Every year, we edge closer to breaching the limits set by the Paris Agreement.
2024 was the hottest year on record, with extreme weather events like droughts and wildfires affecting lives and livelihoods across the globe.
To adapt to a changing world and climate, we need more reliable, actionable climate predictions. But the information used to produce them is often fragmented, inconsistent or just not tailored to the decisions we need to make day-to-day.
Enter the ASPECT project, a pioneering EU-funded initiative working to improve our ability to predict and prepare for climate change through more accurate climate predictions that serve us both now and into our uncertain future.
To find out more, we caught up with Dr Marta Terrado, ASPECT Co-Principal Investigator and Co-leader of the Knowledge Integration Team, Earth Sciences Department, Barcelona Supercomputing Center.
What are the challenges or limitations of current models of climate predictions and projections, and how do these impact end-users?
Research communities working in the fields of weather forecast, climate prediction and climate change projection have traditionally worked in silos. This has resulted in the use of different methods and approaches, and often different models.
This academic divide makes no sense to most users, whose decision-making and planning processes often need to simultaneously consider different time scales irrespective of the underlying modelling approach.
Despite the need for consistent forecasts to support decisions, climate information is often provided to users in different pieces which, to make matters worse, don’t always agree. This poses a limitation to the uptake of climate information for decision- and policymaking.
How do you aim to improve on this situation?
We’re working to develop innovative seamless climate predictions that provide a single, coherent “image” of the future climate.
It helps here to use the analogy of a camera: Adjusting the camera’s depth of field allows us to bring into focus both nearby and distant objects in a landscape. In a similar way, seamless climate predictions provide information both for the near and distant future, connecting predictions for the next months (seasonal) with longer-term predictions for the next decades (decadal).
This unified approach avoids fragmented or inconsistent information, offering users a clearer and more complete picture of the climate.
We hope that seamless climate predictions, which provide consistent information across time scales, will make it easier for policy-makers to integrate information for both the near and distant future into policies. So far, only a single time scale, if any, tends to be integrated in policies (traditionally, climate change projections).
Only considering a single time scale for climate change in predictions and policy-making can lead to maladaptation, increasing our vulnerability to climate change at other time scales.
Policy frameworks that may benefit from a wider overview of future climate conditions include National Adaptation Plans as well as other regulations, such as the EU Common Agriculture Policy, the Global Gateway, Solidarity Cohesion Funds or the Sendai Framework on Disaster Risk Reduction.
What are the challenges of this?
We hope that our seamless approach will benefit users by enabling them to make better decisions. However, we are talking about a new type of information here that hasn’t yet been put into practice. There’s a significant gap in translating these data into useful information and integrating it into existing knowledge and practice.
In ASPECT, users from sectors like agriculture or finance are pioneering the use of seamless climate predictions. Our main challenge is to demonstrate the added value of this new information compared with predictions that are currently available. It’s an ongoing task.
How do you incorporate local or regional climate variability to ensure predictions are actionable for communities facing specific threats like coastal flooding or drought?
Traditional global climate models (GCMs) can be used to predict the expected climate conditions over different regions and timescales. However, these models deliver information at a rather coarse resolution, typically around 100 km2.
To simulate local and regional climate conditions, it’s important to consider local-scale drivers, such as the topography of the region and local atmospheric circulation patterns, in addition to large-scale drivers.
In ASPECT, we develop and test different spatial downscaling methods, including dynamical and statistical downscaling approaches. These are key to making data relevant for local and regional-scale use.
We aim to identify the situations in which each of these methods works best and provide guidance for their application. Spatial downscaling involves refining global climate model data, providing high-resolution information for a specific region or area. It’s an indispensable method to deliver tailored, actionable climate information to users from a wide range of sectors.
How can you make your predictions and projections useful for specific sectors like agriculture and insurance?
We apply a co-production approach that places users at the centre of our developments, ensuring that their needs are understood and met. Climate information is co-produced through close collaboration with stakeholders (who we call Super Users) from key societal sectors. These include agriculture, finance, governance, disaster risk reduction and the humanitarian sector. The co-production process results in information that is not only scientifically robust but also actionable and tailored to real-world applications.
Beyond Super Users, the project is also engaging with a wider “community of interest” where potential users learn about the benefits of climate information for decision-making and are encouraged to adopt this information.
We also strive to build a “community of practice” in seamless climate predictions by engaging with stakeholders and working to build capacity for the use of the new climate information. Our aim is that stakeholders in the community of practice will gain the skills to apply seasonal-to-decadal climate information. Hence, important efforts are directed to the engagement with National Meteorological Services, some of whom are also part of our consortium.
Have you had any influence on policymaking or adaptation decision-making so far?
We published a scientific paper assessing whether 2024 could be the first year where global average temperatures exceed 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. This study shows that, while a temporary exceedance would not breach the Paris Agreement, we are approaching this threshold, highlighting the urgency of taking action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and limit global warming.
This information can help to increase policymakers’ awareness of the gravity of the issue and motivate them to enhance their national and international commitments to cut emissions.
No real-world decisions have been supported by ASPECT results yet, since we are still working on the development of case study pilots. However, the use of improved climate predictions generated by project partners is being tested with the pilots for decisions such as vineyard spring frost protection and water management in Spain. Also for the identification of appropriate interventions to ensure affordability of a nutritious diet in Malawi.
How will you ensure the results of your work are accessible, navigable and useful for end-users?
We’re working to ensure the availability and accessibility of the results to potential users through different channels. One of these is our website, which will feature an online data catalogue with all the information users need to access and use ASPECT data and applications. Visitors can also find our mid-project update there, which explains our work and findings so far in accessible terms.
We’re also developing a climate information delivery system. This is an application to visualise complex model data outputs, allowing on-the-fly data processing and user interactivity, expected to be sustainable after the project’s duration.
To bring the project outcomes closer to non-scientific audiences, we’ll develop an interactive webpage with examples of the use cases developed with the Super Users and access to climate data and methods developed in the project, illustrating their application to real-world decision-making.
Finally, we organise annual User Forums that everyone interested in climate information for adaptation is invited to attend! User Forums are events that bring together the ASPECT community of practice and the community of interest with providers of climate information to share new insights on seamless predictions and support future adaptation efforts.
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