WIREDGOV

This month, we have been looking more closely at the role of the Met Office Hadley Centre Climate Programme and how its research meets UK government evidence needs, supporting the UK and global climate community to understand and respond to climate challenges. 

At a time when the response to the impacts of climate change have never been more pressing, there is an urgent need to embrace climate solutions and invest in resilience-building initiatives in order to push forward and navigate the challenges of a changing climate to create a more resilient, equitable, and prosperous world for generations to come. 

Addressing these challenges requires us to focus on building strong partnerships within the wider climate science community to facilitate the sharing of expertise, skills, and capabilities across closely aligned research and development programmes.  

The Met Office Hadley Centre is one of the World’s foremost climate change research centres and our aim is to provide climate science and services to people and organisations, to allow them to make better decisions to stay safe and thrive. 

The Met Office Hadley Centre Climate Programme

The Met Office Hadley Centre Climate Programme underpins climate-science research in the UK by delivering scientific knowledge, expertise, and capability (models, data and infrastructure) that meets the needs of the UK government and supports the UK and global climate community to understand and respond to climate challenges.   

The Climate Programme provides information that is relevant to UK interests domestically and overseas, including providing data and learning from global observational datasets and global climate models. Where research includes aspects on large-scale drivers of climate variability and change this will, in many cases, be global in nature.  

The programme will zoom in on the UK in more detail, and also other regions (such as Africa) where there is gearing from other projects or programmes (e.g. through CLARE). Additionally, the Met Office will ensure that techniques and analysis code developed for one focus region will be as transferable as possible to other locations.

CLimate Adaptation and REsilience (CLARE)

The UK-Canada framework research programme on Climate Adaptation and Resilience, known as CLARE is a key partnership designed, funded and run by the UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office and Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC) that is responding to the urgent need for climate solutions and resilience. 

CLARE aims to enable socially inclusive and sustainable action to build resilience to climate change and natural hazards, with both organisations working closely to set the strategic and technical directions of the initiative.  

Launched at COP26, The CLARE programme is primarily funded by the United Kingdom which provides nearly 90% of the £110m funding as part of FCDO Research and UK International Climate Finance. CLARE works to support partner governments, communities, and the private sector to use evidence and innovation to drive effective solutions to the climate challenge, whilst building capacity of both those carrying out the research and those using the resulting evidence. CLARE enables long-term, sustainable, and equitable economic and social development in a changing climate, whilst supporting early action to reduce the impacts of climate variability and providing a better understanding of the associated climate risks. 

CLARE includes three core pillars:  

1. Research, commissioning new substantive action-oriented research as well as providing the cross-programme infrastructure, jointly run and co-funded by the UK and by Canada’s International Development Research Centre;  
2. Services, providing timely weather and climate services to inform investments and actions by FCDO, UK government and wider stakeholders in partnership with the UK Met Office and others;  
3. Partnerships, supporting strategic alliances on climate science and adaptation such as the Adaptation Research Alliance (ARA) and Climate Risks and Early Warning Systems (CREWS).   

Since COP26, CLARE has become one of the most prominent research programmes in Climate Adaptation and Resilience globally. So far, 24 research projects are underway involving 136 organisations in 38 countries, three quarters of which in Africa and Asia. CLARE is developing research benefiting 30 countries by involving a wide range of organisations, from research institutions in a range of disciplines, to NGOs, local government, Meteorological Agencies and the private sector. 

Grassroots Action Research Micro-grants through CLARE covered small projects in 23 countries enabling gender equitable and socially inclusive climate adaptation. These include a project in Ethiopia increasing women’s resilience to climate change through climate smart agriculture tools and enhancing food security through fruit production. And, in Ghana, an inventory of solutions to address the twin challenge of climate change and urban environmental problems in Sub-Saharan Africa, aiming to increase the involvement of young people into climate action in the region.   

As a partner, the UK Met Office is playing a key role in a number of CLARE research projects and this blog will explore and explain the key aims within the projects of: 

• A Pan-African and Transdisciplinary Lens in the Margins: Tackling the Risks of Extreme Events (PALM-TREEs) 
• Resilience and Preparedness to tropical cyclones across Southern Africa (REPRESA) 
• Methods to Enhance Capability in High-resolution information for Adaptation: Initial Case Studies (MECHANICS) 
• Seasonal IMpact-Based OutLooks (SIMBOL) 

PALM-TREEs 

A Pan-African and Transdisciplinary Lens in the Margins: Tackling the Risks of Extreme Events (PALM-TREEs) is a three-and-a-half-year project of the CLARE programme, which brings social and physical scientists together with stakeholders to challenge the conventional understanding of extreme climate events. 

PALM-TREEs will seek to improve the understanding of the socio-economic impacts of extreme climatic events by highlighting how inequalities lead to discrepancy in climate risk among marginalised communities and how adaptation can help support these communities in a changing climate. The project aims to equip marginalised communities in South Africa, Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, and DR Congo, with the necessary tools to better respond to droughts, floods, and heat waves.  

The project involves a consortium of universities and institutions led by the University of Cape Town, the University of Yaoundé 1 and the University of Oxford. As a project partner, our primary role is to provide support, training and mentorship to the activities being carried out by early career researchers and collaborate on research projects.  

