Environment Protection: Research
The question
To ask the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, what funding has been provided for climate modelling and environmental monitoring research.
Answered by Kanishka Narayan
UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) invested over £24million in research to support better climate modelling and more robust environmental monitoring in financial year 2024/25. This includes projects that use state-of-the-art computational techniques to monitor pollutants in UK rivers, machine learning models that track the impact of weather events and advanced quantification of greenhouse gas emissions. This year, £3.6million was also provided to the Met Office Hadley Centre to maintain and develop its underpinning climate modelling capability.
Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) has another major R&D programme, the Natural Capital and Ecosystem Assessment programme, worth around £152 million (covering fiscal years 2022/23 – 2026/27). In addition, there are smaller R&D projects across Defra that support ongoing monitoring activity.
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