The World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) has developed five new activities that aim to make critical near-term progress towards meeting WCRP’s Vision, Mission, and four Scientific Objectives, as outlined in the WCRP Strategic Plan 2019–2028. The WCRP Lighthouse Activities are designed to be ambitious and transdisciplinary (integrating across WCRP and collaborating with partners) so that they can rapidly advance some of the new science and technologies, and institutional frameworks, that are needed to manage climate risk and meet society’s urgent need for robust and actionable climate information more effectively.
To do this, the Lighthouse Activities will need to draw on WCRP’s core scientific and technical capabilities, and strategic partnerships. Their scope encompasses building new knowledge of the Earth’s climate system, its near-term predictability, and longer-term trajectories, through to harnessing emerging technologies to better simulate the Earth system via a digital “twin”, as well as exploring new approaches for managing climate risk that start with decision context and user needs.
The science plans of the Lighthouse Activities were approved at the 42nd Session of the WCRP Joint Scientific Committee in July 2021. We are in the process of developing dedicated web pages for each Lighthouse Activity. The ones that are online are:
- Digital Earths
- Explaining and Predicting Earth System Change
- Global Precipitation EXperiment
- My Climate Risk
- Research on Climate Intervention
- Safe Landing Climates
Note that the WCRP Academy is now a stand-alone part of the WCRP structure.
