Our mission
The ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes will launch the world’s first fully integrated centre focussed explicitly on the understanding and prediction of climate extremes in July 2017.
It marks a shift from investigating climate averages to a specific focus on understanding and improving the predictability of high impact extreme events.
Climate extremes are high impact events that seriously affect natural and human systems. They are estimated to have cost the global economy US$2.4 trillion (1979-2012, CRED, 2015).
In Australia, the Australian Productivity Commission (APC, 2015) concluded that since 2002, the insurance losses from natural disasters exceeded $14 billion. Climate change will significantly impact future costs via changes in the magnitude, frequency and duration of extreme events, of which some now show the fingerprint of human activity (Fischer and Knutti, 2015).
These facts underpin our Centre’s purpose; we seek to discover the process-level understanding that explains the behaviour of climate extremes that directly affect Australian natural and economic systems. With this increased evidence-based understanding as our foundation, we will improve our capability to predict these extremes, and as a result inform strategies to reduce our national vulnerability.
The Centre builds from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science and includes a core group of researchers from the University of New South Wales, Monash University, the Australian National University, The University of Melbourne, and the University of Tasmania.
It marks a shift from investigating climate averages to a specific focus on understanding and improving the predictability of high impact extreme events.
Climate extremes are high impact events that seriously affect natural and human systems. They are estimated to have cost the global economy US$2.4 trillion (1979-2012, CRED, 2015).
In Australia, the Australian Productivity Commission (APC, 2015) concluded that since 2002, the insurance losses from natural disasters exceeded $14 billion. Climate change will significantly impact future costs via changes in the magnitude, frequency and duration of extreme events, of which some now show the fingerprint of human activity (Fischer and Knutti, 2015).
These facts underpin our Centre’s purpose; we seek to discover the process-level understanding that explains the behaviour of climate extremes that directly affect Australian natural and economic systems. With this increased evidence-based understanding as our foundation, we will improve our capability to predict these extremes, and as a result inform strategies to reduce our national vulnerability.
The Centre builds from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science and includes a core group of researchers from the University of New South Wales, Monash University, the Australian National University, The University of Melbourne, and the University of Tasmania.
