The Benguela Upwelling System (BUS) of South Africa, Namibia, and Angola is one four Eastern Boundary Upwelling Systems globally. It is bordered with warm tropical water of the Angola Benguela Front Zone in the north and by the Agulhas Current in the south. Changes in the coupled atmosphere-marine climate, natural or anthropogenic, both within the BUS and beyond, affect ecological and socio-economic important sub-systems, potentially affecting millions of people—residents of the coastline and those who derive their livelihoods and resources from the BUS. Our aim in the EXEBUS project is to understand the drivers of change in the BUS and its contribution to the changing variability of the system, with an emphasis on extreme events. Given that both natural- and human-induced changes to the functioning of the BUS occur at a range of time and space scales (and are also interdependent), we seek to understand the changing envelope of variability, extremes of this variability, and their impact.
EXEBUS undertakes an Integrated Ecosystem Assessment (IEA) to establish the roles, trends, and range of variability and the extremities of natural and anthropogenic geophysical, biological, governance, socio-economic features and phenomena, and assess their impact on ecological, sociological, governance, and macroeconomic systems and processes in the Benguela Current Large Marine Ecosystem (BCLME) of South Africa (SA), Namibia, and Angola. The goal is to strengthen the rational basis for management on relevant spatial and temporal scales (up to 2070).