Inside an ASCEND synthesis team: how scattered data becomes climate policy

Every ASCEND synthesis team begins with a decision, not a dataset. Before any analysis starts, the team names the choice a ministry, municipality, or authority has to make, and the evidence that choice requires. That framing determines everything downstream.

Step one: co-designing the question

Teams are co-led by a researcher and a decision-maker or practitioner. In an early workshop they agree on the question, the users of the eventual outputs, and what would count as a usable answer. This is where most research-to-policy gaps close, long before the first analysis is run.

Step two: finding what already exists

The team then maps the evidence landscape. This means locating national datasets, grey literature, monitoring campaigns, previous reviews, and community records. Custom AI synthesis tools accelerate the screening of large literature bodies, so the team spends its time on appraisal and interpretation rather than on manual search.

Step three: integration under one roof

Teams meet in Cape Town for intensive three to five day sessions, hosted at our custom-designed hubs, and continue collaborating virtually in between. Harmonising datasets that were never designed to be combined is difficult, detailed work, and it goes fastest when statisticians, domain experts, and the people who will use the results are in the same room.

High-performance computing supports geospatial overlays, model ensembles, and sensitivity analyses. Every judgement about data quality and uncertainty is documented, because a decision-maker needs to know how much confidence to place in each finding.

Step four: building outputs people use

A peer-reviewed paper is often part of the output, but rarely the part that changes practice. Teams also produce vulnerability maps at the administrative resolution planners work with, toolkits with clear procedures, open datasets, and policy briefs written in the language of the institution that will act.

Step five: handover and capacity

Outputs are handed over through training rather than email. Postdoctoral fellows and early-career participants are coached in science communication, brief drafting, and facilitation, so that capability stays in the region after the team's work concludes.

That is the pattern: scattered evidence in, integrated and appraised evidence out, delivered to someone with the authority to use it. If you would like to propose a team or join one, start with our opportunities.