By Joe Penney DAKAR, March 24 (Reuters) - A pan-African weather centre will help the Red Cross respond faster to floods and drought by feeding it weather forecasts tailored to its needs, the aid group said on Tuesday. The African Centre of Meteorological Application for Development (ACMAD), funded by the United Nations and based in Niger, works with forecasting agencies in 53 countries. "While large-scale disasters like those in Asia, Ghana and Togo in 2007 get more media and donor attention, 800,000 people have been affected by small-scale floods in West and Central Africa in the last year," said Youcef Ait-Chellouche, disaster management coordinator for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies for West and Central Africa. "Managing these disasters is very difficult. We want to make sure to do so as best we can by increasing contingency planning based on probable scenarios, not potential scenarios," he said in the Senegalese capital Dakar. Africa's relatively poor infrastructure makes it especially vulnerable to extreme weather such as drought and flooding, which experts say will become more frequent due to the effects of global warming. The Sahel belt south of the Sahara -- Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauritania, Niger and Senegal -- is growing more arid as desert advances, while countries on the coast of the Gulf of Guinea including Benin, Cameroon, Ghana, Nigeria and Togo are becoming more prone to floods, they say. A rise in global temperatures of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2050 could put 228 million more people at risk of malaria and 224 million more in danger of water shortages in the region, according to a European Union report. The U.N. housing agency said last week that about one in three African slum dwellers could be considered environmental refugees who are fleeing advancing deserts and failing farming systems.
A general view of houses destroyed by a landslide in the village of Bogo, district of Kavaje some 50 km (31 miles) from Tirana March 22, 2009. Experts have warned the ...
