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Knowledge, Evidence and Engagement Portfolio (KEEP)
UK - Department for Energy Security and Net Zero
KEEP is a research and engagement facility that enables HMG climate leads to commission bespoke evidence and engagement activities to improve the delivery and increase the ambition of UK International Climate Finance activities, supporting developing countries to tackle climate change. It facilitates this by making funds available for research and engagement activities, filling evidence gaps and by ensuring efficient quality assurance and approval procedures
UK Hydrographic Office - Skills Development Bursary
Ministry of Defence
The UKHO’s international bursary training programme is primarily aimed at cartographic capacity building and meets UKHO’s objectives of enhancing data supply with training (with skills and knowledge) and developing or strengthening relationships with key partners.
Global Programme on Sustainability
Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs
The programme supports sustainable economic growth that is both long-lasting and resilient to climate-related stressors. It does this through the integration of natural capital into decision making by governments, the private sector and financial institutions. The inability to value natural capital can undermine long-term growth and critically, the livelihoods of the poorest people dependent on ecosystems for their livelihoods. This programme directly addresses this challenge by (i) investing in data and research on natural capital; (ii) assisting countries to integrate this analysis into government policy making; and (iii) integrating this data and analysis into financial sector decision making.
International Climate Finance R&D Programme
Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs
This International Climate Finance (ICF) funded programme will deliver an integrated package of projects to strengthen global knowledge and understanding of the interrelationship between the climate and biodiversity challenges. It will seek to inform the work of policy developers and development practitioners globally and help narrow the funding gap between current and required investment in natural solutions to climate change. It recognises that the scaling, and effectiveness, of natural solutions to the triple challenge of climate change, poverty and biodiversity loss (hereafter referred to as ‘natural solutions’) requires an investment in the primary evidence base needed to inform effective decisions, and drive innovation in the future. The proposed package of work is designed to meet both short and longer-term evidence needs, including to deliver a UNFCCC and CBD legacy, focusing on ensuring strategic, policy-relevant results and a global network of knowledge exchange and learning. As part of this programme, the UK committed £40m to establish the Global Centre on Biodiversity for Climate (GCBC). The GCBC is funded by the UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) with International Climate Finance, working in partnership with DAI Global as the Management Lead. Through a series of research grant calls the GCBC will support GBF Targets 8,11 & 14 by establishing a global network of research institutions and experts to address critical research gaps in how the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity can address climate solutions and improve livelihoods. The GCBC was announced at COP26 with £40m of UK International Development funding. It contributes to the UK Government’s commitment to spend £3bn of its £11.6bn of International Climate Finance on nature and biodiversity over the 5 years to March 2026. The GCBC aims to support developing countries to shape decision-making and develop policies that better value, protect, restore and sustainably manage biodiversity in ways that tackle resilience to climate change and poverty. For more information, please visit www.gcbc.org.uk
Global Fund For Coral Reefs (GFCR)
Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs
Coral reefs are amongst the most valuable ecosystems on earth, harbouring the highest biodiversity of any ecosystem, supporting 25% of marine life and providing a myriad of benefits to thousands of species. The Global Fund for Coral Reefs (GFCR) is a project within the Blue Planet Fund portfolio. The GFCR is the first Multi-partner Trust Fund for Sustainable Development Goal 14. It provides finance for coral reefs with particular attention on Small Island Developing States. The GFCR promotes a ‘protect-transform-restore-recover’ approach through the creation and management of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) to save and protect coral reefs in the face of serious decline and extinction. The GFCR has four main outcomes: Protect priority coral reef sites and climate change-affected refugia Transforming the livelihoods of coral reef-dependent communities Restoration and adaptation technologies Recovery of coral reef-dependent communities to major shocks
PROBLUE
Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs
PROBLUE is the World Bank’s leading multilateral mechanism for leveraging and disbursing blue finance towards sustainable ocean sectors and activities. It is a multi-donor trust fund that supports the achievement of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 14, Life Below Water, and the Bank’s twin goals of ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity. PROBLUE aims to do this by reducing the existing blue finance gap by creating the necessary enabling environment for public and private sectors to shift from unsustainable to sustainable activities.
