I have this item of Correspondence appear in Nature Climate Change today. I contrast the research funding model of the UK Government’s Advanced Research and Innovation Agency (ARIA) with the funding model that established, 25 years ago this summer, the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. I conclude my comparison thus:

“Research into the sociology of science has shown that the way scientific capacity is mobilized by a society, and the nature of the resulting scientific knowledge, is never neutral.  When deploying public funding to support research into the challenges of a changing climate, it is important to align expectations of research design and delivery with the nature of the challenge.  Allocating very large amounts of money to researching single-shot techno-scientific solutions to climate change, as done in ARIA, mis-reads the nature of the climate challenge and offers a false prospectus for research.  What society needs more is the integrated, inter-disciplinary and incremental research facilitated by the small-steps funding model.”

14 March 2025