Twenty-five years ago today – on Wednesday 22 March 2000 – I arrived at the Institute of Directors at 116 Pall Mall, London, at 10.30am in the morning prepared to deliver the most important presentation of my life. I was to defend our proposal for establishing a new national climate change research centre in front of an international expert evaluation Panel. I was accompanied by two senior colleagues—Professor Brian Launder (60) from the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, and Professor Tim O’Riordan (58) from the University of East Anglia (UEA). At the time, I was a 39-year post-doctoral research scientist in the Climatic Research Unit at the UEA, and over the previous eight months I been leading a consortium of universities in preparing our bid.
After my 10 minute presentation, followed by over an hour of questioning, the three of us retreated to a nearby pub for lunch. We were relieved that the presentation and defence had gone according to plan, but were unsure whether we had done enough to persuade the Panel to award the £10 million contract to us ahead of our competitor bid led by Imperial College, London.
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An ambitious ‘opportunity announcement’ had been published by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) eight months earlier, in July 1999 (see image). This open call sought bids from UK research consortia to establish a new inter-disciplinary national centre to research into innovative and sustainable solutions to climate change. This initiative was referred to as the Joint National Climate Change Centre (JNCCC). Three of the UK’s national research councils—NERC, EPSRC (the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council), and ESRC (the Economic and Social Research Council)—were to channel £10 million into this new venture, around £22m in today’s value, contributing 50%, 35% and 15% respectively.
The origins of the JNCCC can be traced back to the election in May 1997 of Tony Blair’s Labour Government. In the Government’s first Spending Review—covering the period 1999-2002—the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, announced major new investment in science. Sir John Krebs, the then chief executive of NERC, championed the case for some of this funding to be ear-marked for a new national climate change centre, the aim of which was “to create a novel interdisciplinary research programme involving climate scientists, technologists, engineers, economists and social scientists”.[1] The centre was to be charged with developing new research that would “meet the needs of business and government in relation to climate change”.
Following submission of outline bids in September 1999—nine were received, each led by a different UK university or research institution—two consortia were short-listed to submit full bids by January 2000, one led by me at the University of East Anglia (see image below)[2], the other led by Professor Michael Grubb, then at Imperial College, London.
Hence the three of us arrived at the Institute of Directors on a mild Wednesday morning in March—the temperature in London reached 15°C that day—to present our case to the evaluation Panel.
The Panel was chaired by the late Sir Crispin Tickell (1930-2022), also then chair of the Government’s Panel on Sustainable Development, together with eight independent experts. From Germany, there was John Schellnhuber, then director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, and from the USA was the ex-pat British social anthropologist Steve Rayner (1953-2020), then based at Columbia University. There were two engineers on the Panel, consulting engineer Professor Robert Shannon (1937-2011), and Professor Jim Swithinbank, a chemical engineer at the University of Sheffield, and also Professor Alan Thorpe, then director of the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, and Professor Geoff Randall, then Director of Astra-Zeneca’s Brixham Environmental Laboratory. The expert members of the group were completed by Dr Charlotte Grezo, the manager of climate change programmes at BP and the only female member of the Panel, and by Professor Michael Gibbons, the then Secretary-General of the Association of Commonwealth Universities.
Supplementing these independent experts on the Panel were five ex-officio members, representing various stakeholder interests: the Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR), represented by David Warrilow, and the Department for Trade and Industry (DTI), represented by Colin Hicks—the DTI were also investing £210,000 in the successful bid—and one member from each of the three funding Councils.
My 10 minute presentation had been carefully crafted over the previous weeks and had been well-rehearsed in front of colleagues at UEA and others from our nine-member consortium. My opening pitch to the Panel went like this:
“The Consortium of institutions that Tim, Brian and myself are representing this morning is very excited by the establishment of a national Climate Change Centre for the UK. The vision of such a Centre that the three Research Councils have developed, we believe not only allows for a strong base of integrated climate change research from which to inform public and policy debates in this country, but also offers an opportunity for the UK to establish a world-leading Centre for such inter-disciplinary activity.”
