- Home
- Aid by Sector
- Environment
- General environmental protection
- Environmental research
Aid by Sector
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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: This year’s programme will build and expand 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. Work in Uganda will focus on developing a Health and Pollution Action Plan, creating a framework for future action that is aligned with priorities of national stakeholders. The programme will also establish Regional Pollution Forums, working in a multilateral way to amplify impact by spreading knowledge of successful interventions.
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
UKCEH National Capability ODA: Options for Net Zero Plus and Climate Change Adaptation
DEPARTMENT FOR SCIENCE, INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGY
Project centred on advancing the capabilities of selected LMIC countries (Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Senegal, South Sudan, Ghana, Nigeria) to deliver climate change mitigation and adaptation approaches. This includes 1) delivering capabilities that support the development and delivery of plans to reduce emissions and increase carbon sinks of natural and managed ecosystems while considering possible cascading effects and trade-offs that impact on the wellbeing and livelihoods of the population in beneficiary countries. 2) Supporting beneficiary countries in their National Adaptation Planning in response to climate change through enhancing the predictability of changing freshwater resources and improving hydro-meteorological forecasting to inform early-warning systems for cascading hazards.
BGS National Capability ODA: Geoscience to tackle global environmental challenges
DEPARTMENT FOR SCIENCE, INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGY
Global environmental challenges will be the focus of BGS' research, specifically: strengthening adaptation and resilience to geological hazards and climate change; security and sustainability of resource supply chains; and reduction in risk to urban and rural infrastructure. These are highly complex interconnected issues, all underpinned by the geosciences, and with an international collaborative approach the proposed research can play a role in tackling them. Our programme will be organised and managed around three interlinked Research and Innovation Challenges (RICs) representing the global environmental challenges: RIC 1: Living in multi-hazard environments RIC 2: Resources for the future RIC 3: Land use change Key to success is research co-designed and delivered via equitable partnerships. To facilitate this translation and to build-in opportunities for inter-connectivity of projects across the programme, we have framed the RICs to work in three key contexts to realise maximum benefit: (1) The urbanising world, representing areas experiencing rapid urbanisation, (2) Resource research emerging economies, representing countries essential to the global supply chain for minerals, energy and food, and (3) Communities on the climate change frontline, where effects will be most impactful or represent scenarios translatable to other parts of the world. BGS has extensive experience in geological multi-hazards research and support for national emergency response organisations. In RIC 1 we will (a) develop new methods for characterising, monitoring and forecasting hazards, both natural and anthropogenic, (b) undertake research into hazards and their impacts in multi-hazard locations including Indonesia, the Philippines and the UK Overseas Territories, and (c) investigate how geoscience knowledge and expertise supports disaster preparedness, response and recovery worldwide and how this can be improved. Geoscience is key to ensuring the sustainable supply of raw materials required to reach net zero, to continue global economic and social development and, along with the supply of food and water resources, to sustain and promote equitable development. Our RIC 2 research will focus on sub-Saharan Africa, the Li-Triangle in South America, and the Philippines. It will: (a) leverage BGS expertise in global raw material supply chain/circular economy research in critical and energy transition raw materials, raw materials for rapid urbanisation and trade-offs associated with mineral waste, (b) develop the geological model structures to facilitate the development of geothermal energy in LMICs, and requirements for sub-surface storage of CO2, and (c) inform strategies for the sustainable use of biophysical resources for food production and utilisation of water resources, for mitigation of environmental degradation and improve supply resilience to support population growth and climate change. Sustainable land management and climate change adaptation research in RIC 3 will work in south and south east Asia, Mexico and east Africa to investigate: (a) climate and anthropogenic pressures on climate and anthropogenic pressures on soil and water quality and quantity; (b) geoscience solutions for sustainable land management to improve agricultural and groundwater resilience; and (c) urban geohazards which are compounded by rapid expansion, and mitigations to increase resilience to these pressures and from climate change impacts.
