PROFESSOR STUART PALMER AND PROFESSOR ALAN JENKINS

6 JUNE 2007

  Q103 Chairman: Good morning to our witnesses this morning, Professor Stuart Palmer, the Deputy Vice-Chancellor of University of Warwick, and Professor Alan Jenkins, the Director of the Water Science Programme, the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology. Thank you both very, very much indeed for coming this morning. This is the penultimate session on our inquiry looking across the Research Councils at international policies and activities, so we are grateful to you for giving evidence to us this morning. May I begin with you, Professor Palmer, and ask, clearly much of science is global these days, so how important is international collaboration to the UK?

  Professor Palmer: You are quite right that research is indeed global. Research is both competitive globally and collaborative globally and, for the UK, it is absolutely crucial that we are able to choose the highest quality international partners to join in our research projects. In the UK, we do not have every facility and we do not have every area of expertise and, to make progress in areas now which are interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary, you really have to engage with your complementary partners in other parts of the world.

  Q104  Chairman: Professor Jenkins, would you echo that?

  Professor Jenkins: Yes, I would echo that and I would also add that some of the biggest problems that we face at the moment are truly global in extent and they need a global approach.

  Q105  Chairman: So, we could not manage without international collaboration? We could not simply bury our heads and do our own thing?

  Professor Jenkins: No, I do not believe that we could. For example, the area of climate change and its impacts and the prediction of future climate change is a good example of where the UK could not realistically go alone.

  Q106  Chairman: The obvious question then is, how good are we at it? How successful are we?

  Professor Jenkins: I do not have the direct metrics in front of me. I believe we have specialist niches. In the environment area, I would consider that we have a specialist niche in terms of, for example, the building and application of these big global models. So, in the environment field and in issues to do with quality of life or policy support in terms of the environment, I would say that the UK are leaders. Not perhaps the leaders but we are up there with the frontlines.

  Q107  Chairman: You mentioned earlier that we cannot obviously do everything ourselves and certainly Professor Palmer made that point. Do you feel that we are strategically focusing our efforts internationally? Do you sense that there is a strategic plan for our international collaborations?

  Professor Jenkins: Again, being a little parochial on the environmental issue and I apologise for that.

  Q108  Chairman: That is all right.

  Professor Jenkins: I would say, no, there is not a strategic plan. What we need is more communication between Government and researchers, we need more cooperation and coordination of our activities and above all we need increased collaboration to make ourselves most effective. At the moment, I do not think that we are necessarily strategically following a plan in the area of the environment.

  Q109  Chairman: Professor Palmer, you are nodding your head.

  Professor Palmer: Yes.

  Q110  Chairman: Do you think that there is a lack of focus here?

  Professor Palmer: I think that the power is with the researcher to choose his or her—

  Q111  Chairman: The individual researcher?

  Professor Palmer: The individual researcher; the individual research groups; the individual subject areas within universities and within research centres to choose their areas of research. In the main, talking about the external funders, to approach them in a responsive mode to fund the areas of research that they particularly see from their perspective as being important.

  Q112  Chairman: Is that not a little haphazard?

  Professor Palmer: Yes, you could say that, but research in many ways and in many cases, certainly blue skies research, is haphazard.

  Q113  Chairman: Warwick University, 40 years in existence, one of the most successful research universities certainly in the UK with an international reputation. How does your organisation benefit from drawing down on this international research expertise?

  Professor Palmer: It benefits enormously. It benefits enormously from having access to international facilities, for example, which of course even the UK would not be able to provide on its own, so you look to CERN in Geneva and you look to Grenoble with the European facilities. We have collaborative partnerships with facilities in Japan. In the States, we have collaborative partnerships with American facilities. Of course, our people go there and their people come here and that exchange is—

  Q114  Chairman: What is the perceived benefit of your people going to the States or to Japan?

  Professor Palmer: The benefit is of course a whole spectrum of benefits. It benefits the research programmes and the speed with which these research programmes can be taken forward, the speed with which the results can then be made available not only to other researchers but to users of the research, to industry and to business. It benefits our students because the academics come back with that international dimension, with that frontier exciting research and build that into their postgraduate programmes and their undergraduate programmes, allowing the PhD students and the undergraduates in years abroad to go and take part in these activities.

  Q115  Chairman: Do CEH do the same? Do your scientists get opportunities to work on collaborative programmes internationally?

  Professor Jenkins: Yes, very much so. Historically, we have been very much involved in water research in particular around the world, in developing countries in particular, but I should say more widely within NERC. Of course, the Oceanography programmes and the Antarctic and Polar programmes are all rooted in a way in a global collaborative effort and that is important if you are going to move the science forward appropriately at the appropriate global scale and in a timely fashion.

  Q116  Chairman: You mentioned some Polar research but, in terms of your own area, in terms of water research, do you target particular countries, on what basis do you target them and how does, if you like, the system in Research Councils actually support you in that targeting process? The Research Council are your paymasters, are they not?

  Professor Jenkins: Answering the last question first—

  Q117  Chairman: Partly.

  Professor Jenkins: The Research Council provides approximately 50% of our funding. The other 50% we win from other sources, largely government departments and the EU. Yes, they are half of our paymaster. What I would say in answer to the first question as to whether we target areas, is, no, not generally. What tends to happen is that the science that we undertake is issue based or problem based and, if I can take the example of the difficulty of building and parameterising these huge global models of climate, it quickly became apparent that to understand what is happening at the land surface, the exchange between the land surface and the atmosphere, in different climatic regions, we had to have major field experiments. These were started in the Amazonian rain forest in the 1980s and 1990s, in the boreal regions of Canada and now in Northern Scandinavia, and in the humid subtropics in Africa, and so these huge ground level experiments are all brought together in a global scale. Once the issue is identified, there is a degree of targeting but it is targeted into the appropriate areas.

  Q118  Chairman: It is about issue first and then you find the most appropriate international collaborations?

  Professor Jenkins: I would argue that that is the case.

  Q119  Chairman: Are you assisted in that by the Research Council? Does NERC help you in that process or is it very much left to yourself?

  Professor Jenkins: We tend to be more funded in that process through the government departments historically. So, we have drawn upon funding schemes which have been run by DfID for example and by Defra for example, but we also have had Research Council funding for those activities.