The challenge
Many people think of climate change as a future problem.
The solution
World Weather Attribution has made scientific advances to determine how climate change intensifies weather disasters.
The impact
Highlight the urgent need to both reduce emissions and become more resilient to extreme weather events.
When an extreme weather event occurs, people often ask if climate change is to blame. Thanks to the World Weather Attribution (WWA) research group, the science now exists to accurately answer the question.
Groundbreaking research on climate change
For decades, climate scientists made the general assertion that, as the planet warms, we can expect extreme weather events to become more frequent and extreme. Recently, however, advances in attribution science have enabled researchers to address the issue in much greater detail. Founded in 2015, WWA is a research group at Imperial College London, that has shifted the misconception that climate change is a distant threat.
Proving the climate-change weather link
Using groundbreaking analyses, WWA has uncovered the fingerprint of climate change on more than 80 devastating fires, floods, heatwaves and droughts around the world. Working with scientists globally, WWA quantifies how climate change influences the intensity and likelihood of an extreme weather event, using weather observations and computer modelling. For example, in 2022, when the UK experienced temperatures above 40°C for the first time ever, a study by WWA found the heat would have been virtually impossible in a world without climate change. The results are made public as soon as they are available, often days or weeks after the event, to inform discussions about climate change and extreme weather.
Weather analysis in action
Since 2015, WWA has carried out more than 80 attribution studies worldwide on heatwaves, extreme rainfall, drought, floods and forest wildfires. The methods have evolved over the last decade, with studies of individual events published in peer-reviewed journals. From the exceptional Amazon drought in 2023, to this year’s deadly heatwaves in North and Central America, WWA’s rapid attribution analysis has determined how much more likely these extreme weather events were due to climate change (30 times and 35 times respectively). As well as encouraging actions to make communities and countries more resilient to future extreme weather events, WWA studies also evaluate how existing vulnerability worsened the impacts of the extreme weather event.