25 years of turning climate science into action

25 years of turning climate science into action

Photo: Francesco Fiondra

Since its inception, the Columbia Climate School’s International Institute for Climate and Society Changed the way the world thinks about climate and climate adaptation. For decades, IRI has helped bridge the gap between those who generate climate information and those who need it to prevent food insecurity, disease outbreaks, and more.The Institute celebrates its many achievements 25th Anniversary Event September 16.

Translating research into action is not usually the focus of the natural sciences, but it has been an important part of IRI’s mission from the beginning, says Maureen Remoco-founding dean of the Columbia Climate Institute and director of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Columbia.

“IRI was created not only to conduct climate research, but to help policymakers understand how they can use the findings to improve their decisions and better manage climate risk,” Raymo said. “IRI works between climate science and climate action, between producers of information and users of information.”

The International Institute for Climate and Society released its first public forecast 25 years ago in September 1997 (left). Andy Robertson, a senior research scientist with IRI’s climate group, said it was groundbreaking to come up with the probability of seasonal forecasts showing normal, above-normal and below-normal rainfall conditions. “It’s now the standard form of making seasonal forecasts.” The map on the right shows the forecast for the same region for September 2022.

The first seasonal climate forecast

Before the IRI, “Most meteorologists, in fact, most scientists thought climate was a tough issue,” retired NOAA scientist Michael Hall explained in a video recorded for the event. “It’s simply too complicated. And then the results of the original paper by Cane and Zebiak.”

In 1986, Mark Cane and Steve Zebiak, who later helped create the IRI, published the first prediction of El Niño. The El Niño climate cycle affects global precipitation and temperature patterns, which in turn affects agriculture, disease outbreaks and natural disasters. Cane and Zebiak first Build a model to explain how it works and show that cycles are predictable.

“This is a breakthrough in the development of climate science,” Hall said, “because it shows that there is some predictability in the system that we can dig into.”

The event honors two colleagues who have been critical to the growth and development of IRI. Lisa Goddard (left) served as IRI Director for 10 years. She helped found the ACToday Colombia World Project, which uses climate services to end hunger and improve food security in six developing countries. Colleagues remember her as a great communicator, a great colleague and mentor, and a very honest person. Benno Blumenthal (right) helped build the IRI database, which simplifies finding and processing climate data, and is used by 30,000 monthly visitors, including forecasters and researchers from around the world.

Defining Climate Services

Cane said that when he and Zebiak and their co-authors published their first El Niño forecasts, they thought it would make the world a better place. “We’re scientists. We’re very naive, and when we publish our predictions, we’re like, ‘Well, if you build it, they’ll come. Anything they’ve always wanted to help poor farmers.

“We really didn’t realize all the barriers between what we were doing and making it useful,” Cane said. This realization led to the creation of the IRI, which was formally established in 1994 as a NOAA pilot program. Now, 35 years after Cane and Zebiak’s paper, “we know a lot more about how to make this work, and we really have it working,” Cane said.

IRI works with local, national and international partners to help deliver climate services globally, especially in developing countries.

In fact, IRI and World Meteorological Organization Define the term “climate services” that provide information to help individuals and organizations make climate-smart decisions.During the anniversary event, the IRI director John Flo Explains the overall meaning behind the term.

“Climate services go far beyond the production of data,” he said. “It also includes understanding the users — the people you want to be able to take that information and use for decision making. It involves understanding their needs and then translating the information into terms they can use, not probabilities or probabilities that they may not want to use. Data. It’s about making sure it reaches the people who need it. You have to communicate it properly through mechanisms that can reach people. In the end, you want to embed it in standard practice. When the project is over and the foreigners leave, you don’t want to use Better information or practice disappears.”

And that’s exactly what IRI does. It starts by working with local stakeholders to understand their needs.Together it generates data and forecasts that are critical to understanding the prospects for agriculture, natural disasters, disease risks, migration patterns and more – information that can be used to improve food security and Nutrition, save lives and livelihoods, and build resilience. it shares this information, train How local governments and policymakers themselves interpret and use forecasts.

