PLA0015

Written evidence submitted by the Met Office

1. The Met Office is the UK’s National Meteorological Service (NMS), a Public Sector Research Establishment (PSRE) and an Executive Agency of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS).  We are responsible for monitoring and predicting the weather and providing the National Severe Weather Warning Service (NSWWS).  In addition, we are home to the Met Office Hadley Centre for Climate Science and Services, which delivers policy relevant climate advice to the UK Government and beyond. As part of this remit, the Met Office are currently involved in a number of research projects, collaborations and cross-Government programmes which may be of interest to the Committee. We have provided an overview of some of the relevant scientific research below to help inform this inquiry.

Global issues

What action is being taken internationally to tackle these threats? Could the UK be doing more to drive international action? What opportunities are there for the Government to promote good planetary health in forthcoming international summits or agreements?

2. Through our scientific collaborations we have become aware of a number of national and international programmes and organisations that are working to take action in this arena. Some we have direct involvement with for specific projects and research outcomes, others we present as work we are aware of which may be useful to the Committee.

The Global Food Security Programme (GFS)[i]

3. The Global Food Security Programme is a UK cross-government programme on food security research in which the UK’s main public funders of food-related research work together. This is to meet the challenge of providing the world’s growing population with access to safe, affordable and nutritious food, all of the time and in ways the planet can sustain into the future. The role of the GFS is to coordinate scientific research supported by its partners across government departments and agencies, the devolved administrations, research councils and Innovate UK. Partners’ existing activities are built upon with the aim of adding value to their current and future investments and complementing their individual strategies.
4. GFS therefore facilitates new interdisciplinary research to address food system challenges, and provides a platform for working in partnership with a wide variety of stakeholders and users, both internationally and in the UK. The programme also supports effective translation of research for use by food producers and processors, retailers, consumers and government, enabling them to respond to and manage the challenges facing the UK food system as well as related global issues, including the many challenges confronting the developing world in the face of environmental and demographic change.
5. The Met Office are involved in the GFS programme as an observer on the Programme Coordination Group and scientists have also been involved in several GFS taskforces, including:
• Paris-compliant healthy food systems: Policy Brief for United Nations Climate Change Conference[ii]
• Expert taskforce reports on extreme weather and food supplies[iii]

The World Health Organization (WHO) One Health programme[iv]

6. The World Health Organization describe 'One Health' as an approach to designing and implementing programmes, policies, legislation and research in which multiple sectors communicate and work together to achieve better public health outcomes. The approach has been formally endorsed by the European Commission, the US Department of State, US Department of Agriculture, US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), World Bank, WHO, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), World Organization for Animal Health (OIE), United Nations System Influenza Coordination (UNSIC), various Universities, NGOs and many others across the world.
7. The areas of work in which a One Health approach is particularly relevant include food safety, the control of zoonoses (diseases that can spread between animals and humans, such as flu, rabies and Rift Valley Fever), and combatting antibiotic resistance (when bacteria change after being exposed to antibiotics and become more difficult to treat).

International Planetary Health

8. The Met Office is part of an emerging group of UK academics developing ideas and working together towards planetary health (i.e. the health of human civilisation and the natural environments on which it depends). Collaborators include the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) Science and Innovation Network (SIN), London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the European Centre for Environment and Human Health, Public Health England and the University of Exeter, amongst others.

Wellcome Trust, Our Planet Our Health

9. The Our Planet Our Health is a Wellcome Trust programme that funds research focused on providing strong evidence for action that will enable policymakers, businesses and the public to make more informed decisions on relevant aspects that affect the environment and health. One of our specialist scientists in this area Prof. Rosa Barciela is a member of the Climate Change and Health Review Committee.

