Researchers want climate tech funding reevaluated

Researchers are calling for a reevaluation of how money is spent on climate technology.

Researchers are requesting that a reassessment be made on funding for climate technology.

The majority of the money that is spent on researching climate change goes to the countries who are already the wealthiest, and it is not invested in developing new technologies that could assist speed up the process of finding a solution.

The amount of money that was spent on climate technology research all over the world during the years 1990 to 2020 was analysed by a group from the Sussex Business School in the United Kingdom. They discovered that the United Kingdom, the United States, and the European Union accounted for eighty percent of the money that was spent (EU).

The researchers stated that the $2.2 billion in funding for the 1,000 projects that they analysed in great detail had been "asymmetrically dispersed," with almost four-fifths of it going to the United Kingdom (40 percent), the European Union (27 percent), and the United States (11 percent ).

They investigated funding from 164 different organisations, 69 of which were from the United States of America, 11 from China, and 11 from the European Commission. The United Kingdom accounted for 18 of the top 20 locations that received the greatest funding for the study of climate-related technologies.

In contrast, significantly less funding was allocated to initiatives in countries such as China, India, Israel, and Japan. The authors of the study also noticed that developing nations, particularly those in Latin America and Africa, were hardly ever mentioned.

Benjamin Sovacool, a professor of energy policy at the University of Sussex Business School, said that the vastly unequal funding given to the United Kingdom, the United States of America, and the European Union raises important questions about fairness and justice in funding for research and development.

Professor Sovacool pointed out that despite the fact that the study "overrepresents research programmes in the Anglo-Saxon world that can afford to publish research data in English," it still demonstrated "a serious failure to enable a truly global response to the world's biggest challenge."

In the year 2020, the Goethe University in Frankfurt published a study that looked at climate research from a different perspective. Specifically, the researchers examined the number of scientific articles that were produced by each nation.

The United States of America and the United Kingdom were at the top of their list, and China was in third place.

The researchers noticed "a sharp jump" in the number of Chinese papers that were published. Additionally, they discovered that institutions in Scandinavia were the best in the world at researching CO2 emissions and the consequences of climate change on society and the economy.

The researchers noted that only three developing countries stood out in all of their analyses: Costa Rica, the Fiji Atoll, and Zimbabwe. They said that countries with the most publications were also the countries that were best prepared for climate change.

Of course, taking action on climate change does not require exclusively using funds provided by the government. A group of businesses that have come together under the auspices of the World Economic Forum to form the First Movers Coalition have made a commitment to use their purchasing power to create markets for emerging renewable energy technology.

At the COP26 Climate Summit in Glasgow, this was initiated by Vice President Joe Biden of the United States. More than 35 businesses from around the world have committed themselves to the goal of integrating low-carbon, environmentally friendly technologies into high-carbon industries by the year 2030.

According to the findings of the team from Sussex, several potential climate innovations are not receiving sufficient funding. For instance, barely 0.2 percent of the budget has been spent on a sort of geoengineering called "placing particles of sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere to curb global warming." This strategy involves sending particles of sulphur dioxide into the upper atmosphere.

They examined 1,000 projects, and out of those, 36% were concerned with how to adapt to climate change, 28% were concerned with energy systems, 13% were concerned with transportation and mobility, 12% were concerned with geoengineering, and 11% were concerned with getting industries to use less carbon.

According to the team, people are also not considering the "deeper spiritual implications of low-carbon transitions." These include the ways in which these transitions may alter people's relationships with the environment or lead to a new set of values or emotions that are more focused on sustainability.

In order to make things more equitable, they want more money to be allocated to study into climate technology in fields such as theology, food science and technology, neurology, sports studies, and classics. These fields, according to them, "give modern scholars a lot to learn from the past."