Environmental Pollution Programme
Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs
The Environmental Pollution Programme’s aim is to work with ODA-eligible countries and regions to reduce the adverse impacts of pollution. Work will improve health and reduce environmental harm and poverty that results from chemical, air, waste and water pollution, as part of the Triple Planetary Crisis. 2021-22: Scoping year to share expertise, best practice and invest in research to strengthen the capacity of low- and middle-income countries to meet their obligations under UN Multilateral Environment Agreements and frameworks. 2022-2025: Phase one delivering two multi-year projects in Vietnam and South Africa through delivery partners Global Alliance on Health and Pollution, the Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC) and in country organisations. The programme reduced pollution and its impacts on the environment and health by promoting sustainable, economically viable practices, strengthening regulations, and enhancing awareness through multi-sector engagement, robust evidence projects, capacity building and monitoring to support policymaking. 2025-26: Phase two delivered a one-year programme which built and expanded on the successful approaches on reducing air pollution and increasing uptake of integrated pest management in Vietnam, adding new work on waste and plastic pollution. The programme launched in Uganda and focussed on developing a Health and Pollution Action Plan, creating a framework for future action that is aligned with priorities of national stakeholders. The programme also established the Regional Pollution Forum platform, taking a multilateral approach in Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa to amplify impact by spreading knowledge of successful interventions.
Climate Science for Service Partnership (CSSP) Brazil - Calls- tender-UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
DEPARTMENT FOR SCIENCE, INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGY
Collaborative climate science research programme between Brazil and UK to improve understanding of recent climate changes and Brazil’s role in mitigation activities to inform international negotiations; to enhance projections of future weather and climate extremes and impacts to inform decision making and contribute to disaster risk reduction in Brazil. Research into Sub-seasonal and seasonal predictions for advancing climate services in Brazil.
Climate Science for Service Partnership (CSSP) Brazil - Calls- tender-UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS
DEPARTMENT FOR SCIENCE, INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGY
Collaborative climate science research programme between Brazil and UK to improve understanding of recent climate changes and Brazil’s role in mitigation activities to inform international negotiations; to enhance projections of future weather and climate extremes and impacts to inform decision making and contribute to disaster risk reduction in Brazil. Research hydrological cycle responses to land-use change and climate change over Brazil
Climate Science for Service Partnership (CSSP) Brazil - Calls- tender-UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
DEPARTMENT FOR SCIENCE, INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGY
Collaborative climate science research programme between Brazil and UK to improve understanding of recent climate changes and Brazil’s role in mitigation activities to inform international negotiations; to enhance projections of future weather and climate extremes and impacts to inform decision making and contribute to disaster risk reduction in Brazil. Research in understanding and attributing weather and climate events, and their socio-economic impacts on key food, water and health sectors in Brazil.
Climate Science for Service Partnership (CSSP) Brazil - Calls- tender-UNIVERSITY OF EXETER
DEPARTMENT FOR SCIENCE, INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGY
Collaborative climate science research programme between Brazil and UK to improve understanding of recent climate changes and Brazil’s role in mitigation activities to inform international negotiations; to enhance projections of future weather and climate extremes and impacts to inform decision making and contribute to disaster risk reduction in Brazil. Research into ecosystems responses to extremes.
Climate Science for Service Partnership (WCSSP) South Africa - Calls- tender-UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON
DEPARTMENT FOR SCIENCE, INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGY
Collaborative project between meteorological services in South Africa and UK focusing on capacity building for improved weather and climate services, enabling mitigation of risk from extreme weather events. Research into improving representation of Climate Variability and change over Africa by using Machine Learning as a tool for Data Rescue.
Climate Science for Service Partnership (WCSSP) South Africa - Calls- tender-UNIVERSITY OF PLYMOUTH
DEPARTMENT FOR SCIENCE, INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGY
Collaborative project between meteorological services in South Africa and UK focusing on capacity building for improved weather and climate services, enabling mitigation of risk from extreme weather events. Research into advancing rip current forecasts for beach locations across South Africa.
Climate Science for Service Partnership (WCSSP) S E Asia - Calls- tender-UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON
DEPARTMENT FOR SCIENCE, INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGY
Strengthened partnership between meteorological services in UK, Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Indonesia. Research in understanding responses to Impact-based Forecasts and Warnings with a view to better quantifying the value of warnings.
Weather and Climate Science for Service Partnership (WCSSP) India - Calls- tender-SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY FACILITIES COUNCIL (STFC)
DEPARTMENT FOR SCIENCE, INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGY
To undertake research on natural hazards in South Asian Monsoon system (both summer and winter); Improve capability of global coupled, regional convective scale (km) coupled and sub-km city-scale (300m) modelling frameworks to predict priority natural hazards over India. This is for 100TBAs storage on the JASMIN system to support scientists storing and sharing their outputs in order to carry out research for the weather and climate science to service partnership (WCSSP).
