Climate science is a key tool for governments tasked with preparing citizens and infrastructure for the impacts of global warming.
But translating climate information into policy planning is no easy feat.
In a recent study, published in Climate Policy, we explore how climate science is – and is not – being used in national-level adaptation planning in 16 countries in southern Africa.
We find that there is often a disconnect between analysis of climate data, assessments of climate impacts and proposed adaptation options.
Adaptation plans are also often failing to look at the full range of plausible climate futures.
As well as identifying key barriers in how climate projections are being used, we offer some recommendations for how climate science could be more effectively integrated into adaptation plans, including enhancing collaboration between scientists and adaptation planners and clarifying what is meant by scientific uncertainty.
Climate adaptation
Climate adaptation can take place at many levels – from someone painting their roof white to keep their home cooler, for example, all the way up to the construction of large-scale flood defences.
Adaptation measures can include sustainable agricultural methods, including agroforestry; water collection and storage, such as dams; and public services, such as early warning systems and impact-based weather warnings.
Adaptation can be a response to current conditions, or a long-term plan based on projections of future climate change.
In many countries in southern Africa, governments face pressing economic challenges and deep structural inequalities, in addition to pronounced impacts from weather events. Long-term planning is not always at the top of priority list.
Yet, awareness of future climate might be crucial to avoid maladaptation – when adaptation interventions have negative consequences which increases vulnerability to climate change. (For example, a measure designed to increase irrigation to improve agricultural yields in a region projected to become drier, leading to increased water insecurity.)
National communications
To get a picture of how climate science is being factored into country-level adaptation planning, we analyse information in “national communications” submitted by countries to the UN, as well as conduct interviews with experts, government officials and climate scientists.
National communications are reports where countries provide updates on their vulnerability to climate change, as well as an inventory of their greenhouse gas emissions and the steps they are taking towards emissions reduction and adaptation.
Our study looks at national communications submitted by the 16 countries that form the Southern African Development Community (SADC). These are Angola, Botswana, Comoros, Democratic Republic of Congo, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Seychelles, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
Developing countries are required to submit national communications every four years to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
All southern African countries featured in the analysis have submitted at least one national communication. (Namibia and Zimbabwe have submitted five each.)
However, the UNFCCC’s guidance on how to assess climate impacts and vulnerability is very brief. It notes that countries “may use appropriate methodologies and guidelines they consider better able to reflect their national situation”.
The lack of specific guidance is perhaps not surprising, given that – currently – scientists do not have a common method for developing robust climate information to support decisionmaking. This has been recognised by the World Climate Research Programme, which has set up a working group that aims to establish what it means for a scientific product to be “robust”, or fit for informing local or regional decisionmaking.
In the absence of specific guidance, norms appear to have developed in the national communications.
Most of the national communications in southern Africa include a dedicated section on future projections from climate models. These tend to use global or regional climate models, such as CORDEX Africa.
The climate projections included in the national communications have a strong emphasis on long-term changes to temperature and rainfall.
The plot below demonstrates how temperature and rainfall projections are used in different ways in the 16 national communications in the analysis. For example, it shows that 13 reports include projections of annual precipitation variables, 10 feature projections for seasonal precipitation change and nine mention annual temperature projections.
However, we find that few countries chose to focus on other variables – such as heatwave or extreme rainfall indices – in the climate projections section of their national communications, despite these extremes often resulting in large impacts.
While there was an emphasis on flooding and drought in many reports, this was typically found in the impacts and adaptation section, which was often disconnected from analysis of climate projections.
All 16 national communications cited floods as a “top five hazard” and 13 included drought. However, in sections on climate projections, the reports rarely included analyses beyond average temperature and rainfall. Just four national communications included projections of sea level rise, while projections for tropical storms, ocean temperature and flooding were featured in one each.
We also find the impacts and adaptation sections typically lean on impact modelling and experience from recent weather events, not climate projections analysis.
(Impact models are used to test how climatic changes might influence other systems, for example crops, water resources or human health. These impact models sometimes use climate projections as an input – but not always.)
In the national communications, we find that, in some instances, there was a clear link between the climate projections section and impacts assessment. However, this was not always the case.
Accounting for uncertainty
We also find that most national communications are not adequately accounting for uncertainty in climate projections.
Climate projections are generated by running climate models with hypothetical future scenarios. These scenarios take into account different socioeconomic pathways the world may take, with implications for the amount of greenhouse gases emitted and the amount of global warming.
