Funding
NERC's funding, allocation and budgeting mechanisms, ensure that the way in which we plan, prioritise and deliver our strategy is effective.
NERC funds investments through three funding streams:
National capability
National capability enables the UK to deliver world-leading environmental science to support national strategic needs, and to respond to emergencies. It is mainly about long-term investment and will rarely be subject to open competition. NERC research centres and other providers of services and facilities play a leading role for the UK in managing and delivering this capability.
Activities within this funding stream:
- Environmental survey and monitoring
- Shared services and facilities
- Skills and expertise
- Research infrastructure
- Related training and knowledge exchange
Benefits
- Enables us to be responsive to changing strategic priorities.
- Provides longer planning horizons.
- Offers a lighter touch to administrative processes and evaluation.
Research programmes
Research programmes explicitly address the science challenges and priorities identified by NERC's strategy. It provides strategically directed environmental research, training and related knowledge exchange. Research programmes can either be funded through grants or contracts.
It is:
- delivered by higher education institutes, research and collaborative centres and analogous organisations;
- time-limited and designed to meet the evolving requirements of NERC's strategy;
- often collaborative, cross-cutting and inter-disciplinary in nature; and
- often provided through open competition to ensure delivery of the highest quality research.
Benefits
- Funding and the research activity it supports are more responsive to evolving strategic needs and priorities.
- It will encourage national and international collaboration.
Responsive mode
Responsive mode funding encourages 'blue-skies' research - where scientists put forward their own ideas for research projects within NERC's remit. These can often produce surprising and unexpected results that can lead to new products, knowledge or inform government policy.
This funding helps to build a healthy science base and to identify future strategic science directions. It is delivered by higher education institutes and research centres. Scientists will often be encouraged to work in partnership.
A process map and user guide is available to download. This has more comprehensive information and is written for NERC's science community and staff.
How NERC plans and manages its funding streams (120KB)
For more information on grants eligibility or terms and conditions, please refer to the Research Grants Handbook.
For more information about NERC's funding streams, contact the Head of Financial Delivery:
Shaun Caswell
Tel: 01793 442560