Home About ESCC Hub The Earth Systems and Climate Change Hub

The Earth Systems and Climate Change Hub

The Earth Systems and Climate Change (ESCC) Hub was established in 2015 and ran until mid 2021. The Hub was a partnership of Australia’s leading Earth systems and climate change research institutions:

  • CSIRO
  • Bureau of Meteorology
  • University of New South Wales
  • Australian National University
  • Monash University
  • University of Melbourne
  • University of Tasmania.

The ESCC Hub was hosted by CSIRO and was one of six hubs supported by funding through the Australian Government’s National Environmental Science Program.

Our role

The role of the ESCC Hub was to ensure that Australia’s policies and management decisions are effectively informed by Earth systems and climate change science, now and into the future.

We achieved this by building a national partnership, with world-leading capability in multi-disciplinary Earth system science and modelling that provided Earth system and climate information in support of a productive and resilient Australia.

Our research priorities were:

  • Improving our understanding of past and current climate
  • Improving our understanding of how the climate may change in the future
  • Building the utility of climate change information.

Delivering our science

Our work provided the best available Earth systems and climate science through a climate knowledge ‘value chain’ that involved many stakeholders, from scientists through to next and end users.

While some of the Hub’s science outputs were directed to a range of end users from the outset, much was also used by Australian and international research communities, within and beyond the Hub. This research was used to generate data, information, products, tools and services for a range of end users, including government, the private sector, non-government organisations and Australian communities of interest (including Indigenous communities). 

National Environmental Science Program (NESP)

The National Environmental Science Program (NESP) is the Australian Government’s long-term commitment to environment and climate research.

NESP builds on its predecessors, the National Environmental Research Program (which concluded in June 2015) and the Australian Climate Change Science Program (which concluded in June 2016), to support decision-makers to understand, manage and conserve Australia’s environment with the best available information, based on world-class science.

NESP was delivered through six research hubs between 2016 and 2021. In addition to the ESCC Hub, these were:

NESP has recently been approved for another round of funding, from 2021 to 2027.  The climate change science and stakeholder activities conducted under the Earth Systems and Climate Change Hub will be continued, and expanded, under the new Climate Systems Hub.

More information about NESP is available from the Australian Government Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment website.