Such is the complexity of the climate system and the many unknowns of how global society will develop in future, there is a wide range of uncertainty in the projections that models produce.
While temperature projections tend to be relatively consistent across different climate models, rainfall projections – especially in regions such as southern Africa – carry much greater uncertainty. For many countries, some models suggest it will be wetter in future, while other models suggest it will be drier.
However, we found this uncertainty was not always stated in national communications. For example, some national communications use only a single model, the average across a collection of models or a single emissions scenario – meaning the range of climate futures and risks countries could face is not always being considered.
To best support adaptation planning, climate projections should be combined with interpretation. When climate projection data are presented on their own, they only tell us what the models show. Interpretation is needed to help decisionmakers consider what this data can tell us about the real world.
(There is a good example from South Africa’s third national communication, which uses a relatively novel approach for representing uncertainty. It uses “narratives” to describe the different climate futures that are possible in each province, such as “hot and dry” or “warmer, wetter”.)
Overall, it is not clear if the climate science set out in national communications is being used when deciding on adaptation options – raising the question of what role future climate information is playing in the documents.
Barriers
Climate science is complex – communicating and interpreting findings, as well as uncertainties, can be challenging. Uncertain rainfall projections in southern Africa in particular is making decisionmaking difficult.
To understand the barriers to integrating climate projections into adaptation decisionmaking, we interviewed 18 experts. This included government decisionmakers and technical experts, as well as climate modellers and applied researchers tasked with translating science for government officials.
One impact modeller told us: “The [climate projection] results are not agreeing. So then the question is, which results do you adopt at national level?”
We find that end “users” of future climate information, such as governmental adaptation planners, are not always able to interpret complex or uncertain findings – and have trouble accessing spatially-detailed information they require.
In some sectors, such as water and infrastructure, users and decisionmakers are knowledgeable and accustomed with uncertain climate projections – but officials in sectors such as health are less familiar.
Meanwhile, the flow of information from climate scientist to decisionmaker is not always direct. Instead, experts in third-party organisations – such as applied researchers or impact modellers – play a role in passing on information.
These external experts – which we refer to in the study as “boundary agents” – can improve the translation and dissemination of information between scientists and decisionmakers. However, in some instances, information is lost.
Our analysis shows that climate projections can become increasingly more certain as they are passed along by boundary agents. As one experienced climate scientist who has helped develop numerous national documents to the UN explained:
“Sometimes you use words like: ‘This looks like [a] plausible [pathway], this is one of the likely [pathways] that this signal is going to look like’ … But even if you have tried to maintain that these are probabilistic statements…don’t be surprised when you go some pages down the line [to read]: ‘this region is likely to get warmer by 5C’. Then you get a statement that says, ‘according to the climate model, we’re going to experience 5C warmer temperatures in the future’.“
Lessons for the future
Our study analyses tips from experts on how climate science could be more effectively used in adaptation planning, based on real-world experience.
The measures highlighted by the experts include:
- Creating spaces for collaboration between scientists and adaptation decisionmakers.
- Inviting adaptation decisionmakers to be included in the development of scientific analyses, to boost their understanding of uncertainty and different climate variables. This could also help scientists better understand the information needs of adaptation decisionmakers.
- Explaining climate science jargon, including by avoiding abbreviations such as DJF (meteorological nomenclature for December, January and February) or SSP (for shared socioeconomic pathways).
- Clarifying what is meant when discussing uncertainty, given that climate scientists are likely to be discussing uncertainties in climate modelling while adaptation planners uncertainty in governance and finance.
- Ensuring that maps and figures designed to communicate uncertainty are intuitive to people outside the world of climate science.
Overall, our research shows that there are adaptation processes in southern Africa where future climate projections are being included. However, it raises questions about how far the implications of future climate change are being integrated and understood.
Work is needed to incorporate a broader range of climate projections into planning – in particular, variables related to extreme weather such as heatwaves and flooding, which lead to large impacts, such as heat-related deaths or destruction of crops.
The uncertainties in climate projections must also be better considered, communicated and understood. This challenge is not unique to southern Africa; scientists around the world have important work to do to figure out how to communicate “robust” future climate information to decisionmakers.
Enhanced collaboration between climate scientists and planners, improved communication approaches and effective use of “boundary” organisations can help remove some of the barriers to the effective use of climate science in national adaptation planning in southern Africa.
