Adam is interested in driving research impact by making research findings more useful to national and local decision makers, other researchers, and engaged climate-aware audiences. As project manager for the OpenLAND and OpenCLIM projects, Adam works with stakeholders to understand how they use climate datasets, what questions they need to answer, and how, informing the research methodology and the format of project outputs to maximise their usability. Adam’s first paper as lead author (Smith et al., 2025) is a reflection on delivering place-based climate risk data in support of local adaptation decisions, drawing experience from the OpenCLIM and MACC Hub projects, among others.
In the MACC Hub project (Maximising UK Adaptation to Climate Change), Adam is developing local climate risk reports and stakeholder workshops to assist local organisations to better understand climate risks and strengthen their adaptive capacity. Workshops are being delivered to local stakeholders in England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland through 2025 and 2026.
Previously, Adam researched satellite observed trends in burned area, fire–climate indicators (FWI, CHI, NDVI, VPD), and emissions, for the Mediterranean region, to investigate the balance of climatic and socioeconomic drivers of these trends. Adam contributed to a major review article ‘Global and Regional Trends and Drivers of Fire Under Climate Change’ (Jones et al. 2022), a Web of Science Highly Cited Paper; and supported the development of ‘A global assemblage of regional prescribed burn records – GlobalRx’ (Hsu et al., 2025).
During COVID-19, Adam collaborated on research to estimate the temporary effect of COVID restrictions on daily global CO2 emissions. He developed a confinement index, representing the relative impact of COVID policies on domestic activities for dozens of countries. This work was included in the Global Carbon Budget estimates for 2020 and 2021.
Adam is an expert in gathering and summarising latest research and led a series of reviews by international teams of scientists, published through the ScienceBrief platform. This was a tool for keeping up with the latest science emerging on climate change impacts, climate projections and understanding.
Key Research Interests
Adam’s research includes greenhouse gas emissions and climate change mitigation, synthesis and rapid evidence assessment of climate change impacts, climate resilience and climate change adaptation, climate change risk assessment, and adaptive capacity building.
