Top climate scientists leave as project funding dries up

Victoria professor one of those moving abroad to find promising opportunities

By Margaret Munro, Canwest News Service February 17, 2009

Katrin Meissner is determined to be on the forefront of understanding the climate change affecting everything from permafrost to bird migrations.

The celebrated young scientist at the University of Victoria had planned to build her career in Canada. But Meissner is packing up her young family and heading for Australia.

The University of New South Wales made her an offer she couldn’t refuse—a position as a senior lecturer, research opportunities and guaranteed daycare for her one-year-old son, which was the perk that sealed the deal.

“I didn’t really want to leave,” says Meissner, who is walking away from a coveted tenure-track position in Victoria. But she says the opportunities in Australia seem much more promising. ‘’Long-term it looks quite scary in Canada,” says Meissner.

It is a refrain heard across Canada as funding dries up at the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences (CFCAS), a prime source of funding for university-based projects underway from the Arctic to B.C. mountaintops.

Projects involving hundreds of scientists have entered their final phase and will shut down by March 2010. “They’re dead as of next spring,” says atmospheric physicist Richard Peltier of University of Toronto, noting that there is no new federal money in sight for new projects or to build on existing ones.

“It’s a shame to see it go down the tubes,” says Richard Lawford, at the University of Manitoba, who manages the four-year-old Drought Research Initiative funded by the foundation. The project is aimed at preparing for the country’s next water crisis. The last drought, from 1999 to 2004, cost an estimated $6 billion and 41,000 jobs.

Lawford says the team is keen to build on the project in a bid to ensure there is enough water for farmers and cities. But with CFCAS running out of cash, so is the project.

Young scientists and technical staff will be hardest hit. “That’s were the real pain comes in,” says Lawford, who fears many highly educated young scientists working on the drought project will head to the U.S. where science is expected to undergo a renaissance under President Barack Obama.

“We may have just trained them for the U.S.,” says Lawford. And expertise, which Canada will need to prevent rivers and reservoirs from running dry when the next drought hits, will be lost with them, he says.

Scientists across the country echo the concern and say there are signs the exodus has begun.

“In my lab, I have three going to Australia,” says Andrew Weaver, who leads a climate modelling team at the University of Victoria. Meissner, along with a PhD student and master students with newly minted Canadian degrees, is heading for a new climate change research centre in Australia.

Young scientists have always tended to move between labs. But with the foundation projects all coming to an end, senior researchers say Canada will have trouble attracting bright young climate scientists and keeping the ones it now has.

Atmospheric scientist James Drummond, who directs a remote polar lab on Ellesmere Island that is fast running out of money, says he has already lost a post-doctoral student to a NASA contractor in the U.S. He fears more will follow given Obama’s plan to spend more than $400 million on climate change research at NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Drummond notes that Obama’s approach to science stands in sharp contrast to Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s. His stimulus package disappointed many in Canada’s research community. It provided no funding increases for key science funding agencies and did not renew funding for others.

The Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences, which got nothing in the budget, had been looking for a $25-million-a-year lifeline.

The foundation was set up by the federal government in 2000 and took over funding of climate and atmospheric research at Canadian universities from several federal programs that were phased out. The foundation, which received $60 million in 2000 and another $50 million in 2004, has financed 160 projects and 24 research networks.

“We’ve built up a number of very powerful research groups which are doing the country proud,” says Peltier, at the University of Toronto.

He heads the Polar Climate Stability Network, which received just over $5 million. The scientists have been assessing different components in the climate system—from the glaciers in Western Canada to the frigid waters flowing out of the Arctic.

“It really is a huge concern that the country’s investment in climate science is diminishing just at the time when we need it more than ever,” says Peltier, noting how climate change will impact everything from permafrost to extreme weather events.