BGS is involved in Europe in a number of ways, the most
lucrative being through EC funded projects, but also through multi-lateral and
bi-lateral collaboration that have developed over the years.
Our current funding from Europe is about £1 million and is
down on recent highs which approached £2 million. As with many competitive
funding sources there are phases of funding and from time to time the phases
coincide thus creating a dip or artificial high. We are currently in a dip with
respect to EC funding that we had managed to build to about 5% of our total
income.
Prognoses for the future indicate that we may be able to
increase this income, but it is doubtful that the total will exceed ~10% of our
funding. This is about the amount for funding that the EC puts into research as
national governments fund the rest.
Should we put such an effort into this funding source as the
overheads to win the funding is high and the EC funders do not pay anywhere near
the full cost of the research? I have spent a lot of time recently trying to
shore up our longer term funding from Europe and ask myself this very question.
I feel that the answer is “yes”, as this work establishes us
as international experts and we can then use this credibility to win more
lucrative contracts. Nonetheless, the work we do for Europe must be work we
would normally do internally. Thus developing new data infrastructure that can also
be used in BGS projects in general, getting the EC to fund the construction of
laboratories that serve additional purposes
or funding data products that we can integrate into national or international
data bases that add value to BGS as a whole are the sorts of endeavours we need
to undertake. In general these fall in the infrastructure development domain.
I think we are positioning ourselves as leaders in European
data delivery for the geosciences and this should be our major goal with
Europe. Our partners are not necessarily the other national surveys and as some
of you know I am somewhat cynical about an approach that includes all the
surveys as partners. Our preferred partners are institutes and entities that we
may not intuitively work with, but that need our resources in data processing and
also from whom we can learn to build new data products. Why not reposition and
reskill to achieve the “the Ultimate Earth model” that is something of the
scale of the “human brain
project”.
Understanding the shallow and deep Earth will bring
benefits in understanding how we use it for Energy and storage, but also how we
remain resilient to geological hazards, like earthquakes, landslides and
volcanoes. For the first time computing technology brings this understanding
within our grasp but it will involve a joint effort to collect and process data
across Europe and the globe.