Through a co-production approach, researchers work closely with stakeholders to develop new approaches to make this climate information more usable and accessible. The project will also focus on strengthening the inclusive and equitable knowledge networks needed to support climate resilience.   

REPRESA

Resilience and Preparedness to tropical cyclones across Southern Africa (REPRESA) is a CLARE project focussing on the impacts of landfalling Tropical Cyclones (TCs) in Madagascar, Malawi, and Mozambique.  

The impacts of TCs are devastating; in March 2019, over one thousand people died following the worst flood disaster in the region’s history caused by the landfall of TC Idai, and more recently, in February-March 2023, hundreds lost their lives when Cyclone Freddy hit the region, a TC with unprecedented persistence. 

Despite their severe impacts, little is known of the changing attributes of TCs affecting the region in a warmer world. REPRESA aims to provide this necessary understanding of compound TC flood risks and the likelihood of unprecedented impacts, through state-of-art climate and flood modelling. It will pull-through scientific advances to achieve improved resilience through in-country leadership, training, and community engagement.  

REPRESA brings together an interdisciplinary team of world-leading and physical scientists and is co-led by three organizations: the Global Change Institute of the University of the Witwatersrand (GCI) in South Africa, the Eduardo Mondlane University in Mozambique (UEM), and the University of Bristol in the UK. It includes partners across southern Africa, Europe and the UK.  

Outcomes of the REPRESA project include improved early-warning uptake, strengthened anticipatory action plans and better-informed climate adaptation planning, in the context of intersecting vulnerabilities. The Met Office is playing a key role throughout the project, including contributing new very high resolution (km-scale grid spacing) climate simulations for Africa that are better able to capture the intense rainfall associated with TCs. The Met Office is also the focal point for capacity strengthening, working with the national hydrometeorological services to increase capacity in impact-based forecasting.

MECHANICS

The twenty-month long CLARE project; Methods to Enhance Capability in High-resolution information for Adaptation: Initial Case Studies (MECHANICS) project has just commenced and is being co-led by a team of researchers from Zambia, South Africa and the UK. It’s overall aim is to build capability and develop case-studies in applying high resolution (km-scale) climate information for adaptation. Recent work on convective-scale (<4km) modelling over Africa has demonstrated its value in improving representation of the climate including extreme events. 

MECHANICS will develop two decision-led “Km-scale Application Case Studies”, the first in Lusaka and the second in South Africa and will demonstrate how Km-scale information can aid real-world evaluation of adaptation options by decision makers. Both will develop an understanding of decision-contexts of the impacted systems and incorporate into these more robust findings on relevant changes in the climate and their impacts generated from integrating new high resolution climate information with the current understanding of these changes. The project will also build capability to undertake, and act as a demonstrator for, the use of high-resolution climate data to improve the robustness of context-relevant climate information and so enable better climate adaptation and resilience decision-making. 

The first case study, led by the University of Zambia and Climate Systems Analysis Group at the University of Cape Town, will focus on supporting the city of Lusaka, Zambia, to adapt to increased perennial flooding. The second case study will be led by the Global Change Institute of the University of the Witwatersrand and the Agricultural Research Council and focuses on supporting farmers and city planners in South Africa adapt to reduced spring rainfall and later onset of the rainy season.  

The Met Office Hadley Centre will support these southern African research teams and will lead work generating evidence for how Km-scale modelling can enhance the robustness of climate information for adaption decision-making, to guide future investment in the underpinning science, technical infrastructure and human capacity.

SIMBOL

Communities across the world are sensitive to the impacts associated with seasonal climate variability, particularly in regions reliant on rainfall seasons that support economic activities. Despite advances in seasonal forecasting over the past two decades, there has been limited progress in the generation and use of impact-based seasonal outlooks, that more directly serve societal needs while preserving the inherent probabilistic nature of the information. 

The Seasonal IMpact-Based OutLook (SIMBOL) project, funded through the CLARE programme from October 2023 to March 2024, has advanced a new method to address this gap within Regional and National Climate Outlook Forums. The project was delivered by the Met Office and University of Bristol, supported through the Met Office Academic Partnership (MOAP), and in collaboration with the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) Climate Prediction & Applications Centre (ICPAC) – the regional climate centre for East Africa. 

SIMBOL has developed a simple-to-use and standardised methodology that can be adopted across the world, building on Impact-Based Forecasting (IBF) for early action on weather prediction timescales. Utilising co-production sessions, impacts specialists and stakeholders integrate different sources of evidence to jointly characterise impacts (for selected hazards, regions and sectors) for each forecast category irrespective of the forecast probability, and then integrate with seasonal forecasts to determine levels of risk and issues advisories.  

A case study has been developed, focused on the impacts of seasonal total rainfall on groundwater availability in Somalia, and trialled at the 66th Greater Horn of Africa Climate Outlook Forum (GHACOF-66) in Uganda in February 2024. Feedback from the trial was very positive and work is now advancing towards implementation of the approach through other programmes, including the FCDO funded Weather and Climate Information Services (WISER) programme. 

Research supported by CLARE is bridging critical gaps between science and action by championing Southern leadership of research. Through CLARE, the programme is developing new tools and supporting partner governments, communities, and the private sector to use evidence and innovation to drive effective solutions to the climate challenge, whilst building capacity of both those carrying out the research and those using the resulting evidence. This work supports locally-led, socially inclusive and sustainable adaptation action through building true and equitable partnerships.