25 years of putting climate science into action

Photo: Francesco Fiondella

Since its inception, the Columbia Climate School’s International Institute on Climate and Society has changed the way the world thinks about climate and climate adaptation. For decades, IRI has helped build bridges between those who produce climate information and those who need it. The institute celebrated its many achievements at her 25th anniversary event on September 16th.

Putting research into action isn’t usually the focus of the natural sciences, but it has been an important part of IRI’s mission from the beginning, says Lamont Doherty, co-founder of the Columbia Climate School and director of Columbia’s Earth. said Maureen Raymo. observatory.

“The IRI was created not only to conduct climate research, but to help decision makers use the results of that research to improve decision-making and understand how to better manage climate risks. said Raymo. “IRI operates at the boundary between climate science and climate action, between information producers and information users.”

The International Institute for Climate and Society published its first public forecast (left) 25 years ago in September 1997. Andy Robertson, senior research scientist in the IRI Climate Group, said it was groundbreaking to present seasonal forecasts that indicated the likelihood of normal, more-than-normal or less-than-normal rain conditions. , which is a standard format for how seasonal forecasts are made.” The map on the right shows the September 2022 forecast for the same region.

climate forecast for the first season

Before the IRI, “most meteorologists, and indeed most scientists, thought climate was an intractable problem,” said former NOAA scientist in a video recorded for the event. “It was simply too complicated. Then we got the results of Cane and Zebiak’s original paper.”

In 1986, Mark Cane and Steve Zebiak (who would later help create IRI) published the first predictions of El Niño behavior. The El Niño climate cycle affects precipitation and temperature patterns around the world, impacting agriculture, disease outbreaks and natural disasters. Cane and Zebiak were the first to explain how it works and build a model that shows that cycles can be predicted.

“This was a breakthrough in the evolution of climate science,” says Hall.

The event commemorated two colleagues who were integral to the growth and development of IRI. Lisa Goddard (left) was her director of IRI for 10 years. She helped establish her ACToday Colombia global project to use climate change services to combat hunger and improve food security in her six developing countries. Her colleagues remembered her as an excellent communicator, a great colleague and mentor, and a very honest person. Benno Blumenthal (right) helped establish his IRI data library, which simplifies searching and manipulating climate data, and is used by 30,000 monthly visitors, including forecasters and researchers worldwide.

Definition of climate services

Kane said when he, Xeviak, and their co-authors published the first El Niño prediction, they thought it would change the world for the better. We were very naive, making predictions with an attitude like ‘if you build it, they’ll come’…anything from the poor farmers they wanted to help.

“We never really understood all the barriers between what we were doing and what it would take to make it practical,” says Cane. That recognition drove his creation of IRI, and in 1994 he officially came into being as a NOAA pilot project. Now, 35 years after Cane and Zebiak’s paper, “we had so much sense of how to make it work, and it really worked,” Kane said.

With regional, national and international partners, IRI has helped deliver climate services around the globe, especially in developing countries.

In fact, IRI worked with the World Meteorological Organization to define the term ‘climate service’. It provides information to help individuals and organizations make climate-smart decisions. At the anniversary event, IRI Director John Farlow explained the holistic meaning behind the term.

“Climate services go far beyond data production,” he said. “It also involves understanding your users — people who want to take that information and be able to use it in their decision-making. We need to translate it into terms they can use, to make sure it reaches those who need it, we need to communicate it appropriately and through mechanisms that reach people, and finally, that should be incorporated into standard practice, and we don’t want better information and practices to disappear when the project ends and the foreigners leave.”

And that’s exactly what IRI does. It starts with working with local stakeholders to understand their needs. Collaboratively create the data and forecasts essential to understanding the outlook for agriculture, natural disasters, disease risk, migration patterns and more. This information can be used to improve food security and nutrition, save lives and livelihoods, and build resilience. Then share that information and train local governments and decision makers on how to interpret and use the forecasts.

