The WCRP implementation plan needs to clearly articulate the research priorities that will guide and direct the science needed to enable rapid progress towards providing societally-relevant climate information. After consultation and discussion with the WCRP leadership and community, we landed on two high-level research priorities, that we call our "Implementation Priorities." These are to:
- Understanding how extremes change with climate change
- How climate knowledge, data, and information can best be used to quantify risk
- How this knowledge and information can be integrated into risk assessment frameworks and also enable opportunities to also be identified.
- It is not for WCRP to develop or implement mitigation policies, but those organizations and societal actors who do design and implement such policies need to be guided and informed by the latest and best quality climate science – alongside other sciences and technologies of course.
- Mitigation includes geoengineering; a form of climate intervention that absolutely needs WCRP science (along with consideration of liabilities, ethics, technologies etc.).
- "Evaluate" includes the advice we provide on how to best to monitor and track the efficacy of mitigation policies and agreements like the Paris Agreement (as is already done, for example in the case of the Montreal Protocol or Stockholm convention)
Click the white boxes for a more detailed explanation of each implementation priority
The Implementation Priorities provide guidance and direction to the science needed so that robust and actionable regional to local climate information can be delivered, in support of, for example:
- Implementing the UN Sustainable Development Goals
- Informing disaster risk reduction plans such as the Sendai Framework
- Climate adaptation and mitigation policies and agreements
To find out how to connect with us on this journey, see our connect page.
Last Updated: 21 July 2020