Weather and Climate Science for Service Partnership S E Asia (WCSSP) - Calls - tender - SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY FACILITIES COUNCIL (STFC)
DEPARTMENT FOR SCIENCE, INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGY
Strengthened partnership between meteorological services in UK, Philippines, Malaysia Vietnam, and Indonesia. This is for 100TBAs storage on the JASMIN system to support scientists storing and sharing their outputs in order to carry out research for the weather and climate science to service partnership (WCSSP).
Weather and Climate Science for Service Partnership (WCSSP) South Africa - Calls- tender-HR WALLINGFORD
DEPARTMENT FOR SCIENCE, INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGY
Informing context-specific needs for impact-based early warning systems South Africa experiences a wide range of weather and climate-related extremes, including droughts, storms, floods and heat waves which are projected to get worse with climate change. Recent examples of extreme weather events include the 2018 drought in the Western Cape, when Cape Town came dangerously close to what was described as "Day Zero", the moment when approximately four million inhabitants would have been left without water (Pascale et al., 2020) and the April 2022 floods in KwaZulu-Natal which left over 460 people dead and caused US$1.6 billion of damage (Keen et al., 2022). In February 2025, South Africa was hit by extreme weather which resulted in thunderstorms, tornados and flash floods over large areas of the country leading to widespread disruptions to the education system in some provinces and two school children tragically dying in flash floods (Daily Maverick, 2025). Climate change will have an impact on South Africa via, for example, increases in droughts which will affect the agricultural sector and maximum wet bulb temperatures which will adversely affect mortality rates, especially for those living in informal settlements, where houses are often constructed of sheets of corrugated iron (Chersich et al., 2018). Under a high greenhouse gas emissions pathway, climate change is also projected to have potentially devastating impacts on South Africa’s coastal settlements and infrastructure, owing to rising sea levels, coastal erosion, and changing storm patterns, which will combine to worsen coastal flood events (Cartwright, 2011; Dube et al., 2021). One way to ameliorate the effects of extreme weather-related events is via Impact-based Forecasts and Warnings (IbFWs). IbFWs provide stakeholders with the information they need to act before disasters occur, helping them to reduce the socio-economic costs of weatherrelated hazards. In 2020, the South African Weather Service (SAWS) introduced a new severe weather warning system which provides impact-based warnings. SAWS adopted a qualitative approach, as opposed to a quantitative model-based approach, to identify impacts, whereby hazard forecasts are translated into qualitative and selected impacts by emergency managers on the ground. This approach means that emergency managers make the choices on which impacts deserve to be communicated, and which ones are left out.
Weather and Climate Science for Service Partnership (WCSSP) South Africa - Calls- tender-UKCEH
DEPARTMENT FOR SCIENCE, INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGY
WARD SA: Water Availability duRing Drought in South Africa South Africa is a semi-arid to arid country, with low rainfall (~500 mm annual average) (Abiodun, Naik , Mogebisa, & Makhanya, 2022) and high evaporation rates. Rainfall over South Africa is highly variable, both spatially and temporally, and the country often experiences meteorological drought. The intensity of meteorological drought is projected to increase under climate change (Engelbrecht F. A., Steinkopf, Padavatan, & Midgley, 2024), and is a significant risk to sustainable development into the future. Because of South Africa’s high levels of terrestrial, freshwater and marine biodiversity and endemism, South Africa’s progress towards environmental sustainability is critically dependent on being able to predict and manage hydro-climate risks into the future (Mutanga, et al., 2024). While South Africa has a long tradition of research-based approaches to the management of its water resources (Morant & Quinn, 1999) and there has been significant research on future climate over Southern Africa (Engelbrecht F. A., Steinkopf, Padavatan , & Midgley , 2024; Engelbrecht & Monteiro, 2021), there have been relatively few studies on the impacts of climate change on hydrology and water resources (Kusangaya, Warburton, van Garderen, & Jewitt, 2014). This information is key to future planning of water resource management, to assist decision making and to inform potential adaptation and mitigation strategies. Until relatively recently, land surface models, such as the Joint UK Land Environment Simulator (JULES), have tended to ignore water resource management activities, instead representing a more nearly natural system. More recently land surface models have started to recognise the importance of better representing human management of the natural world, often using approaches pioneered in earlier global hydrology models such as H08, WaterGAP and GWAVA (Hanasaki N. , et al., 2008; Döll, Kaspar, & Lehner, 2003; Meigh, McKenzie, & Sene, 1999). However, to date JULES includes very little description of water resource management – just a simple scheme to acquire water for irrigation from soil and then rivers. Land surface models are used across a range of resolutions (i.e. the model gridbox size) from of the order of 