Overland, Indra and Sovacool, Benjamin K (2019) The misallocation of climate research funding. Energy Research & Social Science, 62. a101349. ISSN 2214-6296

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Abstract

The window of opportunity for mitigating climate change is narrow. Limiting global warming to 1.5 °C will require rapid and deep alteration of attitudes, norms, incentives, and politics. Some of the key climate-change and energy transition puzzles are therefore in the realm of the social sciences. However, these are precisely the fields that receive least funding for climate research. This article analyzes a new dataset of research grants from 332 donors around the world spanning 4.3 million awards with a cumulative value of USD 1.3 trillion from 1950 to 2021. Between 1990 and 2018, the natural and technical sciences received 770% more funding than the social sciences for research on climate change. Only 0.12% of all research funding was spent specifically on the social science of climate mitigation.

Item Type:	Article
Keywords:	climate mitigation; research funding; social sciences; natural sciences
Schools and Departments:	University of Sussex Business School > SPRU - Science Policy Research Unit
Depositing User:	Francisco Dominguez
Date Deposited:	12 Nov 2019 10:53
Last Modified:	09 Jan 2020 13:45
URI:	http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/87985

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