Natural Environment Research Council (Hansard, 18 December 1991)

§ Mr. Alan Howarth

The annual report of the Natural Environment Research Council has been submitted to my right hon. and learned Friend, under the requirements of the Science and Technology Act 1965, and a copy is being placed in the House today.

I was most interested to read the report of the council's 25th anniversary year. The report highlights research concerned with detecting and understanding changes in environmental systems, the enhanced collaboration between NERC institutes and the higher education sector, and the work of NERC scientists in the forward planning of important international programmes on the environment. I was particularly impressed to learn more about:

(a) the urgent response on environmental issues connected with the Gulf war including development of a model which successfully predicted the fate of oil released into the sea and of environmental impact assessments.
(b) the launch of a new terrestrial initiative in global environmental research—TIGER—to provide data on the carbon cycle, trace greenhouse gases and water and energy balances on land, and on ecosystem impacts, including the monitoring of environmental change.
(c) the expansion of the universities global atmospheric modelling programme, to concentrate on two main themes: natural variability of the atmosphere and its response to greenhouse forcing; and stratospheric chemistry, dynamics and prediction of ozone depletion.
(d) the completion of the 15-year main run of the fine resolution Antarctic model integrated on the research council's Cray X-MP supercomputer. This is the first eddy-resolving model of the southern ocean and represents an important first step in the running of sophisticated, coupled ocean-atmosphere models needed for climate prediction.
(e) the receipt by NERC of the Queen's award for technological achievement, jointly with VG Elemental, for the development of the inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer, which is of particular value to earth and hydrological scientists.
(f) the countryside survey 1990 undertaken by NERC's institutes of terrestrial and freshwater ecology and the joint NERC/ESRC land use programme at the university of Newcastle upon Tyne, which will, for the first time, use field survey accompanied by satellite remote sensing to produce a digital map of land cover for the whole of Great Britain

I congratulate the Council on these and its many other achievements, and I commend its report to hon. Members.