A quiet WMO workshop in Togo is training African meteorologists to turn raw climate data into the backbone of “NDCs 3.0”, and a stronger case for finance and resilience.
On a humid February morning in Lomé, the capital of Togo, the air‑conditioned training room at the national meteorological agency filled with the glow of laptop screens. Lines of numbers scrolled past as participants ran scripts to clean decades of rainfall data from rural stations in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, and Madagascar. When the graphs were finally plotted, showing longer dry spells here, sharper downpours there, a murmur went through the room.
For many of the meteorologists and climate officers present, this was the first time they had calculated climate indices that will feed directly into their countries’ next round of Nationally Determined Contributions, or NDCs, the national climate pledges at the heart of the Paris Agreement.
“This is where political commitments meet physical reality,” one trainer told the group. “If the data is wrong, the NDC is weak.”
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) calls this the “NDCs 3.0” moment: a push to ensure that the next wave of climate plans from African countries is anchored in solid climate science, not just good intentions. The regional workshop in Lomé is one small but telling piece of that effort.
Background and Stakes
From 2 to 6 February 2026, WMO convened the “Regional Workshop on Climate Science Information for the NDCs 3.0” in Lomé, hosted by Togo’s national meteorological service, ANAMET. Experts from seven African countries, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Comoros, Guinea, Madagascar, Rwanda, and Togo, spent five days working through a simple but demanding question: how to turn raw climate observations into decision‑ready information for climate policy.
The meeting, co‑sponsored by the CREWS West Africa project and the EU‑funded ClimSA programme, is part of a broader WMO effort to strengthen National Meteorological and Hydrological Services (NMHSs) as providers of climate services for adaptation and mitigation.
WMO’s own guidance stresses that credible NDCs require quantified evidence of trends in temperature, rainfall, droughts, and floods, as well as projections of future risk.
The timing is tight. According to WMO, 139 countries have already submitted new or updated NDCs, and about 70 percent now explicitly reference the use of climate information and meteorological services. But many low‑ and middle‑income countries still struggle to quality‑control their data, analyse trends, or translate scientific outputs into policy language and investment plans. As governments move toward “NDCs 3.0”, the next strengthening cycle due later this decade, the Lomé workshop is meant to help close that gap.
Human Stories and Real-world Examples
The work in Lomé is highly technical, but the stakes are human. Participants learned to run homogeneity checks on long‑term data series, spot suspicious jumps caused by station moves or instrument changes, and compute indices that describe heatwaves, heavy rainfall days, and dry spells. These metrics, standardised by the Expert Team on Climate Change Detection and Indices, are the building blocks for statements such as “droughts are becoming more frequent” or “extreme rainfall has intensified” in a given region.
Climatology experts from the University Institute for Research in Sustainability, Climate Change and Energy Transition (IU‑RESCAT) and Spain’s Rovira i Virgili University led hands‑on sessions, guiding participants from spreadsheets to visual charts that a non‑scientist could interpret.
The idea was not only to generate numbers, but to teach how to explain them to agriculture ministries, finance officials, or parliamentarians who approve budgets and projects.
Togo’s Secretary‑General at the Ministry of Transport, Dr. Tindano Komlan, spelled out the political dimension when he opened the workshop. Reliable and usable climate science information, he said, is “an indispensable lever for guiding public policies and climate investments.”
For ministries trying to decide where to build new roads, how to design irrigation schemes, or which early warning systems to prioritise, the quality of the underlying climate analysis can mean the difference between resilience and costly mistakes.
Co‑production sessions brought in representatives from agriculture and environment ministries to discuss what they actually need from climate services.
A meteorologist from Guinea might present new evidence of shifting rainy seasons; an agriculture official could respond by requesting district‑level maps to guide planting calendars or seed distribution. The workshop emphasised that NDCs are not just UNFCCC paperwork, but potential roadmaps for very tangible decisions.
Policy, Debate, and Expert Views
Behind the calm of the training room is a broader debate about who controls climate knowledge and whose data counts. For years, many African NDCs have relied heavily on global datasets and models produced in Europe or North America, sometimes with little localisation.
WMO’s push, reflected in the Lomé workshop and its “Methodology on Climate Science Information for Climate Action,” is to put national services in the driver’s seat.
During the week, WMO staff introduced tools such as the National Framework for Climate Services (NFCS) approach and the Climate Services Dashboard, designed to help countries organise their own data, products, and user engagement.
The message was that NMHSs should not be passive recipients of external expertise, but co-authors of the climate information underpinning NDCs, adaptation plans, and funding proposals to entities such as the Green Climate Fund.
There are still constraints. Many national services are under‑resourced, with patchy observation networks and limited staff. Even the best‑trained analysts can only work with the data they have.
Some civil society voices have also urged that NDCs reflect local and Indigenous knowledge alongside formal climate science, arguing that the lived experience of changing seasons and extremes carries insight that weather stations may miss.
WMO acknowledges these tensions but frames workshops like Lomé’s as necessary building blocks. Post‑training evaluations gave the event an average score of 4.79 out of 5, with participants reporting stronger skills in using WMO resources, computing and interpreting climate indices, and applying climate science in national policies and NDC processes. The organisation describes this as early evidence that targeted technical support can move the needle.
What Comes Next
By the end of the week in Lomé, the training room whiteboard was filled with acronyms: NDC, NAP, NFCS, CREWS, ClimSA. On participants’ laptops, though, the outputs were more concrete: cleaned datasets, new indices, draft country briefs that translate trends into risks and options.
For the seven countries represented, and for many others watching from afar, the question now is whether those skills will survive contact with political timelines: tight NDC submission deadlines, changing government priorities, donor requirements, even budget cuts.
WMO says it will continue to support African meteorological services as they move into the NDCs 3.0 cycle, emphasising that national climate targets and investments must “rest on solid evidence.”
If that happens, the legacy of a week in Lomé may show up not only in improved spreadsheets but in more credible climate pledges, stronger cases for climate finance, and, ultimately, better protection for people living on the front lines of a warming world.
