The Grantham Institute at Imperial is part of a winning consortium for a new research programme to inform UK policy-makers on climate change.

The programme, called AVOID 2, will deliver scientifically robust, policy relevant evidence to UK policy-makers and provide a forum for sharing analysis with other key countries engaged in the international climate negotiations.  

The work will be carried out by a multi-disciplinary consortium of UK research organisations, led by the Met Office, and including the Grantham Institute for Climate Change, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at UEA, and the Walker Institute for Climate Systems Research at the University of Reading.

AVOID 2 will run over the next two years, a critical period in the international climate change negotiation process, when the scale of greenhouse gas mitigation ambition and structure of a global climate agreement will be shaped.

The initial AVOID research programme was established in 2009 to provide scientifically-robust, policy-relevant answers to questions directly related to the Ultimate Objective of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which is to ‘prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system’.

AVOID 2 will build on the previous research outputs to provide the robust and policy relevant science needed to inform the international policy discussions, leading up to the important UNFCCC Conference of Parties meeting (COP21) in Paris in September 2015.  

Some of the research areas the programme will cover include: understanding what global and regional temperature impacts can be expected under different scenarios; investigating limits to the rate at which systems can be decarbonised; and considering the economic risks to the UK economy from global impacts, such as supply chain disruptions.

Speaking at the Climate Week awards on Tuesday 4 March, Greg Barker MP, Minister of State at the Department of Energy & Climate Change said:

“If left unabated, climate change will have a devastating effect and the UK Government has shown early and consistent leadership and adopted some of the most ambitious climate change targets in the world.

“But it’s not just governments that need to take action.  With the UK’s leading research organisations working together with international partners, the AVOID 2 programme is helping to answer vital questions on climate change that will inform our international climate negotiations.”

Dr Simon Buckle, Policy Director at the Grantham Institute, who will be leading the international engagement activity for the AVOID 2 programme, said:

“This is a critical period for international action on climate change.  Achieving agreement on an environmentally, politically and economically credible set of commitments in time for the Paris climate summit is a highly non-trivial task.  The AVOID 2 programme will engage with UK and international policy makers on the key issues they will need to grapple with over the next 18 months. 

We hope that the objective and evidence-based research and analysis provided by AVOID2 will help make clearer the scale of the risks posed by climate change and help governments to assess the options we have to limit those risks.”

See the AVOID website for more information