date: Fri, 21 Nov 2003 16:00:30 +0000
from: Tim Osborn <t.osborn@uea.ac.uk>
subject: Re: Tyndall Phase 2
to: <tyn.rt1@uea.ac.uk>

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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

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