As an example of the latter, Amanda GrossiIRI Senior Staff Assistant, who has worked on ACToday food security projects in Ethiopia and Senegal, said IRI has been developing “skills-based courses for 70,000 agricultural consultants or extension workers, reaching 16 million farmers. The course helps these people to truly understand and Use the weather information available in their country and communicate it to farmers.” She added that the team is also developing courses for 10 universities in Ethiopia so that students graduate with the skills to use and understand climate information.

Change the timescale

Before IRIs, climate scientists were building climates based on what they expected 80 or 100 years from now, Grossi noted. For farmers worried about the coming weeks, the next season, or the next year, this kind of information is simply not useful.

“So IRI came along and we changed this culture of thinking about time scales,” Grossi explained. “We help build a new culture in which adaptation and resilience focus not only on future climates, but also current and near-term climates.”

For example, if farmers have access to climate information for a specific location, they can know what to plant this season, when and how to plant it — or when to keep the seeds for a year. By focusing on information that can help people make informed decisions, Grossi said IRI has shaped agricultural approaches to climate change globally.

Changing the timetable is also critical to helping developing countries adapt to long-term climate change, explains IRI senior research scientist Walter Began. “The best way to paralyze is to give policymakers very far future information and there is some uncertainty. Then for sure nothing will happen.”

Baethgen explained that the IRI helps move the issue of climate change from the future to the present. Under the IRI’s leadership, major agricultural networks are now beginning the climate adaptation process, starting with asking “How can we improve resilience today?” Baethgen says this is the best way to start improving resilience to future climates.

broad and broad impact

“IRI’s methods and techniques are used by thousands of people in hundreds of countries,” Raymo said. Throughout the event, IRI’s achievements and successes are listed.

Daniel Osgood explains how his team works with farmers in developing countries to design Index Insurance and other financial products that withstand weather shocks. He said the government could use the forecasts to start a fund to take advantage of good years by planting high-yielding seeds, or to help protect people from bad years. Likewise, individual farmers can act on this information by taking out loans to buy seeds in good years or counting on insurance payouts in times of drought.

In Rwanda, the IRI helped fill a 15-year gap in climate records created by civil war and genocide.The agency expanded this type Work in more than a dozen countries all around the world.

In the humanitarian sector, aid agencies have been trying to move from responding to disasters to predicting them, and in 2008, the Red Cross West Africa Centre used forecasts created by IRI to mobilize resources ahead of time for the first time. That flood caused far less damage than the previous one, says Baethgen .

In many cases, the impact of IRI work extends well beyond climate, agriculture and disasters. For example, Grossi said that if a Senegalese farmer had a bad year, it would not only affect his ability to support his family, but he might not be able to send his children to school. Or, he might only send his boys to school, leaving the girls behind.

When climate information is turned into useful services, individuals can turn collateral damage into positive impacts, Grossi said.

what’s next

According to Andy Robertson, the next big challenge for IRIs is forecasting 3-4 weeks in advance. “We’ve been able to predict the weather very well for years,” he said. “Again, the seasonal outlook has been a reality since the breakthroughs of Cane and Zebiak, IRI and others. But in the middle, there’s a so-called predictable desert, and you can’t say much.”

IRI has been working with partners to bridge the gap between weather and climate forecasts.Robertson provides an example of this seasonal forecast This was generated on April 22 of this year, indicating a higher chance of India’s warmer than normal temperatures in May, and the forecast was very accurate.

“We need information on all time scales,” Robertson said. “Bringing these things together — I think that’s the task of the future.”

John Furlow mentioned that being a member of the Columbia Climate Institute is helping IRI to build partnerships and expand its work across the university—for example, they are now working with Columbia’s Center for Global Energy Policy to find seasonal forecasts for the energy sector.

Furlow and several others expressed hope Columbia Climate SchoolFounded in 2020 to tackle the climate crisis, it will draw on IRI’s experience to achieve its ambitious goal of real-world impact.

“This approach of looking at it in terms of problems and uses, and then figuring out where we can inject the right scientific information to help this part and that — that’s the agenda,” Zebiak said. “I think IRI’s roadmap for the world is exactly what it needs to meet the more complex challenges of the future.”