The post Guest post: How climate science is – and is not – shaping adaptation planning in southern Africa appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Guest post: How climate science is – and is not – shaping adaptation planning in southern Africa
The United Nations Secretary-General and foreign ministers from the UK, France and Spain have blamed the deadly wildfires engulfing Europe on climate change, using the disaster to renew calls for faster cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.
António Guterres told journalists on Friday that the “climate crisis is in overdrive”, adding that global heat seen so far is just a “warm up act” as a phenomenon known as El Niño intensifies “adding fuel to a planet already on fire”.
A new World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) report published on Friday predicts that the weather pattern will grow into a “strong event” between now and October, increasing the risk of higher than normal temperatures across much of the world and disrupted rainfalls.
“That risks shattering every seasonal record – and driving even more severe effects worldwide,” Guterres said.
El Niño builds on top of an already warming world, driven primarily by the burning of fossil fuels. A WMO scientist, who did not want to be named, told journalists that all the heatwaves and other climate impacts seen so far this year are “before the effects of El Niño are really kicking in at a global scale”.
Fossil fuellling the fires
Fires have broken out across much of Europe but are threatening the most people in the south-west of France near Bordeaux and in Central Spain near Madrid. Nearly a quarter of a million people have been evacuated in France with hundreds of homes destroyed while in Spain 80,000 people have had to leave their homes and at least 13 died in one village.
A scientific study published on Friday by the World Weather Attribution group found that man-made climate change made deadly fires in France twice as likely and those in Spain twenty times more likely. Smaller fires in the UK were not analysed by the study.
UN Climate Change leader Simon Stiell blamed fossil fuels for the fires, as well as storms in Chile and heatwaves in North America and Japan in recent weeks. “The climate alarm is blaring”, he said on Wednesday.
Guterres criticised new fossil fuel production projects and fossil fuel subsidies for causing hardship across the world. Discussing his speech, a senior UN official – who did not want to be named – said the subsidies amounted to trillions of US dollars a year and criticised pension funds and institutional investors, including insurance companies, for continuing to invest in fossil fuel projects.
Asked why world leaders and the public are not prioritising climate action, Guterres said they are distracted by wars in Ukraine, the Middle East, Sudan and elsewhere and sometimes forget “other aspects that are a sometimes even more dangerous threat”.
Also the fossil fuel industry and “some countries” are campaigning to pretend that climate change does not exist, he said, adding that the UN should be more active in “naming the situations as they are and the responsibilties as they are and mobilising the public opinion”.
After meetings in Paris and Madrid earlier in the week, the UK’s new foreign minister Ed Miliband issued joint statements with his French and Spanish counterparts – Jean-Noël Barrot and José Manuel Albares Bueno – calling on the world to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels.
They promised to do more to reduce emissions and protect their people and encouraged other governments to do the same.
The UK-French statement called on governments to publish UN climate plans, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs), which are aligned with the Paris Agreement’s goal to limit global average temperatures to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
According to Climate Action Tracker, only three countries – the UK, Nigeria and Norway – have submitted NDCs with 2035 emissions reduction targets which are compatible with 1.5C. Fifty-two countries – including Egypt, Vietnam and Argentina – have yet to submit an NDC at all.
Defending science
Beyond action on emissions, the ministers also intervened in an ongoing dispute over the timing of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC)’s next flagship assessment.
Miliband and Barrot’s statement said they “underline the importance” of scientific report feeding into governments’ next global stocktake of progress on climate action in two years’ time, calling it a “critical input” to that process.
The timing of this report has been a contentious issue in government negotiations at the IPCC and at June’s climate talks in Bonn. While a group of nations calling themselves the “friends of science” want the report before the stocktake, others like Saudi Arabia and India have argued that this would make the report of a worse quality and less inclusive of developing countries’ scientists.
Science ‘under attack’ from fossil fuel interests at UN climate talks
The UK-Spanish statement weighed in less explicitly on this issue but said that they “recall the importance of scientific evidence and acknowledge the work of the IPCC in this respect.”
The British and French ministers said they would seek to accelerate reductions of emissions in methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas, at COP31 in November. They encouraged governments “to work jointly to develop a marketplace for fossil fuels with near-zero methane intensity.”
Methane leaks from oil, gas and coal production are a major contributor to global warming. Over a 20-year period, methane traps around 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide.
The UK and Spanish statement emphasised the importance of supporting the Global South and underlined the need to mobilise sustainable financing “at scale with the challenge we face”. The previous UK government, in which Miliband was energy minister, cut climate finance to developing countries to pay for increases in military spending.
