QUEST
Welcome - from the programme leader
Prof I Colin Prentice (April 2004)
Colin Prentice leads the QUEST programme, and is the Professor of Earth system science at the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Bristol.
I'm delighted to have been appointed by NERC to lead QUEST, and by Bristol University as Professor of Earth System Science. The Department of Earth Sciences in Bristol is now my base and the base for the QUEST core team, which will be appointed by the autumn of 2004. The core team will help to organize and interact with the various UK-wide consortium projects that will form the backbone of QUEST.
The programme is supported organizationally from NERC's Swindon headquarters through Dr Phil Newton and by Dr Gina Adams, who is the part-time programme administrator for QUEST (note, Dr Melissa Lewis has now replaced Gina).
QUEST has an ambitious goal: to be in the forefront of discoveries about the linkages among the geosphere, biosphere and human activities. These are highly complex and only very partially understood at present. Over time, the dichotomy between humans and 'environment' has given way to the realization that we live in and are part of a coupled global system that involves powerful interactions between living and non-living components. There is strong evidence for these interactions both in the geological record and in measurements being made today, which show that human activities are beginning to cause profound alterations in the composition of the atmosphere and the nature of the global climate.
These changes in turn will necessarily have feedback effects on the human enterprise. We still have a very limited understanding of how these feedbacks will work. Yet, as scientists, we are increasingly under pressure to give answers to 'what if' questions related to the development of policies for adaptation to or mitigation of global environmental change. In order to answer these questions more satisfactorily than we can today, we need to better understand both the 'natural' workings of the Earth system and the interactions between the global environment and human society.
Earth system science thus presents both a major intellectual challenge, and an urgent national and global priority. The field is especially challenging because it may be the most interdisciplinary scientific enterprise there has ever been, drawing on economics and the social sciences as well as biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, and the atmospheric, geographical and earth sciences. Communications among the disciplines need to be improved greatly and a community of interdisciplinary Earth system scientists needs to be fostered.
On the one hand this may appear a daunting task. On the other hand, I believe it represents an opportunity for rapid progress through collaborative research, drawing on the enormous expertise that the UK has in all of these disciplines. I have been working on the interfaces between different disciplines for years, most recently as a Director of the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany, and I have learned what can be achieved through a determination to make people of different backgrounds work together.
The 'pre-launch' event for QUEST was a town meeting in London, organized by NERC towards the end of 2002. The participants were agreed on remarkably many things about QUEST. These included the need for synergy (building on, not re-inventing, existing programmes in the UK and elsewhere), for consortia with critical mass and the required spread of disciplines, and for flexibility in the application of funds, allowing non-conventional mechanisms such as focused, goal-oriented interdisciplinary workshops and follow-up activities to play an important role alongside more conventional mechanisms of support for PhD students, postdocs and fellows.
Planning for QUEST is strongly taking into account the recommendations of the town meeting. A science plan and an implementation plan are scheduled to appear in May 2004, based on a concept which I presented to NERC's Science and Innovation Strategy Board (SISB) a few months ago. The plans will get feedback once again from SISB before they are published. The following outline is therefore provisional, but it indicates the general idea. QUEST broadly will consist of the following elements:
- The core team (leader, deputy leader, two research associates and a science and policy officer, plus a PA and technical support). Recruitment is well advanced and the team is expected to be fully in place by the autumn of 2004. The core team will facilitate QUEST activities and will do research on a range of topics arising in QUEST. The science and policy officer will also be responsible for liaison with policy researchers, UK stakeholders and international assessments.
- A programme of workshops on cross-cutting topics of central importance to QUEST. The first of these will be decided on by the core team, but later there will be opportunities to propose workshop topics. The form of this procedure has yet to be decided.
- Carefully targeted strategic activities in Earth system modelling and data synthesis. The form of support for these activities will be decided through a consultation process. Some of these activities may form part of the wider range of data management and knowledge transfer activities and contributions from small businesses that will be implemented in accordance with NERC's policy.
- Consortium projects, forming the backbone of QUEST and accounting for roughly 60 per cent of the total spend. The provisional project themes are: (1) contemporary coupled climate, carbon cycle and atmospheric chemistry; (2) Earth system history and dynamics; (3): impacts and human dimensions of global environmental change. The first calls for proposals will appear in this order, with the first call for theme 1 scheduled to appear in May 2004 (for funding to start early in 2005) and the first calls for the two other themes to appear at roughly six-monthly intervals thereafter
I have already mentioned synergy as a key principle of QUEST. Synergy means working together with and building on the programmes that NERC, and other agencies, already support in areas such as ecology, hydrology, geology, oceanography and marine sciences, polar sciences, atmospheric modelling, Earth observation, climate change, and energy research. It means scientists from different institutions working together. It means maximizing the potential for 'economies of scale' by working with partners in Europe, North America and other places, as appropriate for the needs of the programme. It means modellers and data specialists working together to optimize the use of the investments made by both communities. Above all, it means recognizing that not one of our disciplines by itself possesses the key to Earth System Science.