The Maximising UK Adaptation to Climate Change (MACC) Hub

The Maximising UK Adaptation to Climate Change (MACC) Hub aims to help the UK address critical gaps in adaptation planning, implemetation and capacity building. It will synthesize cutting-edge research and related, practical applications to inform adaptation strategies at local and national levels in the UK. Broadly, the project seeks to better understand — and to make more understandable — “what works” on adaptation.

The centrepiece of the wider project is its online knowledge portal, the MACC Hub itself. This online hub will serve as the conduit for the information generated through the project. The hub, created by SEI, will be hosted by weADAPT, the institute’s signature, collaborative platform for climate change adaptation. The close ties with weADAPT will connect the MACC Hub with the global research and practice frontiers and to the global weADAPT community of people and organizations working on related issues worldwide.

The wider MACC Hub endeavour has four key areas of activities:

• Building skills and partnerships — The project aims to advance understanding, enhance training, and foster meaningful engagement to strengthen climate change adaptation knowledge and capacity across the UK.
• Generating data and knowledge — The project seeks to generate knowledge that advances adaptation action. It plans to develop an open-access software platform to provide comprehensive climate risk and adaptation data for analysis.
• Linking knowledge, policy and practice — The project will seek to foster needed connections between policy and practice to better enable evidence-based decision-making. The project intends to establish a policy response unit and to set up policy labs, in addition to creating the MACC Hub knowledge portal.
• Fostering innovation through targeted funding — The project is planning to trial transformative adaptation projects through a flexible fund that is intended both to support innovative solutions and to leverage partnerships between academic and implementing organizations.

Partners and funders

SEI is part of the broad-based consortium of universities and climate organizations involved in the project, representing entities from throughout the UK. 

The GBP 5 million project is funded by UK Research & Innovation (UKRI) and the UK Department for Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), and is scheduled to run for three years. The program was co-designed by UKRI, Defra, the UK Met Office and the UK Climate Change Committee.

King’s College London serves as the Hub Secretariat and the home of the project’s Policy Response Unit, which is supported by King’s Policy Institute. Activities will be implemented through regional centres, each seeking to address key barriers to adaptation as follows:

• Brunel University London, the London Climate Ready Partnership (formerly the London Climate Change Partnership), and Sustainability West Midlands – addressing public awareness of climate adaptation and the barriers to engagement, with a focus on developing more effective ways to reach and engage members of the public.
• University of Glasgow and Verture (previously Sniffer)  (knowledge brokers on climate resilience in Scotland) — analysing place-based activities in Scotland, with a focus on increasing understanding of systems complexity and developing training for transformative adaptation outcomes.
• Northern Ireland Environment Link (Climate NI Team, a cross-sectoral partnership) and Queen’s University Belfast — addressing aspects of policy, legislation and regulation that hold back the adaptation vision proposed in the UK’s national adaptation plan.
• Cardiff University, Future Generations Cymru (the Office of the Future Generations Commissioner for Wales), and the Severn Estuary Partnership (supported by Netherwood Sustainable Futures) – exploring the efficacy of Welsh and Scottish approaches to well-being and future generations, and informing UK-wide, justice-oriented approaches to adaptation.
• Climate Outreach — conducting research on what people think, feel and know about climate adaptation; developing effective messaging strategies to engage the public on concepts of resilience; and helping partners to integrate these into their work.
• Newcastle University, the University of East Anglia, and the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford – creating a data integration centre to help make climate model results more easily understandable for policymakers.