The UK government led by new Prime Minister Andy Burnham has yet to outline any major changes to climate finance in its two weeks in power but has announced it will convert some finance from grants to loans in order to free up money to subsidise bus travel in England.
More adaptation needed
Guterres said that “it is time to stop treating each disaster as an isolated tragedy and recognise the systemic risk that is unfolding before our eyes.” A recent study found that three-quarters of UK media reports about the British June heatwave did not mention climate change.
As well as reducing emissions, the UN Secretary-General called for measures to adapt vulnerable people to extreme heat. Specifically, he said that buildings should be built and retrofitted for extreme heat and that every city and country should have heat-health action plans and early warning systems. Over 250 cities have joined the UN’s ‘beat the heat’ initiative, he said.
The Portuguese diplomat called for governments and employers to do more to protect their workers from heat, criticising global fashion brands for not setting heat standards for the factories that supply them. “No one should have to risk their life to earn a living,” he said.
The post UN chief warns climate crisis “in overdrive” as El Niño threatens to fuel the fire appeared first on Climate Home News.
UN chief warns climate crisis “in overdrive” as El Niño threatens to fuel the fire
Climate Change
‘Ride the wave of momentum’: Australia announces once-in-a-decade Marine Parks Network review
In response to the federal government announcing its once-in-a-decade review of Australia’s Marine Parks Network, the following lines can be attributed to Elle Lawless, Senior Campaigner at Greenpeace Australia Pacific:
“Greenpeace Australia Pacific welcomes today’s announcement that the Albanese Government will review Australia’s Commonwealth Marine Parks Network. This is a rare, once-in-a-decade opportunity to strengthen our marine parks and ban industrial fishing in Australia’s marine protected areas.
“Australians would be appalled to know that more than half of Australia’s Marine Parks Network currently allows for extractive industries, like longlining, bottom trawling and oil and gas mining. These so-called ‘protected’ areas were designed to safeguard our beloved ocean wildlife and underwater ecosystems – that is what Australians expect. Damaging industrial industries should not be given a free pass to trawl, fish, drill or extract from our marine parks.”
“With the first Ocean COP just around the corner, and off the back of Australia’s move to ratify the Global Ocean Treaty earlier this year, the Australian government has a unique opportunity to ride the wave of this momentum and solidify itself as a true global ocean leader.
“Greenpeace Australia Pacific is calling for industrial activities to be banned from our protected waters and for at least 30% of Australia’s ocean to be protected as ocean sanctuaries. This review presents a rare opportunity to create more ocean sanctuaries, true blue havens where ocean life can recover, thrive and repopulate the surrounding waters.”
—ENDS—
‘Ride the wave of momentum’: Australia announces once-in-a-decade Marine Parks Network review
In recent days, prominent climate sceptics and rightwing commentators have shared charts on social media incorrectly implying that Europe is having its “quietest” year for wildfires in 2026.
These include Dr Matthew Wielicki, a former University of Alabama geochemist and self-described “professor in exile”, who was recently appointed by the Trump administration to lead the US Global Change Research Program.
However, these charts paint a misleading picture as they are skewed by encompassing the entirety of Russia in the data – including the vast plains of Siberia.
These charts also use data that include fires that are deliberately lit to manage cropland, which is a declining practice across much of Europe.
In this factcheck, Carbon Brief shows that the area burned by wildfires across the European Union in 2026 is second only to 2022 for this time of year.
The latest data from the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) also shows that France has set a new modern record for area burned and Spain’s wildfire season is among the worst on record.
The fires have displaced more than a third of a million people across south-western Europe, while an impending heatwave has also raised fears of the fires worsening in the coming days.
‘Quietest year’
On 27 July, as wildfires raged across multiple European countries, former Conservative peer and climate-sceptic commentator Matt Ridley posted on Twitter that “2026 is the quietest year for wildfires in Europe by some distance”.
Ridley, who sits on the academic advisory council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), a UK-based climate-sceptic lobby group that refuses to reveal the sources of its funding, was responding to an article by Daily Telegraph columnist Tim Stanley.
Stanley’s column, headlined: “Climate change is real – and the right needs to get serious about it”, warned:
“This is no longer a matter of speculation: the wildfires of Europe, pitiless and persistent, are the way we live now.”
Ridley included a chart from Our World In Data, showing the cumulative area burned by wildfires by week for Europe. The chart puts 2026 as having the smallest area for this time of year in a dataset going back to 2012.
