The Decadal Forecasting Project established in 2016 has had many scientific successes over five years. This success has led the capability to deliver into new priority areas for climate research. For example, our decadal modelling to understand extreme events is being utilised by the Australian Climate Service (ACS) and some Decadal Forecasting Project staff are working directly with ACS. ACS is a partnership, made up of world leading science, information and expertise from the CSIRO, Bureau of Meteorology, Geoscience Australia and Australian Bureau of Statistics and delivers a single national view of climate and natural hazard information.
We no longer have a discrete “Decadal Forecasting” program or team because after five years of its establishment, this fundamental core work is now being delivered across a number of climate science research areas and programs. The funding CSIRO committed to allocate to the Decadal Forecasting Project is still funding climate research supporting national science priorities.
Those scientists working on the Decadal Forecasting Project are now working across other areas within CSIRO including ACS and our Climate Resilient Enterprise initiative. One staff member who contributed to the Decadal Forecasting Project was made redundant in order to align capability to deliver across priority areas.
Providing data to the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) is done on a voluntary basis. Where possible CSIRO seeks to make our climate data available to the community, including WMO, through data sharing programs and platforms.
CSIRO has a variety of funding arrangements in place, depending on the nature of the research. Details of our funding are publicly available in our Annual Report: https://www.csiro.au/en/about/Corporate-governance/annual-reports[Link will open in a new window]
In September 2022 CSIRO announced the establishment of a new Environment Business Unit (BU) dedicated to addressing the challenges and opportunities of the environmental sector now and into the future. The creation of an Environment BU will have no impact on our research capability with all existing research staff in Land and Water and Oceans and Atmosphere moving into the new BU. The creation of this BU will allow us to tackle more complex multi-disciplinary challenges under a single integrated environment strategy.
Media reporting around a budget gap for the new Environment BU is incorrect.