Australia is confronted by a changing climate. Understanding climate risks to the economy, business and environment across Australia requires knowledge founded on Earth system science.
The Decadal Plan for Australian Earth System Science makes 14 recommendations, beginning with the urgent establishment of an Australian Institute for Earth System Science, tasked with developing, coordinating and implementing the national science required to deliver answers to nationally significant questions.
Download the plan
(PDF, 5.3 MB)
Read the Academy’s media release
Australia is confronted by a changing climate. Understanding climate risks to the economy, business and environment across Australia requires knowledge founded on Earth system science: a comprehensive scientific atmosphere, oceans and land, and the flows of energy, carbon, water and nutrients between these systems. Australia needs a new approach to build this understanding into our predictions and projections using the best available science and ensuring uncertainties and gaps in the science are filled. This new approach must prioritise long-term national coordination, oversight, strategy and implementation.
Australia’s Earth system science endeavour is rich with talent. However it is fragmented and operates under various priorities which are often in competition and increasingly focused on short-term outcomes. Excellent investments such as Centres of Excellence, the National Environmental Research Program, the Australian Climate Service and CSIRO initiatives align with the urgent need to solve immediate problems around impacts and adaptation to climate risk. As a result, an unintended vacuum has emerged where no unifying agency or long-term funding initiative is addressing the fundamental understanding of climate to provide the foundations for climate intelligence needs in 10, 20 or 30 years’ time. We are, in effect, building climate action and climate policy on foundations developed 10 to 20 years ago.
This plan for Australia by the Australian Academy of Science’s National Committee for Earth System Science will, over the next decade, create the scale and ambition of endeavour to generate the scientific understanding needed to answer the critical questions that climate change is demanding of our national and regional security, economic wellbeing, and environmental and social resilience.
This plan makes 14 recommendations. The first, and enabling, recommendation is the urgent establishment of an Australian Institute for Earth System Science, tasked with developing, coordinating and implementing the national science required to deliver answers to nationally significant questions.
This necessitates long-term investment by the Australian Government.
Other recommendations relate to the urgency of a national strategy for integrated high-performance computing and data via a Tier-1 facility. The national strategy must include a fully integrated strategy for the management and custodianship of data to enable the effective use of new tools, including artificial intelligence and machine learning. We also highlight challenges associated with workforce planning.
With the implementation of Recommendation 1, Australia can establish the science foundations for an evidence-based approach to climate risk, and partner with our allies to provide climate intelligence across our region. Without the establishment of a strong science-based foundation, we risk investments that lead to maladaptation, incorrect disclosure of financial risk by business, and erroneous assessments of national and regional risks associated with climate change.
R1: Urgently establish an Australian Institute for Earth System Science, tasked with developing, coordinating and implementing the national strategies required to deliver answers to nationally significant questions.
R2: Establish an integrated, standardised and curated observational data system, including national and global reanalyses and satellite data, co-located with nationally significant computing facilities to support understanding and modelling, artificial intelligence and machine learning based applications.
R3: Coordinate and prioritise observational programs for research across Australia. Oversight of these observational programs, strategic review of investment in research observations and a strategy to identify emerging needs should be established above the level of individual capabilities.
R4: Develop a strategy and methodology to prioritise process-based studies that build understanding, and leverage that understanding to improve more complex modelling systems.
R5: Establish oversight or coordination of the multiple investments in process-based studies to identify duplication and gaps to maximise the return on investment.
R6: Ensure a sovereign Earth system modelling capability to answer crucial and concerning questions about the interactions in Earth’s system via the implementation of a national strategy for exascale capability.
R7: Establish a national solution to manage Earth system science data, including the custodianship of observations and model simulations. This needs to be integrated with data wranglers and technical staff with the required competencies, compute infrastructure to enable analysis, and the implementation of artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques. The establishment of this national data solution is overdue and requires urgent attention.
R8: Maintain strong collaboration with the Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator National Research Infrastructure (ACCESS-NRI) to integrate new process-based understanding into ACCESS to enhance national prediction and projection capability.
R9: Universities consider locating disciplines and courses relevant to Earth system science, in particular atmospheric science, oceanography, soil science and ecophysiology, within schools of mathematics or physics where possible.
R10: Provide mentorship or co-supervision, additional to existing institutional supervision, to coordinate and enable world-class postgraduate training aligned with identified priorities and national research needs.
R11: Identify critical areas of model development that are suitable for PhD students, and extend scholarships to recognise the value of, and challenges related to, model development.
R12: Provide a mix of permanent and short-term positions, working in collaboration with external researchers, to target identified areas of process-based understanding and/or model development.
R13: Identify major areas of national need and communicate those needs to funding agencies, and identify and encourage applications from suitable individuals in collaboration with universities and other research agencies.
R14: Provide direct investment in research proposals in the form of cash and in-kind support to highlight those that align with the national strategy.
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