Weather forecasts and health models to improve early action

10. Weather can play a significant role in the outbreak, spread and transmission of certain diseases. By working closely with the health modelling community, two relevant services which have recently been developed include:

• Cholera Forecasting in Yemen

The UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) in Yemen asked the Met Office to provide support to prevent cholera outbreaks in Yemen. To inform and prioritise targeted prevention measures and interventions UNICEF and Oxfam could make, they needed to understand where it had rained and where it would rain in the next 10 days in Yemen. UNICEF uses forecast information provided by the Met Office alongside a cholera model to plan their operations, which they find ‘invaluable’. Early indications suggest a significant drop in cholera cases. In 2017, 50,000 new cases were recorded in just one week. This year, numbers dropped to 2,500.

• Dengue Fever forecasts in Vietnam

This is a UK Space Agency funded collaboration to develop an integrated dengue fever early warning system in Vietnam. The project will deliver a tool that enables advance warning of likely dengue outbreaks, allowing public health authorities to mobilise resources to those most in need. The project will also provide forecasts of dengue fever under a range of climate change scenarios.

Natural Capital Committee[v]

11. The Natural Capital Committee advises the government on natural capital, such as forests, rivers, minerals and oceans. The term Natural Capital encompasses all resources and processes within the natural environment (air, water, sea, land and below ground) including biotic and abiotic (e.g. nutrient cycling, erosion, climate, evolution) and biodiversity.  Natural capital assets are those aspects of the natural environment that underpin delivery of ecosystem services or benefits. In relation to natural capital metrics, the UK Environmental Observation Framework (UKEOF) aims to identify relevant environmental observation priorities and gaps. Maintaining a healthy stock of natural capital assets is a key government objective and meeting that objective requires an effective monitoring strategy.
12. Environmental observation is fundamental to the implementation of a natural capital approach. Only by knowing the value of the current ‘stock’ can an estimation of the ecosystem services provided, and their value to society, be established. Similarly, monitoring how natural capital is changing over time is vital to ensuring the continued sustainable provision of multiple ecosystem services.
13. The Met Office are involved in regular Natural Capital meetings and workshops to support the Natural Capital Committee and Natural Capital Working Group in the area of weather and climate observations. Among other topics this has included discussions on how natural capital (and weather/climate data as part of this) will fit with the 25 year Environment Plan, the Biodiversity Monitoring and Surveillance Strategy, and Natural England's Conservation Strategy, together with meetings on 'Measuring natural capital'.

Weather & Climate Information Services for Africa (WISER)

14. Funded by DFID, the WISER programme's mission is to deliver transformational change in the quality, accessibility and use of weather and climate information services at all levels of decision making in Africa.  Focusing on service delivery, directed by user needs, it supports poverty reduction and development.  Now in Phase 2, the Met Office have supported the programme with a number of projects including:

• Phase One:  Climate Information Services Kenya

Working in partnership with the Kenya Meteorological Department the project has improved the production and communication of weather forecasts at a local level. Focussed on Western Kenya, this has developed a set of bespoke forecasts to improve the lives and livelihoods of small-holder farmers and fishermen in the Lake Victoria region.

• Phase Two:  Kenya Coastal Resilience and Improving Services for Potato Production (CRISPP)

This project will deliver accessible and decision-relevant weather and climate information across businesses and communities in Kenya, particularly in Kenya’s coastal region and the potato sector. In terms of its consumption, potatoes are Kenya’s second most important crop after maize, grown by approximately half a million small scale farmers. While growth of the sector in recent years is positive, production has expanded into more marginal areas, with an enhanced risk of losses caused by drought conditions. Working closely with the different stakeholders in this sector to assess potential options to increase their resilience has confirmed that there is a clear demand for decision-relevant weather and climate services.

