Published online 25 June 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.602

News

Funding cut for UK climate research

Ministry of Defence pulls £4.3 million from Met Office.

Met OfficeThe Met Office has lost its research funding from the UK government's Ministry of Defence.Met Office

The UK's Met Office has had its funding for climate research slashed by a quarter, following withdrawal of financial support by the government's Ministry of Defence (MoD).

The loss of £4.3 million (US$7.0 million) in funding from the MoD will affect the Met Office Hadley Centre for Climate Change in Exeter, the world-class climate modelling institute whose researchers made key contributions to the last assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007.

"This news comes as a shock," says climate scientist Martin Parry, formerly at the Met Office and now at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London. "The UK's core modelling work on climate change has been funded from this source, up to now."

“Losing 25% of your funding is a huge deal.”

Gavin Schmidt
NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies, New York

"Global and regional security will be threatened by climate change, and the MoD is hopelessly wrong to think it is outside its responsibility," adds Parry, who co-chaired the IPCC's working group on climate impacts, adaptation and vulnerability.

In a statement, an MoD spokesperson said that the cuts, which will come into effect immediately, were made with a view to "prioritizing success in current operations, such as Afghanistan".

On the defensive

This will be the first time that Met Office climate research has gone without MoD cash, according to a Met Office spokesman. The office became an executive agency of the ministry in 1990 and a commercialized trading fund in 1996. By 2008, one-sixth of its budget of £176.5 million came from commercial services. But government, and the MoD in particular, has continued to be its main customer and funder.

In 2007, the MoD signed a three-year deal worth £12 million with the Met Office, to part-fund its Integrated Climate Programme (ICP), which makes up the bulk of its climate research. Although the MoD has withdrawn its remaining funding, a Met Office spokesman insisted that the programme is not threatened.

The Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) is committed to providing £4 million per year in funding up until 2011 to ICP, and the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) will provide approximately £10 million in annual funding over the same period.

The Met Office is now in negotiations with these departments, and with the Department for International Development (DfID), in an effort to recoup some of the lost funding.

"If they don't recoup it, they are going to be in serious trouble," said Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeller at NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies in New York. "Losing 25% of your funding is a huge deal. Five percent is generally containable, but 25% is not an amount you can hope to absorb easily."

ADVERTISEMENT

Chris West, head of the UK Climate Impacts Programme at the University of Oxford, says the deficit will slow down UK climate research.

However, the cuts could also lead to a better way of funding climate research, says Schmidt. The Met Office's link to the defence ministry is unusual among national climate research centres, and some feel that it can lead to unnecessary bureaucracy.

"Climate research should be as open and transparent as possible," says Schmidt, "and institutional links with the defence establishment can sometimes impede that goal." 

Commenting is now closed.

naturejobs