Climate Change Learning

The business value of measuring and reducing carbon emissions 🌎 Understanding and addressing carbon emissions is an essential aspect of modern business operations. Emissions are categorized into three scopes, each representing different parts of an organization’s value chain. Scope 1 includes direct emissions from owned or controlled sources, such as facilities and vehicles. Scope 2 refers to indirect emissions from purchased electricity, steam, heating, or cooling. Scope 3 encompasses indirect emissions across the entire value chain, such as purchased goods, waste, and downstream use of products. Accurately measuring emissions across these scopes allows organizations to identify climate, financial, and regulatory risks. This enables businesses to proactively address challenges, align with evolving regulations, and mitigate exposure to potential liabilities. Measurement also provides a foundation for setting reduction targets and tracking progress toward achieving sustainability goals. Reducing emissions creates opportunities for operational efficiency and cost savings. For example, transitioning to energy-efficient systems or optimizing supply chain processes can lower energy consumption and reduce waste. These actions not only contribute to environmental goals but also improve the bottom line through lower operational costs. Integrating emissions reduction strategies into business models supports long-term competitiveness. In a low-carbon economy, organizations that lead in decarbonization can distinguish themselves from competitors. This differentiation enhances brand reputation, strengthens relationships with suppliers and customers, and opens opportunities for market expansion. Furthermore, transparent emissions management builds trust with stakeholders. Investors increasingly prioritize sustainability performance in their decision-making, and employees value alignment with organizational values. A credible approach to emissions reduction can enhance investor confidence, improve employee engagement, and secure a stronger social license to operate. Measuring and reducing carbon emissions is not solely a regulatory or environmental imperative—it is a strategic business opportunity. Organizations that integrate these practices into their core operations can reduce risks, capture efficiency gains, and position themselves for success in a rapidly evolving economic and environmental landscape. Source: Thinkstep #sustainability #sustainable #business #esg #climatechange #climateaction #emissions

Across the Horn of Africa, climate shocks now unfold as compound crises. The 2020–2023 drought left over 46 million people food insecure and eroded their livelihoods. Before recovery could begin, the 2023–2024 El Niño rains triggered widespread flooding, displacing hundreds of thousands of people. Drought–flood whiplash is no longer exceptional; it is the region’s operating climate. My research with the Jameel Observatory for Food Security Early Action in northern Kenya reveals that pastoralist communities are already adapting to these shifts with remarkable flexibility. From star calendars to animal behaviour and vegetation cues, herders read a rich tapestry of indicators and now complement these with radio forecasts and satellite data. They do not wait for a single forecast or a rigid trigger. Instead, they adjust grazing routes, stagger herd movements, and pool resources as signals evolve. This flexible anticipatory action challenges the dominant model of fixed thresholds and single-event triggers. It shows that forecast information only has value if it is trusted, timely, and open to renegotiation on the ground. Climate Information Services (CIS) enable this agility by translating global climate models into local, impact-based advisories. Regional centres, such as ICPAC, provide seasonal outlooks to guide rangeland management and food security planning. Communities use this information to develop innovative solutions by layering these scientific forecasts onto their own adaptive calendars. Formal Anticipatory Action (AA) frameworks can learn from this. Kenya’s 2024–2029 AA Roadmap is vital. Fundamentally, it will deliver more if it incorporates flexibility by allowing rolling triggers, locally defined indicators, and iterative decision-making, rather than treating early action as a one-off release of funds. The cost of inaction rises with every season. Investing in flexible, forecast-driven anticipatory systems is both fiscally prudent and politically essential. For governments, regional bodies, and development partners, the way forward is clear: move beyond crisis response and embed adaptive, plural, and community-grounded anticipatory action at the heart of policy and planning. In the Horn of Africa’s climate future, acting early and being flexible is the most innovative and cost-effective form of adaptation. Photo courtesy of United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR)

