ESP

Earth System Physics

 

Collaboration

ESP is involved in a wide range of international programmes often involving multi-country collaborations. Some examples are given here:

  • WATCH: This project, funded under the EU FP6, brought together the hydrological, water resources and climate communities to analise, quantify and predict the components of the current and future global water cycles and related water resources states; evaluate their uncertainties and clarify the overall vulnerability of global water resources related to the main societal and economic sectors. The final report of WATCH significantly expanded our understanding of climate change and land use impacts on the global hydrological cycle.
  • Climateprediction.net: Climateprediction.net is a distributed computing project to produce predictions of the Earth's climate up to 2100 and to test the accuracy of climate models. To do this, it needs people around the world to give it time on their computers - time when they have their computers switched on, but are not using them to their full capacity. This will allow the project to improve our understanding of how sensitive climate models are to small changes and also to things like changes in carbon dioxide and the sulfur cycle.
  • CECILIA: CECILIA's primary mission is to improve the understanding of local climate change in Central and Eastern Europe and its impacts into forestry, agriculture, hydrology and air quality. 
  • ENSEMBLES: The ENSEMBLES project was a five-year project (2004 - 2009) supported by the EU FP6. Its goal was to develop a prediction system for climate change based on the principal state-of-the-art, high resolution, global and regional Earth System models developed in Europe;  quantify and reduce the uncertainty in the representation of physical, chemical, biological and human-related feedbacks in the Earth System; and maximise the exploitation of the results by linking the outputs to a range of applications.
  • ACQWA: The ACQWA Project (Assessing Climate impacts on the Quantity and quality of WAter) is a large-scale integrating project, with 35 partners and a budget of EURO 6.5 million.The project, initiated and coordinated by the University of Geneva, Switzerland, began formally on October 2008.
  • CMCC: The CMCC (Centro Euro-Mediterraneo per i Cambiamenti Climatici) is a Consortium consisting of different Italian public and private research institutions dedicated to climate-related research; ICTP is an associated centre.
  • QWECI: Quantifying weather and climate impacts on health in developing countries project (QWeCI) aims to understand the climate drivers of the vector-borne diseases of malaria, Rift Valley Fever, and certain tick-borne diseases, which all have major human and livestock health and economic implications in Africa, in order to assist with their short-term management and make projections of their future likely impacts. QWeCI will develop and test the methods and technology required for an integrated decision support framework for health impacts of climate and weather.
  • HEALTHY FUTURES: The HEALTHY FUTURES project aims to construct a disease risk mapping system for three water-related, high-impact vector-borne diseases (malaria, Rift Valley fever and schistosomiasis) in eastern Africa, taking into account environmental/climatic trends and changes in socio-economic conditions to predict future risk.