We live in an unsustainable world. Particularly in the less developed world, there is high vulnerability to the social, economic and environmental impacts of climate variability and change. Hence, there is a need to increase sustainability and reduce vulnerability through sustainable development.

The climate is determined by the workings of the climate system, which is composed of the atmosphere, oceans, ice sheets, land, and the plants, animals and people that inhabit them. It varies not only from year to year and decade to decade but also on time scales of centuries or longer.

Countries are usually unprepared to cope with climatic anomalies and varibilities in an effective way. Governments typically react to climate extreme events through crisis management rather than through the formulation and implementation of anticipatory measures commonly referred to as risk management. A typical reason mentioned by decision-makers for the lack of such risk management policies has been the lack of means to predict climate conditions with sufficient skill and lead-time. In selected regions of the world, this situation has changed dramatically due to recent advances in the capacity to predict climate anomalies linked to the onset and intensity of a warm or cold event as part of the ENSO phenomenon. ENSO is the main source of inter-annual climate variability in many parts of the world.

Although the advances in ENSO prediction are significant scientific achievements, there are still limitations in our ability to establish effective risk management policies or, in general, to take advantage of the improved forecasting capabilities. It is our recent memory that the impact of ENSO phenomena certainly inhibits the natural economic growth of East African sub-regions. It also alters the natural faces of regional climate that induce burden on the ecosystems. This indicates that climate is among a large number of variables that stakeholders need to consider in the planning and decision-making processes. Therefore, the author of this paper is intended to propose that effective applications of climate forecasts must frame the climate information in broader decision support tools that also include data on prices, land use feasibility, evaluation of the economical and environmental impact of technology.

After a review of the major concepts of interactive behavior of climate and development, the paper illustrates some evidence of the linkage between climate vulnerability and sustainable development. A methodology for climate prediction and its application schemes in the role of sustainable development planning and implementation that highlights the role of climate is then presented. At the later stage, an attempt is made to explore the half-century trend of Ethiopian rainfall climatology and its teleconnection linkages with the global El Nino/La Nina phenomena.