Enhancing Indonesia's Disaster Preparedness Through an Innovative Multi-Risk Management Framework with ICT ecosystems
DEPARTMENT FOR SCIENCE, INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGY
Indonesia stretches along one of the most tectonically active boundaries in the world. Since 1970, earthquakes in Indonesia have led to over US$20 billion in economic losses and to hundreds of thousands of fatalities, sadly, many preventable with a better understanding of earthquake risk. Seismic risk increases over time and is exacerbated by rapid population growth and urbanisation. One of the greatest risks arises from substandard vulnerable structures, which account for a large proportion of fatalities and comprise most of existing building stock in urban and suburban regions of West Sumatra. Particularly in Padang city, such substandard structures are highly vulnerable and experienced catastrophic collapses during the 2009 West Sumatra earthquake. Whilst the Indonesian government has made some progress towards meeting the objectives set in the UN' Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, the risk of vulnerable structures in West Sumatra (one of the least developed areas in Indonesia) remains very high. As a result, there is an urgent need for better disaster preparedness, reliable vulnerability assessments and appropriate seismic risk management strategies to reduce potential losses in future earthquakes. In recent years, Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) have been proposed to enhance the quality of data and accuracy of seismic risk calculations. Field data from building images (i.e. building categories, geo-tag location) obtained from deep learning approaches can be used to calculate the empirical vulnerability of buildings, but such information is only useful if it is calibrated with real data and integrated into earthquake risk assessment frameworks. Social media can also provide large amounts of eyewitness data (e.g. video and images) about an earthquake but harnessing this data into useful information for emergency responders, search and rescue workers, and structural engineers is still a challenge and requires the use of big data and artificial intelligence. The aim of this project is to develop an innovative, rapid and efficient framework for multi-hazard seismic risk assessment with ICT ecosystems to enhance West Sumatra's disaster preparedness, using Padang city as a pilot case study. For the first time, the developed framework will consider the effect of earthquakes, tsunami, landslides and liquefaction. The methodology will be subsequently integrated into the innovative management system KERIS. The new framework and KERIS system are expected to support West Sumatra's Regional Disaster Management Agency (BPBD) in coordinating Disaster Risk Reduction efforts and policies in West Sumatra. The collaboration brings together leading institutions of the UK (University of Warwick) and Indonesia (Unversitas Bung Hatta, Institut Teknologi Bandung, and BPBD) with expertise in the fields of structural engineering and ICT. This collaborative project has the following Objectives. 1) Develop a rapid and efficient (on data management and computation) multi-hazard risk assessment methodology including data from ICT ecosystems using Padang as a pilot case study. 2) Propose innovative seismic risk mitigation and DRR management strategies, including a mobile app and the integration of the new framework into a new knowledge-management system (KERIS). 3) To organise workshops, seminars, networking events and visits between staff in the three universities so as to establish new long-term collaborations between them. The outcomes of the proposed research will give stakeholders in West Sumatra innovative and efficient tools for disaster mitigation, which is expected to reduce earthquake-related losses and promote sustainable development in the region.
