The UK Climate Resilience Programme (UKCRP) is launching a new lunchtime webinar series in which both researchers and stakeholders will participate.
The hour-long webinars are being moderated by the Champion team for the UKCRP. They will showcase projects conducted for UKRI and by the Met Office for the first wave of the UK Climate Resilience Programme.
Each webinar will provide an overview of a project, its key findings and its implications. This will be followed by a response from a relevant stakeholder/non-academic partner, who will be invited to provide their perspective on the research process and outputs. The webinar will conclude with an open Q&A session with both panellists.
Webinar dates and speakers
Wednesday 10 June 12.00-13.00
Speaker: Dr Freya Garry, Climate Scientist, Met Office and Dr Ed Pope (Met Office)
Title: How will multiple climate hazards impact UK food over the 21st Century?
Register for the seminar: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_hoHg_e8pQu6fvvXWZbQ3Ew
Abstract: Compound climate events occur when climate drivers result in multiple climate hazards, leading to increased impacts relative to the hazards occurring separately. To classify as a compound event, hazards may occur concurrently, or consecutively, or might involve multiple climate drivers. The hazards may be spatially related or the first may be a preconditioning event that causes the second driver to result in a hazardous situation. In this seminar we will introduce compound climate events with a focus on the impacts to the UK agricultural sector. We will present initial results from case studies which include examples of different types of compound hazard. As well as characterising future changes to compound hazards, we aim to combine this information with exposure and vulnerability generate risk projections where possible. We will demonstrate our use of the UK Climate Projections perturbed parameter ensemble and discuss some of our plans for ongoing work.
Dr Ed Pope, Expert Scientist and Manager of the Climate Security team at the Met Office, will respond to the presentation, giving wider context on agricultural research at the Met Office and the pull through of science to decision making through the DEFRA Food and Farming Service.
Wednesday 24 June 12.00-13.00 
Speaker: Professor Hayley Fowler, Professor of Climate Change Impacts, Newcastle University (Project PI) and Murray Dale, Technical Director and Chartered Meteorologist, JBA
Title: FUTURE-DRAINAGE: Ensemble climate change rainfall estimates for sustainable drainage
Register for the seminar: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_suV4sNdQQxquSOOLZ5sj3g
Abstract: FUTURE-DRAINAGE will use outputs from the new UKCP18 perturbed physics convection-permitting model (CPM) ensemble (at 2.2km resolution across the UK) to produce revised rainfall ‘uplifts’, the first assessment of uncertainty in rainfall ‘uplifts’ and new guidance for UK urban drainage design and urban flood risk assessment for use in climate adaptation. This will include the development of a new regional pooling approach for spatially-correlated CPM outputs, and modelling to compare the national RoFSW methodology to outputs from fully-hydrodynamic urban flood models, for the same cities and uplifts, to quantify the uncertainty in and determine the level of detail in modelling needed for future urban flood predictions.
Consultation with water and sewerage companies (WaSCs), the Environment Agency (EA) and Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) is embedded within the FUTURE-DRAINAGE project. Eight WaSCs, the EA and SEPA were represented at a stakeholder workshop in September 2019 and the drainage community briefed further by a presentation by Murray Dale at the CIWEM Urban Drainage Group Annual Conference in November 2019. Aspects of the research concerning return periods of the results, regionalisation of the uplifts, uplift confidence and how to use the uncertainty estimates in practical ways in sewerage planning are being considered through the project with stakeholder input.
This presentation will explain the aims and objectives of the project and show some of the results so far on the new statistical method developed to produce return period estimates from CPM outputs across the UK, and some preliminary assessment of the uplifts.
Future webinars – confirmed speakers
8 July Dr Kate Lonsdale, UK Climate Resilience Champion: Creating climate resilience in the UK: What does this mean, and how might we achieve it?
9 September Professor Nick Pidgeon (Cardiff University): Understanding UK perceptions of climate risk and resilience.
23 September Simon Brown / Daniel Cotterill (Met Office): Statistical analysis and attribution of impact relevant climate extremes
7 October Andrew Charlton-Perez (University of Reading)/Mark Harrison (Met Office): Understanding heat related mortality
21 October Declan Conway (Grantham Research Institute, LSE): Characterising and adapting to climate risks in the UK wine sector.
4 November Don Monteith (UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology): Forecasting risk of environmental exacerbation of dissolved organic matter – building climate change resilience.
18 November Dr Neil MacDonald (University of Liverpool): Building UK climate resilience through bridging the qualitative-quantitative data divide.
2 December Professor Lisa Collins (University of Leeds): Smart systems approaches for climate resilient livestock production.
16 December Claire Scannell/Lizzie Kendon (Met Office): Urban climate change and climate services.
13 January 2021 Jon Stenning (Cambridge Econometrics): UK-SSPs: setting out socioeconomic trajectories for climate resilience research
Past webinars
Wednesday 20 May: Indicators of changing climate risk in the UK. Professor Nigel Arnell, Professor of Climate Science, Department of Meteorology, University of Reading and Brendan Freeman (Committee on Climate Change). See the full event listing, which includes a link to webinar recordings and slides