The Regional Information for Society (RIfS) Core Project represents an exciting new dimension to WCRP activities that leverages existing core projects and lighthouse activities, expands their scope of influence and coordinates new research required to provide actionable climate information at the regional scale.

Some background

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

What does RIfS do?

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 will adaptively respond over time to the changing needs of society.

Bridging the gap between science and society’s needs

The new Core Project 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.

Building on an existing foundation

A key scientific pillar in this new core project is the Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX) which will continue to advance and coordinate the science and application of regional climate downscaling. 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.

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