History

RIfS was officially approved by the WCRP Joint Scientific Committee in November 2020, and the draft Science and Implementation Plan was approved in June 2022.

In the initial stages of development, RIfS was supported by the WCRP Coordination Office for Regional Activities (CORA).

The focus of RIfS is to grow the foundations for effective links between climate research and the information needs of society. This builds on core research principles of providing actionable information through integrating the best available science. That science is aligned with the scales of relevance to society’s decision contexts, and enabled within a co-creation/co-production framework. The activities of RIfS have adaptively responded over time to the changing needs of society.

RIfS addresses the challenges in how to reconcile and integrate multiple lines of climate information (distillation) to produce context-relevant knowledge for decision makers. It also helps foster dialogue with stakeholders to incorporate methods of context-relevant co-design and co-development of climate information, including storylines (narratives), and their effective communication.

A key scientific pillar in this core project since its establishment is the Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX) which will continue to advance and coordinate the science and application of regional climate downscaling. Another scientific pillar, the Global Extremes Platform (GEP), was established in 2022 and coordinates activities on weather and climate extremes across WCRP. Along with contributions from other WCRP activities this will provide RIfS with the necessary tools to advance the understanding of primary climate drivers of risk for specific sectors on multiple temporal and spatial scales, and their relation to regional climate change and variability.