New UK research centre into environmental risk set to open
Greenwise Staff
6th January 2009
A new £1 million UK centre dedicated to managing climate change and environmental risk has been given the greenlight.
The Centre of Excellence in Understanding and Managing Natural and Environmental Risk is to be based at Cranfield University in Bedfordshire. It will provide expertise on environmental risks, such as flooding, and adapting to climate change, as well as other risks, such as animal and plant disease.
It will report to Defra, which is helping to fund the centre, together with other research centres and Government departments, for an initial three years. The centre is to receive a total of £1.2 million of funding over the period.
Professor Robert Watson, chief scientific adviser for Defra, said the centre would be at the forefront of finding ways to assess the risks of environmental issues and in providing “state-of-the-art” risk knowledge in decision-making.
“Scientific information plays a vital role in finding solutions to the challenges of climate change, natural disasters, and animal diseases,” he said. “The centre will be a major asset not only to Defra, but to the research councils and other Government departments.”
The new centre at Cranfield University is being funded independently of a new £7 million flood forecasting centre for England and Wales that is being set up jointly by the Environmental Agency and the Met Office. However, the two centres are likely to work together in the future.
"We are doing a lot of data collection at the moment. However, we will be working with the Environment Agency and eventually the Met Office," said the centre's manager Sophie Rocks.
One of the functions of the environmental risk assessment centre will be to develop and communicate best practice across organisations involved in environmental risk management, according to those leading it.
“Our focus will be in stimulating the good practice in risk management already within Defra, and assisting Defra colleagues with the strategic appraisal of risks across a very wide risk portfolio,” said Professor Simon Pollard, head of Sustainable Systems at Cranfield University. “The centre’s role will be to develop the tools and techniques to do this, and to provide leading-edge thinking on the sound prioritisation of environmental risks.”
As well as Defra, the new centre has received financial backing from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the Economic and Social Research Council, and the Natural Environment Research Council.
It is one of the first to be accredited under the new Living With Environmental Change programme, a new research initiative that aims to provide decision makers with the best natural and social science information to address climate change.
An international Strategic Advisory Board has been set up to guide the way forward for the centre. The first meeting of the board is planned for next month.