50 km for global earth system applications, to of order 1 km in so-called “K-scale” applications. An area of active research is the extent to which model formulation and parameterisations need to be adapted for K-scale, and water resource management is no exception here. In WARD SA we will address these knowledge gaps by building on existing Water Resource Management (WRM) functionality in JULES to create a modelling tool which can be applied at coarse and fine spatial scales to assess the impacts of climate change on available water resources in Southern Africa. Driving data from the Inter-Sectoral Impacts Model Inter-comparison Project (ISIMIP) at 0.5⁰ spatial resolution, and km-scale data from convection-permitting models, will be used to produce simulations that can inform effective climate adaptation and mitigation action. Working closely with South African partners, different land and water resource management options will be investigated through a set of exploratory runs, demonstrating the potential for this tool to inform critical policy decisions. Alongside the development of JULES, WARD SA will explore the potential of Machine Learning (ML) methods to aid water resource forecasting in reservoirs. Machine Learning methods are being increasingly applied to hydrological modelling, particularly Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) models (Kratzert, Gauch, Klotz, & Nearing, 2024). There are far fewer studies applying ML methods to reservoir storage or outflow (Dai, et al., 2022; García-Feal, González-Cao, Fernández-Nóvoa, Dopazo, & Gómez-Gesteira, 2022), perhaps because this data is far less available than streamflow data, but the restricted nature of reservoir data is what makes it a good candidate for ML methods. Operating rules for managed reservoirs are rarely openly available, so process-based models rely on generic equations with calibrated or approximated parametrisations, but ML methods can “learn” the operating rules provided there is sufficient training data. These ML models can then be run independently with appropriate driving data, or used as part of a hybrid modelling approach, to improve reservoir storage predictions and downstream flow simulations.
Weather and Climate Science for Service Partnership S E Asia (WCSSP) - Calls - tender - UNIVERSITY OF READING
DEPARTMENT FOR SCIENCE, INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGY
Understanding and Prediction of Compound Ocean-Atmosphere Storms in the Tropics (SEA-COAST) The South-East Asia region (SEA) is prone to extreme precipitation and winds from weather systems operating at different scales, e.g. squall lines, tropical cyclones or cold surges. Ocean processes like ocean tides, sea-waves and ocean surge driven by these weather systems can aggravate their impacts, the so-called compound events. For example, increasing the risk of flooding in extreme precipitation events, or the risk of damaging infrastructure in extreme wind cases. The provision of effective weather warnings for coastal hazards over the SEA region requires sophisticated modelling tools, with enough detail to represent the multiscale behaviour of local hazards, the interactions between different components of the environment and the region’s complex coastlines and orography. Forecasting tools to support decision-making include an atmosphere model at convective scale resolutions to capture the convection processes and its feedback to larger scales, a full 3-D or a 2-D barotropic ocean model to capture tides and storm surge, and a wave model to capture the total sea level. These models run as an ensemble with schemes representing the uncertainty of the initial condition and modelled processes to capture the uncertainty of the events. Relevant areas of improvement include the prediction of the impacts and uncertainty of costal hazards linked to (a) tropical cyclone landfall for cases where rapid intensification occurred, (b) smaller-scale convective processes with an associated storm surge and enhanced seawaves. This work is focused on developing scientific understanding on the predictability of coastal hazards over SEA and the development of prototypes for forecasting coastal hazards and collaboration with in-country partners.
Weather and Climate Science for Service Partnership (WCSSP) India - Calls- tender-PML
DEPARTMENT FOR SCIENCE, INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGY
River outflow to the ocean in the NEMO model of the Regional Coupled System is currently prescribed as pure fresh water input, either at the surface or on a few ocean levels. However, in reality, fresh water gets mixed with marine water in estuaries, and the inflow into the ocean has a very different salinity and temperature profile with depth than what is currently done in the NEMO model at river outflow points. Current Met Office simulations do have stability issues at river outflow points, because of the current crude estimation of river flows. Estuary box models are considered as the way forward for ocean models which can't explicitly resolve estuaries (Matte et al. 2025). This will enable better numerical stability to run month-long or multi-decadal simulations and better oceanic circulation, due to improved temperature and salinity profiles near coastlines. This work will allow a better understanding of the interactions between river outflow and the ocean to enable partners to better assess potential impacts and thus mitigate against climate change. Primary beneficiaries would be the South Asian region, particularly those countries with an Indian Ocean coastline.
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