This Must be the Decade of Action

The world has just ten years to limit global temperature rise to 2°C

No one is immune to climate change. Already this year we’ve seen drought and famine in the Horn of Africa, wildfires in the US, storms and flooding in Australia, Europe and the UK – and ongoing sea-level rise threatening communities in Asia. And with glaciers melting faster than ever the UN has declared 2025 the International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation.

UEA is an acknowledged leader in climate research. Our researchers are driving ambitious projects to scope and mitigate the risks. Years ago, they helped prove the world is warming. Today, they continue to uncover its secrets, developing bold, practical solutions that can combat adverse effects and working hands-on with communities to help them live safer, healthier, happier lives.

“So many themes to work on”

Collaboration and interdisciplinarity are at the heart of the way we do things at UEA.

In the Norwich Institute for Sustainable Development (NISD) some of our brightest researchers in the natural and social sciences are working with partner organisations on the Norwich Research Park on ways to help farming communities in the developing world feed themselves and live sustainable, healthy lives.

As the climate changes and population pressures increase these challenges evolve and multiply, but Professor Nitya Rao, Director of the Norwich Institute for Sustainable Development (NISD), says UEA’s approach is delivering real benefits:

“There are so many themes to work on. But we have created a unique collaborative environment, with organisations and teams working on nutrition, plant genetics and diversity, soil health, and the Business School working on value chains… I think we have the capacity to really pull this all together over the next five years.”

A key research focus is food systems, from production to consumption. In many places in the world, even if people can grow sustainable, nutritious crops that support biodiversity they must sell them to survive. They eat nutrient-poor, cheap wheat and rice products instead.

UEA’s research focuses on ways to make nutritious, climate resistant, under-used crops attractive and viable for farmers in areas where they grow naturally. For example, in parts of India millet grows well, but because processing it takes time and requires expensive infrastructure, hard-pressed growers often send it to market.

To change this picture we take a multi-layered approach. In India, NISD researchers and their partners are working to influence policy and secure investment in milling facilities. They’re producing accessible tools that promote knowledge sharing, including digital apps so people can spread information about effective indigenous growing practices, soil conditions, plant diseases, pests and more.

In other parts of the world the crops and the barriers to use are different and we tailor our approach. In Uganda, we’ve developed a project training young, unemployed people to work as village agents so farmers can handle issues like crop insurance and seed buying collectively.

We need to take new challenges on board and push for new solutions.

Thirty years ago Professor Rao’s activism focused on women but she says work on gender must now be more nuanced, and she wrote on this in the 2024 Global Hunger Index. She has highlighted a situation in the drought-stricken parts of northern semi-arid Kenya, where some microfunding and loans are now available for female enterprises; there is little support, however, for young men. They’re finding themselves drawn into gangs and ethnic warfare in their search for a future.

“Work on gender and intersectionality, that is, recognising the particular needs of different genders across ethnicities and other forms of difference is coming to the fore now,” she says.

“More advocacy is needed for gender to be integrated into movements for climate and food justice. This is where UEA’s new campaign resonates. It’s so important, I think, to dare to do different. When I talk about the young men in Kenya being vulnerable people laugh but we need to say it. What was true 30 years ago isn’t always true now.”

Professor Nitya Rao (DEV93)

Professor of Gender and Development, School of Global Development.

Director of the Norwich Institute for Sustainable Development (NISD).

“The focus of my research is on people, especially the poor. Which things matter in their everyday lives? What are they experiencing? What do they need?”

Professor Rao started her career as an activist committed to gender equality and women’s empowerment. For more than 30 years her research has explored gendered changes in land and migration patterns among marginalised, rural communities, and how these people can achieve livelihood, food and nutrition security, especially when they’re faced with climate variability. It has taken her into communities throughout India, South Asia, East Africa and West Africa.

Her work recognises that climate events have a disproportionately large impact on women in vulnerable communities because of unequal access to land and capital, and social norms that restrict women’s choices while burdening them with the lion’s share of childcare and domestic duties.

Recent projects have focused on strengthening local and indigenous food systems to improve diet and resilience to climate change. This involves documenting, assessing and promoting local foods and sharing insights with communities. She has been legitimising local knowledge about agriculture that has been vanishing, co-produced with the support of local young people, and enabling people to make healthy choices about what to grow and eat, even when ‘junk food’ is ubiquitous, cheap and increasingly fashionable.

She serves on several high-level science advisory panels on food security and she has taken senior roles in many multi-agency research projects including:

• Adaptation to climate change in semi-arid contexts

• Sustainable food systems

• Coastal transformations and fisher wellbeing

• Urban and peri-urban agriculture as green infrastructure

• Migration as adaptation

Professor Rao has supervised more than 30 PhD students from around the world and says their lived experiences and research interests have informed her own thinking.

Reshaping the world: Deep dive into climate tipping points

UEA climate researchers are leading a new five-year project, ‘Forecasting Tipping Points in Marine Biogeochemistry and Ecosystem Responses (TiMBER)’ to answer some fundamental questions about marine ecosystems.

What are the climate tipping points? Why are they so dangerous? What impact could they have on UK marine ecosystems and industries? What challenges – and perhaps, opportunities – do they present for the UK’s industries? Working with a £4.25m research grant from the UK Government’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), and a host of partners and collaborators, we will find out. We’re exploring the oceans to find the earliest signs of climate tipping points: the thresholds that lead to large, accelerating and potentially irreversible changes such as flooding and food insecurity. The collapse of cod stocks in the North-West Atlantic in the 1980s, because of over-fishing, was one of these changes.

“Tackling the challenges of climate change requires novel approaches and thinking differently about what might be possible. This is what we aim to do through TiMBER.”

Professor Corinne Le Quéré CBE FRS, Royal Society. Research Professor of Climate Change Science, UEA.

25 in ‘25

The Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, hosted at UEA, celebrates its 25th anniversary this year. It is a partnership that brings together researchers from UEA, the Universities of Manchester and Southampton, Newcastle University, The Centre for Social Climate Change and Social Transformations, Fudan University, Shanghai and the Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations (CAST) to develop sustainable responses to climate change.

Originally funded by the Natural Environment Research Council, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and the Economic and Social Research Council, it is now financed by project funding from public and private enterprises who consult on sustainability issues along with core support from UEA.