The UK government has slashed its financial support for the Met Office's climate programme. The move came in the same week that prime minister Gordon Brown laid out ambitious talk of a US$100-billion fund to help developing countries to cope with climate change (see Nature doi:10.1038/news.2009.604; 2009).

The Ministry of Defence (MOD) has withdrawn its £4.3 million (US$7 million) in funding for climate research — roughly a quarter of the Met Office's total funding in this area. The change will affect the Hadley Centre for Climate Change in Exeter, the world-class climate-modelling institute whose researchers made key contributions to the most recent assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007.

"This news comes as a shock," says climate scientist Martin Parry, formerly of 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," he says.

The change does, however, bring the centre more in line with other national climate research centres, very few of which have links to defence funding.

Losing 25% of your funding is a huge deal.

In a statement, an MOD spokesperson said that the cuts, which are effective immediately, were made with a view to "prioritizing success in current operations, such as Afghanistan".

This will be the first time that Met Office climate research has gone without MOD cash. One-sixth of the agency's total budget of £176.5 million comes from commercial services, but the government, and the MOD in particular, remains 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, 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 Although the MOD has withdrawn its remaining funding, a Met Office spokesman insisted that the programme is not threatened.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 is committed to providing £4 million per year until 2011 to the climate programme, and the Department of Energy and Climate Change will provide about £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, 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 per cent is generally containable, but 25% is not an amount you can hope to absorb easily."