Date: 10 December 2025
Lecture Topic: Are we ready for the storms ahead?

Speaker: Hayley J. Fowler
Institution: Newcastle University, UK

Speaker Profile: Professor Hayley J. Fowler is currently Professor of Climate Change Impacts and Director of the Centre for Climate and Environmental Resilience at Newcastle University. Her research aims to advance the understanding of changing weather and extreme precipitation events, and to develop high-resolution climate projections to provide scientific support for adaptation strategies. She is a Member of the Adaptation Committee of the UK Climate Change Committee (UKCCC) and advises the UK Government on climate resilience through the Scientific Expert Panel of the UK Department for Energy Security and Net Zero.
As a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and Recipient of the 2024 European Geosciences Union (EGU) Sergey Soloviev Medal, Fowler is internationally recognized for her pioneering downscaling techniques, which effectively bridge climate models and practical applications. She contributed to the IPCC Working Group I (WGI) Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) and has served as Past President of the British Hydrological Society. Professor Fowler also actively promotes interdisciplinary collaboration and public engagement, often inspiring society to collectively address the climate crisis through popular science and academic lectures.

Lecture Overview: In a warming climate, the intensification of extreme precipitation has been shown in both observations and climate models to roughly follow the theoretical Clausius-Clapeyron scaling relationship. However, studies have indicated that short-duration events are changing at a greater magnitude—and such events often trigger flash floods or landslides, resulting in loss of life. Meanwhile, heatwaves and the resulting droughts and water scarcity are also occurring with increasing frequency. These changes collectively exert cascading impacts on water quality, agricultural production, and other critical societal needs.
Continental-scale convection-permitting climate models (CPCMs) and new observational datasets provide state-of-the-art scientific tools for understanding future extreme weather (rainfall, wind, hail, lightning) and their compound effects against the backdrop of global warming. Nevertheless, due to insufficient representation of large-scale circulation changes and dynamic feedbacks from the land, ocean, and cryosphere, climate models are underestimating the real-world warming rate and the magnitude of the increase in associated extreme weather events.
This lecture will argue that we need to shift the focus from over-reliance on a single climate model to adopting an interdisciplinary storylines approach that integrates multiple lines of evidence into scenario development. Ultimately, we must engage in cross-sectoral collaboration to address these rapid changes and collectively develop actionable information that can be swiftly integrated into policies and practices—thereby improving early warning systems and risk assessments for extreme weather events to support climate adaptation.

Lecture Time:
Beijing Time: 20:00 on 10 December
UK Time: 13:00 on 10 December

Lecture Link: https://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/abce/unesco-chair/events/webinar-series/2025/10-december-hayley-fowler/

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