The World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) coordinates climate research initiatives at an international level. The science activities it supports address cutting-edge topics which cannot be tackled by a single nation, agency or discipline alone. WCRP fosters innovation and collaboration through the organization of global meetings, workshops and conferences. The actual research projects are carried out by scientists worldwide within projects at their home institutions. To ensure that policy makers and end users can benefit from latest scientific advances, WCRP represents the state-of-the-art knowledge of its community toward high-level policy fora as well as toward the producers of operational climate predictions.
In the selection of its focus areas, WCRP is guided by the two main objectives stated in its Sponsor's Agreement. These are:
1. to determine the predictability of climate; and
2. to determine the effect of human activities on climate.
The better variability and change in the climate system are understood, the better will be society's knowledge on climate predictability and its own predictive capacity. Equipped with tools for seamless climate predictions, global communities can better respond to impacts of climate variability and change on major social and economic sectors including food security, energy, transport, environment, health and water resources. WCRP contributes to such services to society by advancing and communicating the global state of the art in climate science.
WCRP collaborates closely with related programmes at international and national level, including on observations, modelling, interactions between society and the climate system, and similar relevant topics.