The UK Climate Resilience Programme ran from 2019 to 2023
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Decision Support Tools

UK Climate Resilience Programme projects have produced a wide range of outputs, including some publicly available interactive tools that can be used to support decision making.

City Packs

A series of urban fact sheets were produced by the Met Office Climate Service Pilot work package on climate services and their delivery led by Met Office scientist Claire Scannell. The project aims to understand user needs for specific applications of local decision-making in aspects such as health, infrastructure and water.

City Packs, which were co-developed with local authorities and other relevant bodies, have been produced for a number of UK cities and regions (listed below).

The following City Packs were published in August 2022:

Climate Risk Indicators

The UK Climate Risk Indicators website provides information on future changes to indicators of climate risk across the UK. The information is provided at scales ranging from the district to the four nations of the UK, and for several different scenarios describing how global emissions of the greenhouse gases that cause climate change might increase in the future. Users can plot maps showing the variation in indicators across the UK and can plot and download time series for specific locations.

The estimates are available for different time periods up to the end of the century and for different assumptions about how greenhouse gas emissions change. They are presented using accessible maps and graphs. Research underpinning the data on the website was undertaken as part of the UK Climate Resilience Programme project on Climate Risk Indicators. The research was led by Principal Investigator Nigel Arnell of the University of Reading, and at the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, while the website was developed by the Institute for Environmental Analytics. The free-to-use website is aimed at agencies and decision-makers responsible for helping the UK adapt to and prepare for climate risks to communities, transport, infrastructure, buildings and agriculture. Read more here.

Climate Risk Indicators (uk-cri.org)

Coastal Resilience

The Coastal Resilience Model (CRM) is a tool developed from the CoastalRes project to quantitatively measure resilience to coastal erosion and flood hazard. The prototype Coastal Resilience Model (CRM) quantifies the economic, environmental and social dimensions of resilience with reference to a suite of performance measures that can be assessed using open-access geospatial datasets. The analytical approach uses Multiple-Criteria Analysis (MCA) to derive a composite Resilience Index derived from a broad set of diverse measures and data, as well as stakeholder weightings.

The CoastalRes methodology was developed using local case studies and the entire coast of England as a case study, and demonstrates the practicality of formalising and quantifying resilience at multiple scales.  This 12-month project was funded by the SPF UK Climate Resilience Programme and led by Principal Investigator Prof Robert Nicholls of the University of Southampton.

A prototype web portal funded by a UKCR Impact project entitled Enhancing community engagement in the adoption of coastal resilience, which will allow users to assign their own weightings to the different contributions to resilience, has been produced by University of Southampton researchers.

https://coastalresilience.uk/crm/

Coastal Decider

A Met Office Climate Service Pilot on Improving Coastal Resilience is co-developing with potential users a coastal resilience service by further developing the existing UKCP18 Sea Level Rise tool and methodology and combining with other relevant data such as tide gauge data or with surge and wave modelling outputs. This included the Met Office Coastal Decider tool (not publicly available).

The aim was to identify a list of ‘coastal risk’ weather patterns that are associated with flooding at multiple UK coastal locations. These coastal risk weather patterns were then used to create a coastal flooding application of the Met Office’s probabilistic medium- to long-range weather pattern forecasting tool (Decider), called Coastal Decider. Coastal Decider is used by the Flood Forecasting Centre to assist in the decision making process which alerts the Environment Agency and the wider responder community to the possibility of a coastal event at long lead times.

Crop-NET Yield Demonstrator

The CROP-NET project’s aim was to scope out the requirements for a robust, real-time crop and grass yield monitoring and modelling service for the UK to provide improved predictions of future climate change impacts. A Yield Demonstrator decision-making tool for the farming community was produced as an output from the project. The project was led by Principal Investigator Prof Richard Pywell of the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology.

The  demonstrator allows farmers to search for their farm or fields on a map (or using a postcode or grid reference) and brings up yield projections for wheat, oil seed rape and grass to 2080. Users can also see how the fields are likely to perform against other fields locally, regionally and nationally, providing a benchmarking facility. Allowing farmers to interrogate the climate change projections and how they will affect yields enables them to make decisions about future farming regimes.

Crop-NET Yield Demonstrator: https://cropnet-demonstrator.datalabs.ceh.ac.uk/

Erosion Hazards in River Catchment

The Decision Support Tool (DST) consists of a Mapviewer to illustrate the potential flood risks, erosion/deposition and associated costs for a number of river catchment case studies At the moment the only case study available to access is for Cockermouth, Cumbria (rivers Derwent and Cocker).

The tool is the work UKCR project, Erosion Hazards in River Catchments: Making Critical Infrastructure More Climate Resilient, led by Principal Investigator Dr James Cooper of the University of Liverpool.

Erosion Hazards in River Catchment DST

Heat Packs

Cities can be impacted by a range of weather and climate hazards including extreme heat, heavy rainfall and sea level rise. Our Heat Packs (factsheets) provide information on how extreme heat events in selected cities may change this century due to climate change, the impacts, and how to build resilience to extreme heat.

Heat Packs are available for the following cities:

Keep Bristol Cool Mapping Tool

The Keep Bristol Cool mapping tool is for policy makers and practitioners such as urban designers, landscape architects, or emergency planners. It demonstrates how current heat vulnerability varies across different neighbourhoods throughout Bristol, and how climate change may increase temperatures in the future.

The tool gives insights into how urban heat risks vary across the city and within communities. It also identifies the areas where high temperatures and heatwaves could have the biggest impact on people’s health and wellbeing.

This information will help Bristol City Council and other decision-makers in the city build greater resilience to high temperatures and heatwaves.

Keep Bristol Cool Mapping Tool

UK Lakes Observatory

The UK Lakes Observatory (UKLO) is a prototype operational service providing information on water quality for over 900 water bodies in the UK from satellite observations. The research behind UKLO was funded by the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 programme, but the UK Climate Resilience Programme funded a proof-of-concept study to demonstrate the power of new satellite data for monitoring algal blooms in waterbodies across the UK. It was led by Principal Investigator Dr Peter Hunter at the University of Stirling.

The service uses data from the European Space Agency’s Copernicus Sentinel-2A/B satellites to produce weekly aggregated estimates of the phytoplankton chlorophyll-a concentration at a 20 m pixel resolution. The data are processed using an innovative processing chain developed at the University of Stirling and visualised on a web-based platform.  The data are currently produced for about 900 UK lakes. 

There are ongoing plans to migrate the service to the cloud and move from weekly to daily  processing.

UK Lakes Observatory: https://3deo-portal.com/#/dashboard/scientificMap/UniversityOfStirling

UK Adaptation Inventory

The UK Adaptation Inventory has been compiled as part of the OpenCLIM project. The UK is considered to be at the forefront of national adaptation planning. However, the extent to which plans and programmes translate into tangible risk reducing action on the ground, as opposed to adaptive capacity building, remains less clear. The UK Adaptation Inventory aims to address this by documenting adaptation on the ground, based on national reporting to government by public and private sector organisations and a systematic review of peerreviewed literature.

UK Adaptation Inventory: https://www.nismod.ac.uk/openclim/adaptation_inventory

UKRI Met Office