About AVOID 2

The Grantham Institute is leading Imperial’s involvement in AVOID 2, a UK government funded climate change research programme involving a multi-disciplinary consortium of research organisations.

The AVOID research programme was established in 2009 to provide scientifically-robust, policy-relevant answers to questions directly related to the Ultimate Objective of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change which is to ‘prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system’.

The second phase of the programme began February 2014 and ran until March 2016.

The multi-disciplinary consortium for AVOID 2 was led by the Met Office and included the Grantham Institute, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, and Walker Institute (University of Reading). There were 12 other organisations in the AVOID network.

Research and purpose

2014/2015 was a critical period in the international climate change negotiation process, in which the long-term climate goal were discussed and the scale of greenhouse gas mitigation ambition and structure of a global agreement shaped. AVOID 2 provided Government analysts and climate negotiating teams both in the UK and internationally with the science needed to inform their decisions, leading up to the UNFCCC Conference of Parties (COP 21) in Paris in November 2015.

The research programme focused on three key questions:

• What are the characteristics of ‘dangerous’ climate change?
• What greenhouse gas emissions pathways will avoid ‘dangerous’ climate change?
• What is the feasibility of such pathways?

Researchers working on the programme had a wide range of leading expertise in climate science and modelling, the interactions between the climate and the biosphere, hydrology, ecology, economics, psychology, sociology and a range of engineering disciplines.