Opening of new centre of excellence on extreme climate events

“As far as the research is concerned, the focus is exclusively on the impacts of extreme climate events – both economic impacts and more broadly societal impacts and consequences. In this latter area, we will be looking at things like public health and inequalities in the impacts of extreme weather events. We will compare different parts of society with each other and different parts of a city exposed to an extreme event,” explains the centre’s director Gabriele Messori, Professor of Meteorology at the Department of Earth Sciences.

Building up a database

A first important step will be to collect large quantities of information and build up a database. This is not just a matter of obtaining data from authorities, it also involves material such as news articles, information from insurance companies, satellite images before and after major storms, audio recordings and interviews. In essence, all material that can be linked to an extreme weather event and its consequences is of interest.

“At present it is very difficult to obtain data specifically on the impacts of extreme weather events. If you want to collect data on the weather, you can set up a meteorological station that measures temperature, wind and other variables. However, there are no measuring instruments that keep track of how many people are affected by some event, or the scale of the economic losses. Moreover, companies and other organisations that collect this kind of data are unwilling to make it public,” Messori says.

Correct information is vital

To be able to adapt to climate change and future extreme weather events, it is absolutely vital that we have well-documented and correct information about what could occur.

“It is not sufficient to know what will happen in terms of the climate alone, we need to know whether these events actually have a significant impact on us. Most of the time we don’t really know. All adaptation measures require a good understanding of what constitutes an event that causes major damage and what is an event against which we have good resilience,” Messori continues.

The centre is one of five research environments at the University to receive grants in the Swedish Research Council’s 2022 excellence initiative. Each research environment will receive SEK 4–6 million per year for five years, with a possible further five years of funding following an evaluation.

Research and education

The essential idea is that researchers in different fields will collaborate and establish a platform for broader knowledge in their respective areas. The Swedish Centre for Impacts of Climate Extremes is coordinated from Uppsala University in close cooperation with researchers at Lund University and RISE Research Institutes of Sweden.

“In Lund, they’re concentrating on the social sciences aspects. We also have a colleague who works both at Uppsala University and at Karolinska Institutet and is an expert on public health, who wants to study the public health impacts of extreme weather. The group at RISE consists of experienced users of language technology and machine learning, so they’re working on automatic data processing of all kinds of related data,” says Messori.

Apart from research and research infrastructure, the centre also involves education from Master’s level upwards.

“And perhaps one final aspect that could be of interest is that we are devoting quite a large part of the centre’s activities to building up a network in which we will both invite researchers from other countries to Uppsala, Stockholm and Lund and fund research stays for postdocs visiting the centre,” Messori concludes.

Åsa Malmberg