💡 Sustainability experts don’t change product materials, redesign logistics routes, or source better suppliers. Our colleagues do. That’s why training should be at the very top of any sustainability agenda. The real results don’t come from us - they come from people across the business who understand their role in change. Here’s what I’ve learned about training colleagues in sustainability: ✔️ Don’t wait for permission — just start. Small sessions beat waiting for the perfect setup. ✔️ Keep it short. Never more than an hour. People lose focus, and the business can’t handle marathon sessions. ✔️ Time it right. Never train buyers during Christmas campaigns. If people are swamped, they can’t hear you. ✔️ Know your audience. Match the training to what the team is ready for - this requires knowing and respecting them. ✔️ Make it relevant. Show them why sustainability matters for the company and for them. Then operationalize it: clear steps, no grey zones. ✔️ Celebrate wins. We use a gold star system and hard data to show the results of their actions. Recognition is fuel. ✔️ Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Training needs to be a constant part of your job. Bonus tip: Spreadsheets don’t stick (with everyone). Stories do. Replace 12% reduction with a pile of plastic the size of an elephant - and watch people remember. Bonus tip: Make it two-way. Ask them why they care, what they worry about, what obstacles they face. The best sustainability solutions start with the people closest to the product or process. Training isn’t just “soft stuff.” It’s the foundation for measurable impact. Because without informed, empowered colleagues, even the best sustainability strategy stays on paper. 💭 How do you approach training your colleagues on sustainability? Any tips that worked in your organization? #SustainabilityTraining #ChangeManagement #EmployeeEngagement #SystemChange #FlyingTigerCopenhagen

🌍 Climate scientists often face a trade-off: Global Climate Models (GCMs) are essential for long-term climate projections — but they operate at coarse spatial resolution, making them too crude for regional or local decision-making. To get fine-scale data, researchers use Regional Climate Models (RCMs). These add crucial spatial detail, but come at a very high computational cost, often requiring supercomputers to run for months. ➡️ A new paper introduces EnScale — a machine learning framework that offers an efficient and accurate alternative to running full RCM simulations. Instead of solving the complex physics from scratch, EnScale "learns" the relationship between GCMs and RCMs by training on existing paired datasets. It then generates high-resolution, realistic, and diverse regional climate fields directly from GCM inputs. What makes EnScale stand out? ✅ It uses a generative ML model trained with a statistically principled loss (energy score), enabling probabilistic outputs that reflect natural variability and uncertainty ✅ It is multivariate – it learns to generate temperature, precipitation, radiation, and wind jointly, preserving spatial and cross-variable coherence ✅ It is computationally lightweight – training and inference are up to 10–20× faster than state-of-the-art generative approaches ✅ It includes an extension (EnScale-t) for generating temporally consistent time series – a must for studying events like heatwaves or prolonged droughts This approach opens the door to faster, more flexible generation of regional climate scenarios, essential for risk assessment, infrastructure planning, and climate adaptation — especially where computational resources are limited. 📄 Read the full paper: EnScale: Temporally-consistent multivariate generative downscaling via proper scoring rules ---> https://lnkd.in/dQr5rmWU (code: https://lnkd.in/dQk_Jv8g) 👏 Congrats to the authors — a strong step forward for ML-based climate modeling! #climateAI #downscaling #generativeAI #machinelearning #climatescience #EnScale #RCM #GCM #ETHZurich #climatescenarios

In Bangladesh, where catastrophic flooding now affects millions of households annually, an organisation called Shidhulai Swanirvar Sangstha has been operating solar-powered floating schools for over two decades — but the model is gaining renewed international attention in 2026 as climate adaptation moves from policy documents into infrastructure design. The boats function as classrooms, libraries, digital learning centres, and clinics, reaching children who would otherwise lose months of schooling each year to seasonal flooding. ⛵📚 The scale of the problem these schools address is significant. Bangladesh is one of the world's most flood-vulnerable countries, with over 17% of its land at risk of permanent inundation by 2050 under moderate climate projections. During monsoon season, rural communities in the northern and central river delta regions can be cut off for weeks. Conventional school buildings simply stop functioning. Children — particularly girls — are disproportionately affected when schools close and families prioritise boys' continued education. 🌊👧 The floating school model inverts the infrastructure assumption: instead of building land infrastructure that floods will damage, build infrastructure that operates on the water. The boats are solar-powered for both propulsion and onboard electricity. Digital tablets, satellite connectivity, and trained local teachers bring curricula aligned to Bangladesh's national standards. Women and girls also receive training in climate-adaptive agriculture, water management, and financial literacy aboard designated floating training centres. ☀️📱 In 2026, international development organisations including UNICEF and World Bank are studying the model for replication across other flood-affected regions — the Mekong Delta in Vietnam, low-lying areas of Nigeria's Niger Delta, and parts of Pakistan's Indus floodplain. The challenge is not the concept — it is the local organisational capacity and funding continuity required to sustain fleets of boats over decades. 🌏💡 The structural lesson Bangladesh offers to the world is this: climate adaptation is not only about seawalls and early-warning systems. It is about redesigning core social infrastructure — schools, clinics, markets — to function under the climate conditions that are already here, not the ones we hope to avoid.

