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Written question asked by Jim Shannon (Democratic Unionist Party) on Tuesday, 9 June 2026, in the House of Commons. It was due for an answer on Thursday, 11 June 2026. It was answered by Kanishka Narayan (Labour) on Wednesday, 17 June 2026 on behalf of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.

Environment Protection: Research

Question

To ask the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, what funding has been provided for climate modelling and environmental monitoring research.

Answer

UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) invested over £24million in research to support better climate modelling and more robust environmental monitoring in financial year 2024/25. This includes projects that use state-of-the-art computational techniques to monitor pollutants in UK rivers, machine learning models that track the impact of weather events and advanced quantification of greenhouse gas emissions. This year, £3.6million was also provided to the Met Office Hadley Centre to maintain and develop its underpinning climate modelling capability.

Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) has another major R&D programme, the Natural Capital and Ecosystem Assessment programme, worth around £152 million (covering fiscal years 2022/23 – 2026/27). In addition, there are smaller R&D projects across Defra that support ongoing monitoring activity.

Secondary information

Type
Written question
Reference
8045
Session
2026-27
Subjects
Climate change Finance Environment protection Monitoring Research
Contains statistics
Yes
Link
View this Written question on www.parliament.uk