Two Scottish research centres have joined forces to create a new “super institute”, backed by £25m of public funding to help them study global issues such as climate change and threats to food and water security.
The James Hutton Institute was formally launched yesterday as part of a bid to bolster Scotland’s position as a leading research centre in agricultural and environmental sciences.
As the main customer of the institute, the Scottish government will be investing £25m in research in 2011 and 2012, which will help the centre to become one of the biggest of its kind in Europe, employing more than 600 scientists, researchers and support staff.
Professor Iain Gordon, the institute’s chief executive, said it will “tackle head-on” the global challenges of climate change, and food and water security.
Bringing together the existing Macaulay Land Use Research Institute in Aberdeen and SCRI (Scottish Crop Research Institute), near Dundee, the new centre will cover a range of scientific disciplines from cell and molecular, environmental and ecological sciences to social economics, geography and computer science.
Key goals include boosting crop yields, developing sustainable farming methods, creating a low-carbon economy, and supporting biodiversity.
It also aims to find ways of balancing the demands on land from farming, industry, housing, tourism and recreation.
The UK’s chief scientist Sir John Beddington said he hoped the institute’s multi-disciplinary approach will boost its success rate. “Institutes like The James Hutton are enormously important,” he said. “They are multi-disciplinary, and they work at lots of different levels – they work at lab level and at the applications in the field.”
He also urged any new employees at the centre to ensure they deliver useful and innovative results.
“I can’t over-emphasise the fact that we desperately need more people to work in institutes likes this,” he said. “We need more people to think about the important problems of how we address our food, water and energy security needs.”