We’ve always thought of school as a place and an institution that runs steadily, with planned breaks for a given number of days and hours.   However, with the effects of climate change now all too visible, this notion stands seriously challenged. Schools are closed many times during the year when it is too hot, or too cold, or too wet or too polluted. Teaching learning time was already challenged due to irregular attendance of teachers and students alike, and the high prevalence of multi-grade classrooms across the country. Where our curriculum assumes 200-220 days of school time, the actual number of hours that children get to engage in learning is dramatically short of this norm. And it shows repeatedly in all the various surveys of learning levels.   Climate-induced breaks now exacerbate this further. What children lose out is not just the teaching-learning hours, but also the opportunity to be with their friends, play and be physically active, practice their talents, and not dawdle over screens. Those from well-resource backgrounds may be able to deal with this uneven progression much better – which will increasingly widen the gap in educational gains between the haves and have nots.   Perhaps we need to re-conceptualise school – it is not just the building and what happens there when it runs, but also what happens at home, outside, in the community, in the digital space and over the airwaves. A framework and a continuum are needed where different stakeholders may facilitate learning, including teachers, parents, local volunteers, community, through in-person or online modes, using a ‘package’ with built-in redundance. That is, multiple formats of learning opportunities (including voice-based guidance for facilitators who may not be literate) are created for those involved to make use of, depending on the circumstances. And, of course, on some days the physical school may run for longer hours than it does usually while on others it is closed as it is too dangerous to keep it open.   It is only by unshackling the school from its rigid ties to time and teachers, and by re-conceptualising it as ‘always on in a flexible mode’ run by a community of implementers with support from teachers, that we may be able to ensure continuity of learning as climate events become more and more frequent.

Learning the coupled dynamics of global climate modes Seasonal forecasts hinge on recurring ocean-atmosphere patterns: El Niño, the Indian Ocean Dipole, the Tropical North Atlantic, and lesser-known modes that together steer monsoons, droughts, and floods. The catch is they do not act alone. They trade energy across ocean basins through teleconnections, yet most systems still model them one at a time or in simple pairs, discarding the cross-basin information that carries predictive signal. Yuan Yuan and coauthors built UniCM, a deep model that treats the modes as one coupled system. It pairs two Transformer branches: a "Globalformer" that learns fine-grained physical fields (sea surface temperature, wind stress, thermocline depth) from the bottom up, and a "Modeformer" that learns the collective interactions among seven climate modes from the top down. A cross-view mechanism feeds the mode dynamics back into the physical branch, keeping local forecasts consistent with the system-wide state. This shows up directly in the numbers. UniCM extends skillful ENSO forecasts to 19 months (against roughly 15 for standard deep learning), the Indian Ocean Dipole to 7 months, and the harder, less-studied modes by over 22% on average. It rode through the notorious spring predictability barrier and reproduced both the extreme 1997-1998 El Niño and the stubborn 2020-2023 triple-dip La Niña. Built on attention, it is also legible: its weights flagged the North Pacific Meridional Mode as a precursor to the 1997 El Niño, a link physics-based studies later confirmed. The lesson is that long-lead skill for compound climate risk comes from modelling interacting drivers jointly, not in isolation. An interpretable, coupling-aware forecast turns multi-month anticipation of overlapping extremes into something a team can actually plan around. Paper: Yuan et al., Nature Machine Intelligence (2026) — journal license | https://lnkd.in/eJH3HpdM #MachineLearning #ClimateForecasting #ENSO #DeepLearning #Transformers #AIforScience #ClimateModeling #Teleconnections #ScientificML #ClimateRisk #Oceanography #ExtremeWeather #AttentionMechanism #EarthSystemScience #DataDrivenDiscovery

🚨📢New paper alert — what happens when you let LLMs think like flood-affected households? 🌊Full paper link, open access: https://lnkd.in/gPbF7sU3 Our (Wenyu Chiou) new proof-of-concept study in WRR introduces an LLM-driven Agent-Based Model for simulating household flood adaptation. Instead of hard-coded utility functions, agents carry narrative memories, verbalized trust, and theory-guided appraisals — and explain every decision in plain text. Key takeaways: 🧠 LLM agents produce gradual, memory-mediated adaptation vs. abrupt threshold shifts in traditional ABMs 🔍 Year-by-year reasoning traces make agent decisions readable and traceable ⚠️ LLM architecture choice matters — different models produce fundamentally different behavioral worlds under identical inputs 📊 New qualitative uncertainty dimensions: prompt framing and memory window length both shape emergent behavior Thanks for the support from National Science Foundation (NSF), U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and Lehigh's Center for Catastrophe Modeling and Resilience #FloodResilience #AgentBasedModeling #LLM #SocioHydrology #WaterResources #ClimateAdaptation