Future Climate For Africa (FCFA)

15. The Met Office is leading Improving Model Processes for African Climate (IMPALA), part of the DFID funded FCFA programme. IMPALA aims to deliver a step change in climate prediction for Africa, enabling decision-makers to better tackle risks associated with health, water and agriculture. Using its scientific research and modelling expertise, the Met Office has developed and run a pan-African very high resolution model down to a scale of 4km which explicitly represents convective storms and which we believe will better capture extreme events at a local scale.
16. IMPALA is feeding this modelling and new understanding into the associated regional projects across Africa to aid planning, including resilience to extreme events in African cities, water resources in East Africa and changes in the West Africa monsoon (Fractal, AMMA2050, HyCRISTAL). In all these areas, the Met Office is applying its science to aid solutions on the ground.
17. In addition, the Met Office has been involved in the FCFA UMFULA project through CI4Tea. This focussed on identifying climate information needs including climate metrics for tea plantations to ensure resilience to a future climate. It combined climate data with plantation data to produce useful and useable future climate information at a tea estate scale to identify and prioritise climate change adaptation options for medium and long-term planning.

Asia Regional Resilience to a Changing Climate (ARRCC) programme

18. Working in partnership with the World Bank and DFID, this four-year DFID funded programme, starting in September 2018, aims to strengthen weather forecasting systems across South Asia. The programme will deliver new technologies and innovative approaches to help vulnerable communities use weather warnings and forecasts to better prepare for climate-related shocks.

Crops and nutrition

How might crops (produced both globally and in the UK) be affected by climate change?

Key Literature

19. Based on our areas of expertise there are a number of key publications the Committee may wish to be made aware of.  For example, the current state of the art syntheses on how crops might be affected by climate change are the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Working Group 2 report[vi], notably the chapter on food security and food production systems[vii], plus for the UK, the Europe chapter[viii]. For the UK more specifically, see the Climate Change Risk Assessment (CCRA) 2012 report on agriculture[ix], and the 2017 report[x], particularly the chapter on Natural Environment and Assets. However, it is worth noting that the IPCC reports were produced over five years ago and while new assessments are in progress, completion is beyond the timeframe of this inquiry.
20. In addition, there is likely to be substantial relevant literature produced since the IPCC’s 2013 syntheses, particularly with a global focus.  For example, the Met Office were involved in the Royal Society update on climate change science[xi]. The ‘food production on land’ chapter specifically mentions nutrition.

Climate Service for Food, Farming and the Natural Environment (CSFFNE)

21. Since 2015, the Met Office have been working on a climate service for Food, Farming and the Natural Environment under the Hadley Centre Climate Programme (HCCP) in close collaboration with customers at Defra; in order to provide improved advice for policy. This has included looking at international food security issues that could affect the UK, particularly through understanding the role of weather and climate in major yield shocks in large producing countries for maize, soybean and wheat. This strand of work has included:
• Assessing the relationship between climate variability and global wheat production, which a) developed agro-climatic indicators for climate impacts on wheat and soybean production with a particular focus on yield shocks in major producing regions, and b) investigated the climate dynamics related to yield shocks and variability in these regions.
• A UK-focused winter wheat feasibility study, which a) investigated the potential for applying agro-climatic indices to observed UK yield variability, b) gathered background information relevant to major yield and climate variability events in the recent past, and c) assessed the potential for applying crop models and climate indicators for UK impact assessment.
• Ongoing work is investigating links between climate and wheat yield quality, and on the potential to use sea surface temperatures to predict wheat yield variability.

CSFFNE: Key Findings Relevant to Crops:

