The Tibetan Plateau and the adjacent high mountain regions of the Himalayas play an important role in the global climate dynamic through its impact on the Asian monsoon system, which in turn is impacting the water resources of this extremely vulnerable region. To provide further knowledge about the changing impact of rainfall patterns, spatial and temporal variability of snow cover contribution, amount of snow and ice melt runoff, evapotranspiration as well as dynamics of wetlands and permafrost water balance studies are required. This is of particular importance in terms of global climate change because of a severe gap in the knowledge of the short, mid and long term implications on the hydrological system. This study concentrates on the macroscale catchment of the lake Nam Co, located at 4718 m a.s.l. at the foot of the Nyainqentanglha Mountains in central Tibet (30° N, 90° E). The water balance of the Nam Co basin is dominated by semi-arid climate, snow and ice melt runoff and high evaporation rates due to the high radiation input and the low air humidity. The observed temperature rise, glacier retreat, permafrost decay and lake level increase indicate significant system changes and the high sensitivity of the Tibetan Plateau on global warming. The development of a suitable water balance model and its preliminary application was the main objective of this study. The development was done with the Jena Adaptable Modelling System JAMS along with existing scientific process components of the J2000 module library which were partly further developed to reflect the specific conditions of the high elevation Nam Co basin. The preliminary modelling exercise based on gridded data from a downscaled ECHAM5 data set provided reasonable estimates about the important hydrological water balance components of the Nam Co basin. With the modelling results the observed lake level rise could be reproduced and it could be shown that the runoff from the glaciered areas seems to be the most important component to explain the increasing amount of lake water.

We explore how to address the challenges of adaptation of water resources systems under changing conditions by supporting flexible, resilient and low-regret solutions, coupled with on-going monitoring and evaluation. This will require improved understanding of the linkages between biophysical and social aspects in order to better anticipate the possible future co-evolution of water systems and society. We also present a call to enhance the dialogue and foster the actions of governments, the international scientific community, research funding agencies and additional stakeholders in order to develop effective solutions to support water resources systems adaptation. Finally, we call the scientific community to a renewed and unified effort to deliver an innovative message to stakeholders. Water science is essential to resolve the water crisis, but the effectiveness of solutions depends, inter alia, on the capability of scientists to deliver a new, coherent and technical vision for the future development of water systems.

A major task of the newly established "Southern African Science Service Centre for Climate Change and Adaptive Land Management" (SASSCAL; www.sasscal.org) and its partners is to provide science-based environmental information and knowledge which includes the provision of consistent and reliable climate data for Southern Africa. Hence, SASSCAL, in close cooperation with the national weather authorities of Angola, Botswana, Germany and Zambia as well as partner institutions in Namibia and South Africa, supports the extension of the regional meteorological observation network and the improvement of the climate archives at national level. With the ongoing rehabilitation of existing weather stations and the new installation of fully automated weather stations (AWS), altogether 105 AWS currently provide a set of climate variables at 15, 30 and 60 min intervals respectively. These records are made available through the SASSCAL WeatherNet, an online platform providing near-real time data as well as various statistics and graphics, all in open access. This effort is complemented by the harmonization and improvement of climate data management concepts at the national weather authorities, capacity building activities and an extension of the data bases with historical climate data which are still available from different sources. These activities are performed through cooperation between regional and German institutions and will provide important information for climate service related activities.

In this study, land cover changes between 1972 and 2013 were investigated in the Binah River watershed (North of Togo and Benin) using remote sensing and geographic information system technologies. Multitemporal satellite images—Landsat MSS (1972), TM (1987), and OLI‐TIRS (2013)—were processed using object‐based image analysis and post–classification comparison methods including landscape metrics and changes trajectories analysis. Land cover maps referring to five main land cover classes, namely, agricultural land, forest land, savannah, settlements, and water bodies, were produced for each acquisition date. The overall accuracies were 76.64% (1972), 83.52% (1987), and 88.84% (2013) with respective Kappa statistics of 0.69, 0.78, and 0.86. The assessment of the spatiotemporal pattern of land cover changes indicates that savannah, the main vegetation type, has undergone the most dominant change, decreasing from 67% of the basin area in 1972 to 56% in 1987 and 33% in 2013. At the same time, agricultural land has significantly increased from 15% in 1972 to 24% in 1987 and 43% in 2013, while some proportions of agricultural land were converted to savannah relating to fallow agriculture. In total, more than 55% of the landscape experienced changes between 1972 and 2013. These changes are primarily due to human activities and population growth. In addition, agricultural activities significantly contributed to the increase in the number of patches, degree of division, and splitting index of forest and savannah vegetations and the decrease in their effective mesh sizes. These results indicate further fragmentation of forest and savannah vegetations between 1972 and 2013. Further research is needed to quantitatively evaluate the influences of individual factors of human activities and to separate these from the impacts of climate change‐driven disturbances.

Study region: The Kara River basin, northern Togo and Benin, West Africa. Study focus: This study investigated long-term trends in annual rainfall (annRAIN), annual rainfall duration (DURATION) and annual maximum rainfall (MAXAN) for seven stations between 1950 and 2010. A Bayesian trend analysis was performed by fitting the Lognormal, Normal and Generalized Extreme Value (GEV) distributions to annRAIN, DURATION and MAXAN, respectively, with a time covariate for both the location and scale parameters. Spatio-temporal variation of the mean decadal rainfall and the seasonality of the mean monthly rainfall were also analyzed. New hydrological insights for the region: The results indicate that the interannual variability of annRAIN is decreasing over time at all stations, and the average annRAIN is also markedly decreasing at several stations. However, DURATION is increasing at most stations suggesting that in those parts of the basin where annRAIN is decreasing, rainfall occurs more frequently but with less intensity. For MAXAN, evidence for decreasing trend is found in two stations, and for increasing trend in one station. It is also shown that the peak of the rainy season shifted from September to August since the 1980s. Furthermore, changes in the spatio-temporal distribution of the mean decadal rainfall are also observed. This study provides valuable new insights into trends affecting rainfall variables in the Kara River basin