I then used four acetate overhead slides covering these top-level elements of our bid:
- The Tyndall Vision Statement
- Excellence and Experience in Practice
- Value-Added Research
- The Tyndall Centre is Connected
The choice of professors Launder and O’Riordan to accompany me to the bid defence had been carefully made. Launder was a mechanical engineer, appealing to the EPSRC, and a Fellow of the Royal Society; he also represented one of our senior partner universities, UMIST. O’Riordan was a social scientist and a Fellow of the British Academy and well-known to the ESRC through his co-leadership of the Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment (CSERGE), an ESRC-funded centre.
With my research on observational climate datasets, model evaluation, and climate scenario construction, my research profile was more aligned with NERC. At the time I was also running the Data Distribution Centre on behalf of the IPCC, which received financial support from David Warrilow at the UK’s DETR. Between the three of us, we felt that we nicely covered the range of questions that might be asked. I had indeed prepared a list of anticipated Panel questions, including these interesting ones: “I am interested to see you propose some work looking at the nuclear option. Please explain your thinking about this?”, and “How will you instill a sense of ‘togetherness’ to the Centre when the members will be in nine different places?” (Also in this document are my speaking notes on the more detailed points I wished to make during my 10 minutes).
Fifty minutes of questioning followed my presentation. Among the 16 questions asked by the Panel, was Steve Rayner asking about how we would achieve stakeholder involvement with our research, and Alan Thorpe wanting to make sure we would not be duplicating or overlapping with physical climate science research being undertaken at the Hadley Centre or by other NERC institutes. Michael Gibbons came across as somewhat sceptical of integrated assessment being an important part of our bid and asked “Please give three principle weaknesses of your approach to Integrated Assessment”. My answer to this question would have relied heavily on the experience I had gained earlier in the 1990s while working on the ESCAPE integrated assessment model for the European Commission.[3] On the other hand, Charlotte Grezo was more concerned about my management experience and asked me directly about what experience I had in managing such a large project.
I can hardly think my answer to Grezo’s question was convincing—given my lack of the experience she was looking for!—and in the subsequent confidential Panel discussion it was minuted that one expert member (not Grezo) expressed “…a slight worry about the management experience of Mike Hulme which would have to be counter-balanced through the make-up of the Advisory Board”. Steve Rayner and one other Panel member, however, seemed less worried: “I agree with Steve”, said one. “This is not a large managed programme [and their] distributed research approach requires scientific excitement as the ‘glue’ rather than centralized management”.
The Panel’s private deliberations continued for over half an hour before inviting the three of us back into the room. The supplementary questions revolved around engineering, obviously a key concern of EPSRC, and a topic that had occupied more than half of their deliberation time. Schellnhuber now asked us: “How do you intend to link engineering into the rest of the science?”, and Rayner wanted us to “Explain the engineering aspects of adaptation to climate change”.
While the Panel retired for their three-course lunch, ahead of receiving the delegation from Imperial College in the afternoon, the three of us—Brian, Tim and myself—debriefed over pub food and a pint in The Three Crowns in nearby St. James. We had little way of knowing what our chances were of success and the outcome would not be known for another two weeks.
A few days later, however, I did receive a cryptic email from John Schellnhuber—breaking Panel confidentiality—simply saying, “Everything’s all right”. I think I knew what he alluded to. But that very same day, Monday 27 March, Vladimir Putin was announced as Russia’s next president—replacing the previous incumbent, Boris Yeltsin—following the previous day’s election in which Putin won 53% of the vote. It seems that maybe not everything turned out alright.
© Mike Hulme, March 2025
[1] See: Hulme,M. (2025) Funding models for climate change research: Small steps or giant leaps? Nature Climate Change. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-025-02281-6. Some of the information relayed in this NCC article, and in this blog post, was obtained through an FOI request to NERC, submitted by the author in October 2024.
[2] Our consortium consisted of the University of East Anglia, where the Centre was to be headquartered, our two major regional partners—UMIST and the University of Southampton—the universities of Cambridge, Sussex, Cranfield and Leeds, the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory at Harwell, Didcot, and NERC’s Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Wallingford.
[3] See: Rotmans,J., Hulme,M. and Downing,T.E. (1994) Climate change implications for Europe: an application of the ESCAPE model. Global Environmental Change. 4: 97-124.
