date: Fri, 21 Nov 2003 16:00:30 +0000 from: Tim Osborn subject: Re: Tyndall Phase 2 to: At 13:01 21/11/2003, John Turnpenny wrote: >Dear Tim et al, > >useful points. this raises the issue of research needs vs. political >considerations. If we felt that NERC was under-represented in Theme 1 (or >even throughout Tyndall) i would not be happy if we were to 'fix' the >research to ensure a 'balance' between research council funders. quite >apart from anything else it assumes the amounts of money each council are >prepared to put in correlates with the type of research needed. and also, >as you point out tim, the scale over which we would average is unclear (do >all themes have to reflect the funding balance, or all projects, or Tyndall >as a whole?). > >i believe that if we genuinely identify research needs which do not balance >the funding input then we should be honest and make that clear to the >research councils. > >cheers, John John, the range and depth of research needs are clearly beyond what the Tyndall Centre alone can achieve and we could, therefore, identify a vast range of phase 2 work plans. So it should be possible to develop a research plan that does balance the funding input - if we want to - and Rachel's response clearly demonstrates that the range of NERC-domain science that was (unfortunately only implicitly) already underpinning the key questions is probably enough to balance NERC funding input. My answer to the question of whether we want to balance the funding input is that we ideally would want to ignore it and identify the "best" (in our view) work plan. But pragmatically we don't want to disaffect any of the main funders -- even if we could put up a good argument as to why we had chosen that work plan. I believe a balance to the funding input would increase the chances of funding for phase 2. But I think it only needs to be an approximate balance and only over the whole centre. Certainly individual projects do not need it, and probably not individual themes. My concern was that RT1 is clearly a theme where there could and should be a balance, yet the document so far did not show such a balance. The type of material that Rachel just circulated could be included and would then provide this (for NERC, at least) and I encourage that type of information to be included. Cheers Tim Dr Timothy J Osborn Climatic Research Unit School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia Norwich NR4 7TJ, UK e-mail: t.osborn@uea.ac.uk phone: +44 1603 592089 fax: +44 1603 507784 web: http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/~timo/ sunclock: http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/~timo/sunclock.htm