Earth Systems and Climate Change Hub (ESCC Hub)

The challenge

Managing the impacts of our changing climate

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Googong Reservoir, New South Wales

Googong Reservoir, New South Wales

Responding to Australia's changing climate requires accessible climate science that:

• improves our understanding of Australia’s future hydroclimate, to inform planning, infrastructure and investment for Australia's future water needs
• tracks, examines and predicts future changes in greenhouse gases and Australia's carbon budget for Australia, to support and inform Australia's emissions mitigation policy responses
• improves our understanding of current and future climate variability and extremes, and improve the quality and delivery of this information, to enable greater resilience to extreme weather and climate events
• provides access to nationally coordinated and refined knowledge, information and data on how Australia's coastal climate will change in the future, to inform coastal planning, investment and development
• develops and delivers improved climate change and climate variability information relevant to ecosystem function and food production, to inform agency/sector decision-making and planning.

Our response

World-leading climate science

The Earth Systems and Climate Change Hub is undertaking research to ensure that Australia's policies and management decisions are effectively informed by Earth systems and climate change science, now and into the future.

The Hub's research portfolio contains a range of projects that aim to:

• improve our understanding of past and current climate
• improve our understanding of how the climate may change in the future
• build the utility of climate change information.

We are using modelling, simulations, projections and analyses of observations to expand our understanding of Australian's climate drivers and ensure that we can provide robust, accessible information to next-users and end-users.

The Hub is a partnership of Australia's leading Earth systems and climate change research institutions:

• CSIRO
• Bureau of Meteorology
• University of New South Wales
• Australian National University
• Monash University
• University of Melbourne
• University of Tasmania.

The Hub partners have provided much of the science-based evidence informing Australia's climate-related policies and decisions for over three decades.

The results

Science to inform decision-making

The ESCC Hub is delivering climate change science-based information and services that are tailored to meet the needs of a range of stakeholders, including policy and decision-makers from all levels of government, Indigenous communities, government authority agencies, the financial services sector, and the research community.

The ESCC Hub is one of six multi-disciplinary research hubs delivering world-class science to support decision makers in Australia through the National Environmental Science Programme (NESP) .

The NESP is a long-term commitment by the Australian Government to support environmental and climate research, with a focus on delivering science that will inform on-ground action and yield measurable improvements to the environment.

The NESP is building on its predecessors (the National Environmental Research Program and the Australian Climate Change Science Programme) in securing for decision-makers the best available information to support understanding, managing and conserving Australia's environment.