A Cardiff University scientist has been named among the recipients of one of the most prestigious and competitive funding schemes in the EU.
Professor Stephen Barker joins 280 leading researchers across Europe to win the European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grants competition.
The funding, worth €721 million in total and part of the EU's Horizon Europe programme, gives senior researchers the opportunity to pursue ambitious, curiosity-driven projects that could lead to major scientific breakthroughs.
Professor Barker's project, 'Predicting the Natural Future of Earth's Climate (NatClim)', will run for 5 years and generate the first quantitative predictions of a future climate to define the natural baseline over the next several thousands of years.
He said: "The future of Earth's climate is of international concern. Yet the models we depend on for predicting the future remain uncalibrated against a natural baseline because that baseline has yet to be defined.
"NatClim will address this gap by developing evidence-based predictions about the future natural evolution of our climate beginning today and going forward until the projected next glacial transition, approximately 10,000-20,000 years from now.
"Combined with state-of-the-art climate model experiments, this will allow us to deliver the first quantitative assessment of the absolute impacts of human activity over the coming millennia."
NatClim will be led by Professor Barker from the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences together with a team of experts including Professor Caroline Lear with support from a group of Early Career Researchers and PhD students, who will gain invaluable and multi-disciplinary experience across climate system research. The project also involves expert climate modellers at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany.
Our results will provide a groundbreaking benchmark and foundation upon which the full socio-economic costs of manmade climate change can be calculated, and a basis for future global climate policy decision-making. It's a very exciting time!
The ERC's 2024 Advanced Grants competition attracted 2,534 proposals, which were reviewed by panels of internationally renowned researchers. Just eleven percent of proposals were selected for funding. Estimates show that the grants will create approximately 2,700 jobs in the teams of new grantees.
Professor Jennifer Pike, Head of Cardiff University's School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, said: "This ERC funding win is evidence of Steve's standing in the international research community."
NatClim builds on his research to date, most recently demonstrating that natural climate variability on orbital timescales is largely deterministic and can be predicted. Steve's last paper on this topic focused mainly on the past; the purpose of NatClim is to look forward in time. In this respect, it will fully embody the maxim of the past being key to the future.
Reader
"Huge congratulations to Steve on behalf of everyone in the School on securing funding from the ERC to pursue this ambitious project - it is a tremendous achievement."
