We must raise our voices!
Last December I felt honoured to take over from Will de Ruijter the job of IMAU scientific director. For over a decade, Will successfully safeguarded IMAU’s interests, leaving behind an inspiring study/teaching environment and a healthy and thriving climate research institute. A thank you event is scheduled for later this year, stay tuned.
My first task as scientific director was to coordinate IMAU’s contribution to the six-yearly research quality assessment. In preparation for this, the four research institutes that populate our department (ITF, SAP, Debye and IMAU) prepared a 200-page self-assessment. During a three-day visit in mid-February, the international evaluation committee inspected research facilities and interviewed representatives of the department’s PhD students, postdocs, staff and management. The report is due in April, but in a first public briefing the committee was outright positive.
In the meantime, we have had general elections in the Netherlands. It is good to see that political parties that in their programs specifically address the problem of climate change performed well. For me this is a clear sign that, in spite of the relative silence surrounding this topic in the build-up to the elections, climate change will remain high on the political agenda in the Netherlands for the years to come.
When looking at the climate research funding landscape, the signals are mixed. At all levels (university, national, EU), large budgets are made available for climate adaption and mitigation studies, but often at the expense of fundamental climate research. Apparently it is easily forgotten that without fundamental climate research, there would be no credible climate adaptation and mitigation research, no IPCC reports, no Paris agreement…
Combine this with emerging political movements that simple deny the urgency of the problem, and it becomes clear that upholding a healthy funding level is far from self-evident. Just consider for a moment the staggering 31% budget cuts proposed for the US Environmental Protection Agency, including all EPA’s climate research programs. But strong opposition works: in Australia, the planned sacking of 100 climate scientists at CSIRO has been largely reversed.
So, as (former) climate researchers we must raise our voices to get the message across, and I urge all of you to advocate the need for fundamental climate research whenever the opportunity arises; without the ‘hard’ science, it will be next to impossible to reduce the uncertainties in climate predictions, and therewith to find reasonable and timely solutions.