For a long time, a majority of African countries have not been proactively mitigating the negative impact of drought and flood events. As a result, relief initiatives are often too late to stem the loss of lives and other social and economic impacts. To address this challenge, and assessing tree-based data from 1665 through 2014, scientists developed the TANA chronology, a historic dataset named after Lake Tana, the source of the Blue Nile River running through Ethiopia.