Climate Central

Climate Central tackles the misperception that climate change is a distant problem—affecting other people and other places—and inspires the public to address this urgent issue. Climate Central’s non-partisan, evidence-based approach helps make climate change real and local by combining strong scientific research with state-of-the-art communications. Its engaging multimedia products and visual tools present climate science and its impacts on weather and natural systems objectively and authoritatively, helping inform local, national, and international media and reaching large audiences among policymakers, the business community, and public. This award supports general operations.

Climate Central tackles the misperception that climate change is a distant problem—affecting other people and other places—and inspires the public to address this urgent issue. Climate Central’s non-partisan, evidence-based approach helps make climate change real and local, by combining strong scientific research with state-of-the-art communications. Its engaging multimedia products and visual tools present climate science and its impacts on weather and natural systems objectively and authoritatively, helping inform local, national, and international media and reaching large audiences among policymakers, the business community, and public. The award supports general operations.

Climate Central helps tackle the misperception that climate change is a distant problem—affecting other people and other places—to inspire the public to take action. New technology and data provide, with increasing precision, the ability to determine the human fingerprint in certain types of weather events, including storm surges, heat waves, flooding, and drought. Through its World Weather Attribution project Climate Central provides scientific attributions in real time about global warming’s role in an extreme weather event to avoid speculation and instead use the event to educate the public and decision makers about climate change. In partnership with leading universities and meteorological institutes across the world, Climate Central is striving to provide this real-time extreme weather attribution service globally. The grant supports the project’s ability to cover the Indian sub-continent and all of North America.

Climate Central was established by academics and communications experts to tackle the misperception that climate change is a distant problem—affecting other people and other places—and to inspire the public to take action to address this most urgent issue. Climate Central’s non-partisan, evidence-based approach allows it to help the media make the connection between climate change and extreme weather immediately after such events occur, when the weather-induced catastrophe has the public’s attention. Climate Central provides the necessary strong scientific attributions in real time to avoid speculation and instead use the weather event to educate the public and decision makers about climate change. With support from the MacArthur Foundation, Climate Central is expanding its efforts to reach broad domestic and international audiences with climate information that is clear, local, and relevant in order to influence the conversation about climate change and motivate policy action.