Seismic Resilience of Egypt's Built Environment: A GIS-Based Framework for Assessment and Mitigation (Egypt-SeReAM)
DEPARTMENT FOR SCIENCE, INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGY
Natural disasters can have dire effects on countries, in the form of human casualties/injuries, infrastructure damage, economic and environmental losses. Earthquakes, in particular, are the most damaging as they are responsible for an annual death toll of over 20K and 20% of the total annual economic losses due to natural disasters. In low-income or developing countries, earthquake impacts are exacerbated, leading to substantial human loss, injuries, homelessness, and population displacement. Irreparable infrastructure damage can also have a great economic impact reaching 20% of a country's gross domestic income, leading to disruption of economic growth and development. Acknowledging this problem, there has been growing national interest in assessing regional seismic risk and loss for major cities. Several countries initiated Disaster Risk Management (DRM) programs which make use of the interdisciplinary advances in science and technology to model the complex interaction of hazard, exposure, and vulnerability and compute loss metrics that can be used by stakeholders and decision-makers to quantify of potential structural, economic, and social consequences, identify critical infrastructure components, outline pre-disaster damage mitigation measures and policies, and planning for post-disaster response protocols. Egypt, a lower-income country and one of Africa's most populated countries, is highly susceptible to the impacts of natural hazards (flooding, rising sea levels, and earthquakes). Several major cities, with populations larger than 5M and overly populated urban centers, are subject to high seismic risk triggered by risk drives such as poverty, climate change, decades of poor construction practices, and absence of municipal oversight. Countries with similar urban conditions, such as Albania and Turkey, experienced a wide extent of damage and losses from recent earthquakes. These countries, and others, allocate extensive funding and resources for DRM. On the other hand, the safety and robustness of Egypt's infrastructure is greatly under-researched. Although several studies investigated the seismic hazard for Egypt's major cities, no attention has been paid so far to either collapse risk assessment or loss and damage estimations (urban exposure, vulnerabilities, and resilience). Egypt-SeReAM will build on and further develop existing DRM methodologies to create such a digital framework for assessing the seismic resilience of Egypt's vulnerable built environment. A partnership between the University of Southampton, three of Egypt's top academic and research institutions will undertake this project combining different disciplines spanning urban planning, seismology, and structural engineering. The project will use the city of Alexandria as a pilot case study to establish the building blocks of the DRM framework concerned with built-environment resilience. The seismic vulnerability of Alexandria's urban center will be assessed, in terms of human, structural, and economic losses due to potential damage to the residential building stock. In the process, spatial urban, geotechnical, structural, and hazard data will be collected and an automated digital framework will be developed to quantify risk and loss under potential earthquake scenarios. The project will employ the geographic information system (GIS) mapping system to describe and communicate the earthquake consequences to the government, academia, industry, and public sectors. This will be packaged within an easily-to-use practice-oriented digital workflow that will assist authorities in making effective decisions for seismic protection measures to minimize potential damage and losses (primarily human, but financial as well) in future earthquakes. Through networking, training, and showcasing activities, the project will promote and specifically target Egypt's short- and long-term resilience to natural disasters, in support of its economic development.
Towards Low Cost Soil Fertility Sensor Systems for Smallholder Food Security in Kenya
DEPARTMENT FOR SCIENCE, INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGY
Food security is one of the "big four" agenda initiatives championed by the Kenyan Government. More than 80% of Kenya's population is dependent upon agriculture for employment, income, or food security needs (FAO) and a large proportion of the population are food insecure, for example 26% of children under 5 years of age suffer from malnutrition (UNICEF). The food security challenge is intensified by: reducing size of land parcels as a result of population growth; farmers being pushed into dryer lower quality land areas vulnerable to drought; conflicts resulting from competition for land; and people dropping out of nomadic life to move to settled communities dependent upon food aid (FAO). To address this, increases in agricultural productivity are needed. An important way to improve crop yield relates to better soil fertility. Optimising fertiliser strategies for soil can be summed up as: Right Source, Right Rate, Right Place, Right Time. For the greatest impact, this requires in-field measurement tools that can be used by farmers to understand the spatial changes in nutrient concentration within a field, and how these vary over time. No technology currently exists that allows this to be carried out at very low cost. The alternative to in-field testing is the use of soil laboratories in Nairobi, but these are expensive to use, far away from the farm and provide a single measurement which is not representative of the whole area farmed. In consequence, most smallholders are in the dark about the nutrition status of their soil and how it changes in response to different soil amendment approaches. This project will help address the measurement challenge by developing a new kind of sensor that can be used by farmers at very low cost to regularly test for two key soil macro-nutrients, called nitrate and phosphate. The project will take inspiration from ancient art and design based printing processes, combined with locally available natural materials (e.g. chimney soot, egg, newspaper and enzymes from plants and bacteria available within Kenya) to make extremely low cost soil sensors. By adopting a "co-creation" based philosophy, the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Kenyatta University in Nairobi and Glasgow School of Art in Glasgow will build a collaboration to deliver a step change in sensing technology for smallholder farmers in Kenya. This will be achieved by initially developing the sensor in the UK, employing a researcher from Kenya. Once a proof of concept has been created, the researcher will return to Kenya with the knowledge and understanding to recreate the sensor and test performance in greenhouse trials. The project will also involve a series of workshops where we will engage communities, industry and policy makers to ensure that we create user led solutions to address food security within Kenya. In the long term, this could be delivered to farmers either as a "factory in a box" containing the tools needed for sensor manufacture, or simply as an information pack that shows how to gather the resources required and print sensors. The project could also influence the wider region: 20 million people across Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia are food insecure (Worldbank, 2022), and face similar challenges.