As an example of the latter, Amanda Grossi, IRI’s senior staff associate who has worked on ACToday food security projects in Ethiopia and Senegal, said that IRI “developed a skills-based curriculum for 70,000 agricultural advisors or extension workers. We are developing it,” he said. Reach 16 million farmers. Its curriculum helps these people to practically understand and use the weather information available in their country and pass it on to farmers. She added that the team is also developing curricula for her 10 universities in Ethiopia, so that students will have the skills to use and understand climate information upon graduation.

Change the timescale

Before IRI, climate scientists framed climate in terms of what we might expect 80 or 100 years from now, Grossi noted. That kind of information is utterly useless to farmers who are worried about the coming weeks, next season, or next year.

“So IRI came along and changed this culture of thinking about timescales,” explains Grossi. “We are helping build a new culture where adaptation and resilience are focused not only on this future climate, but also on the current and short-term climate.”

For example, if farmers have access to location-specific climate information, they can know what to plant this season, when and how to plant, or when to save seeds for another year. By focusing on information that helps people make informed decisions, Grossi says IRI has shaped agriculture’s approach to climate change around the world.

Changing the timescale is also important for helping developing countries adapt to long-term climate change, explained Walter Baethgen, senior research scientist at IRI. “The best recipe for paralysis is to give policymakers information about the very far future, and in that information there is uncertainty.

Baethgen explained that IRI has helped move the issue of climate change from the future to the present. Under IRI’s leadership, leading agricultural networks will start the climate adaptation process by asking, “How can we improve our resilience today?” This is the best way to improve adaptation to future climates, says Bethgen.

Widespread and pervasive impact

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

Daniel Osgood explained how his team is working with farmers in developing countries to protect index insurance and other financial instruments against weather shocks. Governments can use forecasts to take advantage of good years by planting more productive seeds, or raise money to protect people from bad ones, he said. Similarly, individual farmers can act on information and receive seed financing in good years or expect insurance payouts in times of drought.

In Rwanda, IRI helped fill a 15-year gap in the climate record resulting from civil war and genocide. The agency has expanded this type of work to more than a dozen countries around the world.

In the humanitarian sector, relief agencies were trying to move from responding to disasters to anticipating them. In 2008, the West African Red Cross Center used projections made in his IRI to pre-mobilize resources for the first time. Baethgen said the damage from that flood was much less than the previous one.

In many cases, the impacts of IRI activities go beyond climate, agriculture and disasters. For example, if a farmer in Senegal has a bad year, it will not only affect their ability to provide for their family, but they may not be able to send their children to school. Girls may be left behind.

According to Grossi, when climate information is translated into useful services, individuals can turn collateral damage into positive impact.

what’s next

According to Andy Robertson, IRI’s next big challenge is forecasting three to four weeks in advance. “For years, we’ve been able to predict the weather pretty well,” he said. “Likewise, the seasonal outlook has become a reality since the breakthroughs of Cane and Zebiak, IRI and others. did.”

IRI is already working with partners to close the gap between weather and climate forecasting. Robertson provided an example of such a seasonal forecast, this year he generated on April 22nd, and in May it is likely to be above normal in India, and the forecast turns out to be very accurate. Did.

“We need information on all timescales,” says Robertson. “Connecting these things together—I think that’s the challenge going forward.”

John Furlow said being part of the Columbia Climate School has helped IRI build partnerships across the university and expand its scope of work. Seasonal forecasts to the energy sector.

Farlow and several others are committed to learning from IRI’s experience to help the Columbia Climate School, founded in 2020 to address the climate crisis, achieve ambitious goals on real-world impacts. expressed hope.

“This approach of looking at it from a problem and use perspective and figuring out where we can inject the right scientific information that can help this and that part – that’s the agenda,” said Zebiak. “I believe the roadmap IRI provides the world with is exactly what it needs to meet the more complex challenges of the future.”