In a survey asking the UK general public what they thought the cost of net zero is or would be, the average answer was 28% of UK GDP. The actual answer is apparently 0.2% 😮 I learned this listening to a recent episode of the Fully Charged podcast yesterday where Imogen Bhogal was interviewing Ruban Yogarajah in an episode called 'Net Zero's PR problem'. I was listening as I was driving (in my EV!) to deliver #CarbonLiteracy training to Pickwick Academy Trust. I'm already a huge advocate of Carbon Literacy training but this episode (and this stat in particular) really highlighted for me why it's so important. The Department for Education's Sustainability and Climate Change strategy has in there an expectation that all schools will have a Sustainability Lead and a Climate Action Plan in place by the end of this year. It's very rare for a school to have the budget for that Sustainability Lead to be a stand alone role and often staff end up being 'volun-told' that they have a new role, on top of their existing duties. This can understandably lead to a teensy bit of overwhelm, with some Sustainability Leads feeling unqualified for the role. In my role as a Climate Action Advisor at Let's Go Zero I've been supporting Pickwick in their sustainability journey. They had already made a huge amount of progress, thanks to the work of some flagship schools in the Trust, and the support of Ruth Jennison, one of their brilliant teachers. They were keen from the outset to provide Carbon Literacy Training for all of their school Sustainability Leads, for the Trust facilities team, and for core Trust staff. To make sure that people understood the 'why' behind the Trust's sustainability strategy and that key staff were supported and provided with CPD for their new roles. And on Friday we did just that! It was an absolute joy to spend the day with them, taking them on the emotional rollercoaster that is Carbon Literacy training, and seeing such high levels of engagement in the content. We spent some time thinking about how climate change is already, and will in the future, impact on the delivery of education in their schools; and dig into their Climate Action Plans for the year ahead. One of my favourite things was seeing the power of simply bringing everyone together around a common theme. There are always pockets of excellence happening in each of the schools, and the day gave us the chance to share that best practice and those experiences, so these changes can start to ripple out across all the schools within the Trust. Thank you so much Emma Oldale, Amy Tapscott and Ray Picton for their work making the day happen. Really excited to see the pledges and to support the Trust and schools implementing their Climate Action Plans! Let's Go Zero advisors are here to help all schools, nurseries, colleges and MATs create a Climate Action Plan. Please get on touch if your school need free support. Let's Go Zero is an Ashden campaign. The Carbon Literacy Project

The Carbon Footprint Iceberg 🧊 The Real Risk in Climate Strategy No One Is Training For” 👇 When companies say they’re “cutting emissions,” the real question isn’t how much— it’s who has the skills to act on them. Because managing carbon isn’t just a data problem. It’s a human capability problem. 🔴 Scope 1 – Direct emissions Factories, furnaces, company vehicles. These are easiest to track and reduce—when teams have operational discipline and accountability. 🟠 Scope 2 – Energy emissions Purchased electricity, heating, cooling. Here, progress depends on decision-making skills, cross-functional coordination, and the willingness to shift to renewables. 🟢 Scope 3 – Value chain emissions This is the real iceberg. Suppliers, logistics, travel, product use, disposal—often 70%+ of total emissions. And this is where #GreenSoftSkills become non-negotiable: • Systems thinking • Supplier collaboration • Influence without authority • Ethical decision-making • Change leadership 💡 Why this matters Most companies focus on Scope 1 & 2 because they can “control” them. Scope 3 can’t be controlled—it must be co-created. You don’t reduce Scope 3 with dashboards alone. You reduce it with people who can collaborate, negotiate, redesign, and lead change across ecosystems. ⚡ The shift is already underway Investors, regulators, and customers now expect full value-chain accountability. This means sustainability teams must evolve from compliance managers to green leaders with strong soft skills. 👉 Net zero without Scope 3 isn’t a data gap. It’s a #GreenSoftSkills gap. And closing that gap is the real climate advantage. #GreenSoftSkills #CarbonFootprint #Scope3 #NetZero #ESG #ClimateAction #GreenLeadership