UK Climate Resilience funding awards

October 2020

Open funding calls for the UK Climate Resilience programme were announced in May 2019. Following the bidding process and evaluation of the submitted bids, we are pleased to announce that the following projects commence in October 2020. 

Climate services standards monitoring and valuing contract
Awardee: JBA Consulting

The aim of this project is to establish a coherent set of standards for climate services, considering different types of climate service users and providers from public and private sectors, so decision makers can improve their capacity to manage climate-related risk.

The standards framework will apply to climate services for present day, seasonal and longer-term future timeframes. The work will build on the near-complete SPF project, Review of climate resilience standards, guidance and codes of practice (CR19-2). It will draw on expertise nationally and internationally, relevant ISO documents on adaptation and risk, and findings from other UKCR projects. 

This project is also developing and testing a methodology for monitoring and valuing climate service delivery and uptake, to see if it is possible to stimulate a market for climate services in the UK. The monitoring and valuing activity will use three case studies to develop a set of good practice exemplars on the valuation of climate services. The project is due to run for two years, to October 2022, and will involve widespread consultation with users and providers of climate services. 

Enabling the use and producing improved understanding of EuroCORDEX data over the UK
Awardee: University College London

This project will extend the current suite of UKCP climate projections by incorporating information from a broader range of high-resolution climate simulations, predominantly obtained from the EuroCORDEX downscaling experiment, but also incorporating other currently available high-resolution information. This will support a more comprehensive sampling of uncertainty in high-resolution UK climate projections than has hitherto been possible, which in turn offers the potential to develop better-informed strategies for adapting to and mitigating the effects of future weather and climate. 

In addition, the project will provide insights into the physical plausibility of the various simulations; will assess the value to be gained from the use of high-resolution information; will identify the dominant sources of uncertainty in future projections of a variety of weather indices; and will attempt to assess the extent to which the existing UKCP ensemble provides a decision-relevant characterisation of this uncertainty.  To achieve these challenging objectives, the project takes a multidisciplinary approach combining expertise in climate modelling, modern statistics and uncertainty quantification, and software engineering.  
 

June 2020

Following evaluation of a single tender, we are pleased to announce that the following project will begin in July 2020.

ExSamples (Extreme samples)

Awardee: University of Oxford

The aim of this project is to better understand the sampling statistics of extremes in three winters that were amongst the hottest or wettest in the UKCP18 Global Projections. For these winters, their sea surface temperature and sea ice patterns and atmospheric composition will be used to drive approximately 3000 atmosphere-only simulations that differ only in their initial conditions. Could the extreme winters seen in UKCP18 have been higher or were they truly rare events? These climate simulations will be run using public computing resource. The main output will be a new dataset consisting of simulation data over the North Atlantic/European domain run, which has been collated by the University of Oxford and Met Office. 

 

February 2020

Open funding calls for the UK Climate Resilience programme were announced in August 2019. Following the bidding process and evaluation of the submitted bids, we are pleased to announce that the following projects will begin in early 2020.

Development and provision of UK socioeconomic scenarios for climate vulnerability, impact, adaptation and services research and policy 

Awardees: Cambridge Econometrics, Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH) and the Universities of Exeter and Edinburgh

This project will produce UK specific downscaled socio-economic narratives and gridded data for a range of indicators, extended to 2100. These will be internally consistent as well as consistent with the shared socio-economic pathways (SSPs) that will underpin the next IPCC assessment report. The project will also consider potential for significant impact from the UK’s net-zero target for a broad range of policies.

Risk estimates using techniques from catastrophe modelling: UK Flood

Awardees: Sayers and Partners, CEH, Vivid Economics and Loughborough University

This project combines information from UKCP18 with catastrophe (CAT) modelling approaches to a 35 to 50-year time horizon, to investigate the value of CAT modelling for sectors other than (re)insurance as a way of combining hazard, vulnerability and exposure into risk. As part of this UKCP18 projections will be used to drive CEH’s well established grid to grid (G2G) hydrological model at 1km scale to generate future flood events. This will then be combined with CAT modelling techniques in the climate change risk assessment framework currently being used in CCRA3 (flood project – the Future Flood Explorer) and which was used to underpin the National Infrastructure Commission assessment of flood resilience standards (2018). This merging of techniques offers significant potential to develop improved assessments of climate risk and the adaption policies needed to build resilience.

Demonstration of a climate service to address the resilience needs of the UK health sector

Awardees: University of Reading and University College London

This project will establish and characterise the extreme weather events linked to ill-health in the UK and to quantify how both climate and demographic changes might result in changing needs for resilience in the health and social care sector in future decades. This work plan will analyse existing observational and model simulation datasets along with mortality data to better understand the links between mortality and climate variability and change. It will also zoom in on specific cities to understand how finer scale simulations can help to understand the weather and climate drivers of health impacts using an existing and well-supported urban surface model (SUEWS) and the collation and combination of other datasets that characterise vulnerability and exposure to extreme weather events. The team brings together meteorologists with experience in large-scale and urban climate dynamics with epidemiologists and those with experience of sustainable and built environments. The project team will work closely with Met Office scientists leveraging the existing working relationships to ensure that the service is of benefit to end-users.  

 

Climate Service prototype development: enhancing the resilience of the water sector to drought events 

Awardees: CEH, British Geological Survey and HR Wallingford

This project will co-develop (with water industry and regulatory partners) a pilot climate service to ensure the UK’s water resources will be resilient to drought under a changing climate. The methodology being developed will provide a coherent, national approach to providing resilience to drought events. The core of the approach will be to deliver a useable high-quality enhanced Future Flows (eFF) dataset on future river flows, groundwater levels and recharge, tailored to the needs of the UK water industry that makes the best use of new UK climate projections. The work will also provide an assessment of the benefits of the climate service for achieving drought resilience through further interaction and engagement with water industry and regulatory partners.

 

Review of climate resilience mainstreaming into regulatory and voluntary standards, national guidance, and other sectorial/industry codes of practice 

Awardees: JBA Consulting Ltd, John Dora Consulting Limited, TRIOSS, Leeds University and British Standards Institute

This project aims to understand the climate information inputs into commonly used national guidance standards. Standards e.g. Environment Agency flooding guidelines, building codes, British Standards for Adaptation, Office of Nuclear Regulations standards etc. and provide recommendations for updating the climate information input to enhance resilience. The project will begin with a literature review, questionnaires and interviews this project will identify different climate standards and standardised industry-wide tools related to climate resilience across the sectors to be covered.  Evidence of the level of engagement and influence of the identified standards will help to determine good practice guidance and recommendations for improvements. 

May 2019
Following the publication of calls in February 2019, we are pleased to announce the following awards for new project work under the UK Climate Resilience programme commencing in July 2019.

Comparison of risk assessment frameworks and evaluation of their suitability for use in climate risk assessment on time-scales from a season ahead to decades ahead.

Awardee: RAND Europe 

The goal of this study is to provide information about how to best assess climate change risks to support climate resilience efforts.