22. Some of the key findings from the yield shock studies include:
1. The chance of climate-related wheat yield shocks in a northern European country (UK, France or Germany) is currently about 13% per year. The annual chance of adverse conditions across more than one of these three countries in the same year is less than 1%. The largest annual chance of adverse conditions over all the countries studied is in Australia and is estimated to be up to 80%.
2. The risk of multiple, national-scale, shocks occurring at the same time across continents was also investigated. For the two largest producers of wheat (US and China) the risk of a yield shock is estimated at about 7% per decade. The risk of simultaneous shocks across the northern hemisphere (US, Canada, Europe and China) was found to be extremely small in the current climate. Applying this method to CMIP5 climate projections (using medium emissions scenario RCP4.5 in the 2050s) demonstrates that large increases in growing season temperature increase the likelihood of drought conditions across all major wheat producing regions. This increases the likelihood of national-scale wheat yield shocks, as well as multiple shocks across continents.
3. Natural climate variability accounts for up to 80% of the year-to-year variance of UK (national average) winter wheat yields. Skilful precipitation forecasts for the later part of the growing period, and not the winter, could be of significant value to users. Similarly, strong climate-yield relationships exist across the major wheat and soybean producing regions. The risk of adverse growing conditions, if based solely on climate observations from recent years, may significantly underestimate the likelihood of climate-related yield shocks. The wide geographic distribution of wheat production serves to reduce the risk of climate-related shocks to global wheat production.
4. In contrast to wheat, imports from South and North America almost entirely meet the UK’s soybean requirement. Further analysis of the large-scale dynamics giving rise to simultaneous impacts across these regions, as well as their predictability, is a key future research topic.
5. Using climate projections for the 2050s, we find diverging impacts when using temperature (increased probability of shocks) and precipitation (little model consensus) based yield predictions.

CSFFNE: Climate Impacts on the UK

23. The climate service has also studied climate impacts on the UK itself through understanding climate sensitivities of UK priority plant pests and diseases as well as enhancing emergency response to pests and diseases using climate/weather data. Specifically, this involved estimating UK emergence dates for priority pests, provision of UK-wide degree-day datasets for plant pest research, which were delivered using an agreed methodology, for Defra use, and development of a web-based tool, as well as comparison of climate indices of relevance for pests in UK and France, and the development of a microclimate model.

Crop Breeding and Adaption Decisions in the UK

24. The Met Office were also involved in a review[xii] of the use of climate information to support crop breeding and adaptation decisions in agriculture. The study found that there is significant potential for breeders to work more closely with climate scientists and crop modellers in order to address the challenges of climate change. Priority research areas identified included:
1. provision of climate information to identify key target breeding traits and develop improved success criteria (e.g. for heat/drought stress);
2. identification of those conditions under which multiple stress factors (for example, heat stress, mid-season drought stress, flowering drought stress, terminal drought stress) are important in breeding programmes;
3. use of climate information to inform selection of trial sites;
4. identification of the range of environments and locations under which crop trials should be performed (likely to be a wider range of environments than done at present);
5. identification of appropriate duration of trials (likely to be longer than current trials, due to the importance of capturing extreme events);
6. and definition of appropriate methods for incorporating climate information into crop breeding programmes, depending on the specific needs of the breeding programme and the strengths and weaknesses of available approaches.

25. Priorities for further work on crop breeding and climate information were also noted as follows. Better knowledge is needed on climate-related thresholds important to crop breeders, for example on the frequency and severity of extreme climate events relevant to the product profile, or to help provide tailored climate analyses (particularly for extreme events). The uncertainties inherent in climate and impact projections provide a particular challenge for translating climate science into actionable outcomes for agriculture. Further work is needed to explore relevant social and economic assumptions such as the level and distribution of real incomes, changing consumption patterns, health impacts, impacts on markets and trade, and the impact of legislation relating to conservation, the environment and climate change.

Ongoing Met Office Work

26. There is additional, ongoing work within the Met Office Hadley Centre in the area of crops and food security in a changing climate. This includes development of a generic global scale crop model (JULES-crop) based on the Met Office land surface scheme (JULES). JULES-crop is contributing to the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP) project, particularly the evapotranspiration study which aims to intercompare, evaluate, and improve crop models for accurate prediction of soil water uptake (soil water balance), soil water evaporation, crop transpiration, crop evapotranspiration, and crop dry matter accumulation under different soil water conditions, and to phase 2 of the Global Gridded Crop Model Intercomparison (GGCMI) - Carbon, Temperature, Water, Nitrogen and Adaptation (CTWN-A) sensitivity study.
27. In addition, two joint PhD projects with the University of Leeds are investigating climate change and crops – one investigating the combined impacts of climate change and water availability on rice-wheat systems in India, and the second considering heat stress impacts on rice in India and beans in Colombia.

December 2018

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