The UK Met Office has launched a five-year programme of climate change research, aimed at developing better understanding of the regional effects of climate change, and to provide policy makers with the tools they need to tackle climate change both in the UK and internationally.

Dubbed the Integrated Climate Programme (ICP), the research programme will feed its findings into the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), and the Ministry of Defence (MoD).

The programme has been promised £74m over five years from Defra and £12m over three years from the MoD. It will also see the Met Office's Hadley Centre gain new supercomputing resources, according to the government announcement.

"The case for man-made climate change has been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt," said Vicky Pope, head of the Climate Change for Government at the Met Office Hadley Centre.

"It is now vital that the science moves to answer the questions on how climates may change regionally, what the risks of dangerous climate change are and what the potential impacts of climate change may be with different degrees of mitigation and adaptation."

Defra spokesman Phil Woolas said that there was now international consensus on climate change, and that science was at the heart of that agreement. ®

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