This report presents the analysis of an ongoing project to collate information on the environmental research activities funded by ERFF members. The overview presented is the culmination of over two years work involving collecting, organising, categorising and analysing information on nearly 6000 environmental research projects, which were active in 2004-2005 and which are now held in an ERFF research database. The database was developed from a recommendation made in the 2002, Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) analysis.
The report discusses:
- How data was collected, selected and classified
- How the spend was calculated
- The analyses undertaken
- The results of the analyses, and considerations when interpreting them
To provide flexibility in the use of the database, projects were classified using a five dimensional scheme:
- Frascati coding
- Primary purpose coding
- Driver (i.e. industrial or socioeconomic sector of human influence responsible for the environmental change being investigated)
- Domain (the environmental domain or domains being studied)
- EPICS (Earth, Pressures, Impacts, Consequences and Solutions).
Analyses found that, during 2004-2005, ERFF members as a whole:
- Spent over £260m on environmental research and £23m on training. These are direct costs alone and do not include infrastructure.
- Of 12 priorities examined, research on natural resources, farming, fisheries, food, forestry and land use and climate change received the most funding. Waste, environmental aspects of energy, flooding and flood defence, and environmental aspects of human health received the least funding. However, there is considerable funding on energy research which was not included.
- Spend on training mirrored the priority areas.
- EPICS analysis: 50% of the research spend was devoted to improving our understanding of the environment and environmental processes.
- Drivers analysis: the largest proportion of spend, 18%, was in areas in which changes are driven by agriculture, horticulture or forestry.
- Domain analysis: 38% of research was focussed on the living world, 14% on water (including ice), 13% on the lithosphere and 13% on the atmosphere, climate and weather systems.
- Frascati code: ERFF research was evenly spread across the pure - applied spectrum.
- Primary Purpose: the majority of spend was in general support of science (55%) or in support of policy (30%).
Further analysis, development and updating of the database will continue during 2007-10, and a searchable version of the database will be made available during 2008.