
Between April 29th-30th, 2022, the West African Science Service Centre on Climate Change and Adapted Land Use (WASCAL) Research Action Plan (WRAP2.0), valued at 11 million euros, with funding from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) of Germany, and made up of six main research projects, was officially launched at the WASCAL Competent Centre in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. WRAP 2.0 present the most recent working agenda of the WASCAL Competence Centre geared toward making the centre a full-service provision centre by delivering key demand-driven climate and environmental services made available through strategic channels for policy consideration and implementation by policymakers stakeholders across national implementation scales. The two-day event was attended by partners across all six projects both in-person and virtually.
Among other things, the WRAP 2.0 Project consists of Land use and Cover/Land Degradation/Climate Change Nexus, Risks and Vulnerability to Climate Extremes, Rural-urban and Cross Border Migration in West Africa and Sustainable Agriculture/Climate Smart Landscapes Nexus. These broad components form the key component for the development of viable scientific product in quest to deliver key inputs into the upcoming Climate and Environmental Services Centre (CESC) to be delivered by 2024. This reflects a key demand for scientist product and communication dependent on the synergies of the different project and aimed at providing the much-needed scientific inputs by way of reliable climate data and guidelines for policy consideration and implementation across national, regional, and local scales in West Africa.
The objective for the this launch event was to offer the opportunity to all partners across the sister-projects to introduce and provide update on their projects and to provide a gateway for collaboration and operationalization of their potential project results. Individual presentations bothered around project objectives, methodologies to be employed, potential collaborators, challenges to operationalizing project plans and ideas, and opportunities for resolving such problems.
The event was attended by members of the European Union, WASCAL Head of Party and other key officials, Ministerial representatives of the Government of Burkina Faso, as well as over thirty (30) representatives drawn from partners across the different WRAP 2.0 Project.
The launch concluded with a scientific panel and group discussion on the prospect for the plausible implementation of the CESC strategy and campaign.
