JEAI-MOCAs: A multi-institutional initiative to build marine research capacity in Mozambique : news and views

Understanding the dynamics of the coastal oceans is important for managing coastal ecosystems, and hence for protecting lives and planning sustainable development. Among other countries in the southwest Indian Ocean, Mozambique has a greater number of environmental problems to solve. These problems include the landing of tropical cyclonesalong the coast and associated heavy rain and flooding events which cause loss of life,infrastructural damage, coastal erosion, incident droughts, water pollution, over exploitation of marine and coastal resources, and weatherand climatechange and extremes. Many of these problems can be monitored, so that remedial actioncan be taken, by conducting sustainable institutional collective research. Therefore Mozambican institutions should attain adequate capacity of human resources in strategic research areas (e.g. weatherand climateextremes, mitigating harmful effects of climate change, and conservation and sustainable managementof marine and coastal resources). It was because of the aforementioned problems that, for the first time, an initiative developed by a Mozambican research group to focus on oceanic and atmospheric dynamics was established.