PROFESSOR PATRICIA NUTTALL AND PROFESSOR MIKE HULME

12 DECEMBER 2006

  Q237 Chairman: Good morning to you both, to Professor Nuttall from the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology and to Professor Mike Hulme from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. This, as you know, is an interesting inquiry looking at the role of the institutes across all the research councils and, indeed, saying what their role is within 21st century science. I will address this question to both of you: We have heard significant criticism in the course of this inquiry that research council institutes should be embedded in universities. Your institute is, Mike. What is the advantage of that? What do you perceive as the disadvantage?

  Professor Hulme: The Tyndall Centre is what NERC call a collaborative centre. It is established through a time-limited contract between NERC and the University of East Anglia, in my case, which means that all of the people working in the Tyndall Centre are employees of the university. In the Tyndall Centre we are distributed across six different universities but every member of the Centre is employed by the respective university. The benefit of that type of arrangement, as I would see it, is that the community of researchers is able to draw upon a much wider community of scholars and academics. Again, using my centre as an example, we are based in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, which consists of 60 academics and close to 200 researchers. Although the Tyndall Centre at UEA has a staff of maybe 25, we are embedded in a much wider community of scholars and academics.

  Q238 Chairman: What is the advantage of that?

  Professor Hulme: The advantage of that, let us say, for climate change, is that we are able to mix with people who are working in many different disciplinary areas. Climate change is a topic that is innately interdisciplinary, so, by having a much larger pool of academics and scholars to rub shoulders with week in, week out, there is the potential for a much richer exchange and cross-fertilisation of ideas. That is undoubtedly one advantage, as I would see it, of being rooted in a university environment. I suppose the other potential advantage is that by being based in a university we are also in an educational institute with undergraduate students and postgraduate students and so the new or the next generation of researchers and academics is being trained alongside the research that we are doing. We give lectures to undergraduate students and we have a training programme for postgraduate students doing PhDs or students doing Masters. That education and training dimension is again something in which a university-based research centre can participate. It is harder, but not impossible to do if it is not university-based.

  Q239  Chairman: Do you have an initial comment, Professor Nuttall? Many of your institutes are not based in universities. Some are, but most are not.

  Professor Nuttall: We have moved to be one centre now rather than a number of institutes. Historically, we were a number of institutes, which came together in 1994; our origins span beyond that of the Natural Environment Research Council. The history is different. CEH meets the Quinquennial Review aspirations of research centre institute, in that our core business is in monitoring and survey and in undertaking large-scale experiments. For example, we run the Environmental Change Network: we have a number of sites established around the UK where we monitor changes in the environment; we look at atmospheric pollutant deposition; we were the organisation that fronted the farm-scale evaluations of GM crops; and, at the moment, the big project on which we are in discussion with Defra is the fourth Countryside Survey. It is having the skills-base to do the long-term monitoring and survey, which traditionally has not been a strength of universities, besides being able to call upon an institute (just as the Defra institutes), that can meet a requirement when government needs it.