Ridley’s post was widely shared by prominent rightwing figures – including Richard Tice, deputy leader of the hard-right, climate-sceptic Reform UK party, former Conservative cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg and multiple commentators.
Separately, Wielicki also shared a chart on Twitter to imply that wildfires in Europe are declining. Wielicki has previously claimed that the “science is not settled on climate change”.
The charts posted by Ridley and Wielicki both use data from the Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS). The GWIS category for “Europe” encompasses all the countries on the continent and includes the whole of Russia.
As a result, Russia accounts for about 74% of the area included in the GWIS definition of “Europe”.
Wildfires in Russia typically account for 80-90% of the burned area in the GWIS Europe dataset. In 2026, fires in Russia are substantially below average. Therefore, including Russia in this comparison creates the false impression that wildfire activity across Europe is unusually low.
Dr Calum Cunningham, a research fellow at the University of Tasmania’s Fire Centre, says that such claims are “highly misleading”, noting that “they rely on aggregating fire activity across an enormous and climatically diverse region”. He tells Carbon Brief:
“A relatively quiet season in Russia can easily mask an exceptionally active season in France or Spain. If the analysis is focused on the regions actually experiencing the current fires, the picture is very different.
“The reality is that western Europe has experienced an extraordinary sequence of climate conditions this year.”
In contrast, the EFFIS provides a subset of wildfire data specifically for the area covered by the 27 nations of the EU, which, therefore, excludes Russia.
Another difference between the two datasets is that GWIS monitors all fires – including those on agricultural land that are intentionally set alight. The burned area as measured by GWIS contains significant cropland area.
By contrast, EFFIS uses land-cover data and other information to filter specifically for forest fires.
Looking at the EU-only data from EFFIS reveals that Europe is far from having its “quietest” year. The bloc’s burned area, as of 29 July, is almost 435,000 hectares (ha) – second only to 2022 for this time of year.
Notably, Wielicki has actually continued to post charts based on GWIS data, even after acknowledging that “includ[ing] all of Russia, including vast areas of Siberia…isn’t a good proxy for Europe”.
French fires
Even looking at EU-wide data misses the scale of this year’s wildfires for some individual countries.
The chart below shows the surge in burned area in France since mid-July.
For much of the first half of the year, the country was having a wildfire season that was only slightly above average in terms of total burned area. However, a notable uptick began in the first week of July.
The third week of the month saw France break its previous cumulative annual record by more than 19,000ha. That gap has widened as the fires continue to burn; as of 29 July, the cumulative burned area in France during 2026 was nearly 24,700ha above the previous record.
The fires in France follow a record-breaking June heatwave that “dried out vegetation across the region, allowing fires to spread quickly”, wrote the New York Times.
On 27 July, French president Emmanuel Macron called a “crisis cabinet meeting” in order to address the fires “ravaging several areas of south-west France”, said France 24.
More than 220,000 people have been evacuated due to the Gironde fire, west of Bordeaux, in “what may be France’s largest peacetime evacuation”, reported the Associated Press.
In the Conversation, Cunningham and two other University of Tasmania researchers write that evacuation orders “protec[t] human lives, but makes it more likely houses and other structures will burn if there’s no one to defend them”. They add:
“There is little doubt climate change has made France and Spain’s wildfires worse. They represent yet another reason to redouble our efforts to tackle climate change and stabilise our climate.”
Central Spain scorched
While Spain’s fire season has not broken records in the same way that France’s has, it is on track to be among the worst since EFFIS began reporting data in 2006.
The chart below shows the rapid increase in burned area in Spain since 8 July. The latest data from EFFIS reveal that, as of 29 July, Spain has almost matched its previous record at this point in the year. It is also nearly five times the average area burned for this time of year.
In Spain, the wildfires have been concentrated in the central part of the country, near Madrid.
BBC News reported that the fires outside the capital have burned “an area more than twice as large as the city itself”.
Nearly 90,000 people were forced from their homes in central Spain by the fires, said the Associated Press.
Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s prime minister, called the fires a “painful expression” of climate change.
Meanwhile, the UK, French and Spanish governments have issued joint statements this week in response to the fires. The UK/Spain statement begins:
“This summer’s wildfires demonstrated that climate change was now a national security emergency facing Europe and threatening our way of life.”
Related
The post Factcheck: No, Europe is not having its ‘quietest’ year for wildfires appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Factcheck: No, Europe is not having its ‘quietest’ year for wildfires
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