​New Digital Research Report Looks at the Landscape of Climate Research Funding

    Digital Science, a global technology company serving the research community, releases a new report titled: The Landscape of Climate Research Funding. This Digital Research Report looks at the growth and content of climate research investment and note its deep impact on monitoring, regulatory and policy  organisations.  The report is being presented at the Week of the Arctic event in Fairbanks, Alaska, May 8th – 14th.  http://akarctichost.org/

    Key findings, the Landscape of Climate Research Funding report:

    • Funding has grown since 2003 and forms around 1.7% of total research grants or $1.5 billion annually

    • Climate change research  has shifted from the understanding of  global systems research towards impacts and responses – studies around adapting to and mitigating climate change.

    • Critical cuts may not be to research but to the agencies that implement the research.  Direct USA funding data for climate change research reveals just the tip of the iceberg.

    • USA policy change could undermine the efforts of many other nations and international organisations unless other governments step in to remind the USA of its mutual service obligations.

    • Changes in the focus or magnitude of research funding in one research-intensive economy can have direct and significant consequences for the wider global research landscape; these impacts will not be recognized for quite a while since the nature of this research spans years.

    • U.S. historically leads in climate change funding, while the E.U. has significantly increased funding in recent years.

    • Research funding for ‘climate change’ is not spread evenly across the globe, because some systems and some peoples are much more vulnerable to its impact than others; Arctic habitats and communities face climate change at twice the rate of the rest of the world.

    This report uses data from the Dimensions database of competitive research grants, which indexes more than $1 trillion across more than 1.5 million individual grants and awards, linked to principal investigators and to their institutions. In light of new US government policy and funding changes around environmental protection and climate research, it will be difficult to assess the impact of these new rulings until years after the policy has been enacted. However, funding data provide a more proximate bellwether than traditional research analytics: research grant data can track overall trends highlighting where the impacts will fall, providing a useful reference point.

     

    Figure 4. Map from Climate Research Funding Report.png

    Figure: The distribution of grants awarded to countries for research on ‘climate change’. More intense colour indicates a greater relative number of grants to the country.

    You can download this report now via Figshare here and we will be discussing online using #climatechangereport.