Weather and Climate Science for Service Partnership S E Asia (WCSSP) - Calls - tender - UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS
DEPARTMENT FOR SCIENCE, INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGY
Strengthened partnership between meteorological services in UK, Philippines, Malaysia Vietnam, and Indonesia - research on understanding and evaluating convective processes over SE Asia.
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).
Climate Science for Service Partnership (CSSP) Brazil - Calls- tender-UNIVERSITY OF READING
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. Specifically this grant will support the development of communication materials to support partner uptake of programme outputs.
AI for Climate - calls - tender - UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS
DEPARTMENT FOR SCIENCE, INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGY
Kilometre-Scale Simulations for Al Training - High-impact weather (HIW) events, such as heavy rain and consequent flooding and landslides, or drought, can be devastating to the livelihoods of local people and the economy of many countries in the tropics. The societal and economic impacts of HIW include loss of human life, damage to property, destruction of crops, loss of livestock, poor health, displacement of populations, loss of infrastructure, severe disruption to transportation from heavy rainfall, and the suspension of many economic activities (UNDRR, 2019, 2020a, 2020b, 2020c). Almost all HIW is expected to increase across the tropics and sub-tropics with ongoing climate change, affecting the poorest and most vulnerable. Improved projections of climate change in HIW aid adaptation, and motivate mitigation. However, in many tropical regions it is unclear whether regions will become wetter or drier (IPCC), limiting adaptation. UPSCALE will focus on the tropics, where moist convection dominates rainfall and is a primary source of heating to the tropical atmosphere, and where we can use the full model hierarchy including the cyclic-tropical-channel. The UPSCALE project will conduct research into (1) the evaluation of the newly developed Met Office Convection-Permitting Models (CPM) hierarchy of simulations, and (2) the development and application of novel process-based diagnostics and propose sensitivity experiments to understand the mechanisms of up and down scale interactions in the CPMs vs. current simulations with parametrised convection, focusing on the value of large pan-tropical domains. These activities will benefit weather forecasting and climate prediction, especially for the tropics/sub-tropics, including the development of machine learning-based predictions. The K-Scale simulations work package would exploit UK and international research in K-scale modelling with both developed (Australia, U.S.) and developing countries (India, S. Africa) to derive additional value from these high-resolution simulations as training data for AI data driven prediction systems that could then be exploited by partners. The resource would accelerate development and evaluation of the K-scale predictions and work with dataset curators/developers to ensure efficient workflows for ML applications. Initially the work will be on using research we are currently collaborating with partners on and deployment with in-country partners in subsequent years.
Climate Science for Service Partnership (CSSP) Brazil - Calls- tender-UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS WP3
DEPARTMENT FOR SCIENCE, INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGY
Constraining future projections of wildfire and air quality in Brazil This project will bring together and analyse data on fire, climate, air pollution and human health to improve our understanding of the climate and human drivers of wildfire and poor air quality across Brazil. We will use new understanding gained from analysis of historical fires to help constrain future model projections of wildfire and air quality in Brazil. We will provide new evidence of how fire and land management alongside other mitigations could reduce exposure to poor air quality. We will work to develop UK-Brazil collaborations on wildfire and air quality and ensure outputs from the research inform policy and decision making in Brazil.
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.
Advanced filters
To search for Programmes in a specific time period, please enter the start and end dates.