According to new research, most of the money for research on climate change goes to the wealthiest countries and isn’t spent on new technologies that could help fix the problem faster.
A group from the UK’s Sussex Business School looked at how much money was spent on climate tech research around the world from 1990 to 2020. They found that 80% of the money was spent in the UK, the US, and the EU (EU).
The researchers said that the $2.2 billion in funding for the 1,000 projects they looked at in depth had been “asymmetrically distributed,” with almost four-fifths going to the United Kingdom (40%), the European Union (27%), and the United States (11%).
They looked at grants from 164 sources, including 69 from the U.S., 11 from China, and 11 from the European Commission. All but two of the top 20 places that got the most money for climate tech research were in the UK.
In contrast, the amounts of money given to projects in China, India, Israel, and Japan were much lower, and the study’s authors noted that developing countries, especially those in Latin America and Africa, were hardly ever mentioned.
Professor of Energy Policy at the University of Sussex Business School Benjamin Sovacool said, “The hugely unequal funding given to the UK, USA, and EU raises important questions about fairness and justice in funding for research and development.”
Recognizing that the study “overrepresents research projects in the Anglo-Saxon world that can afford to publish research data in English,” Professor Sovacool said it still showed “a significant failure to support a truly global response to the world’s biggest problem.”
In 2020, Goethe University in Frankfurt put out a study that looked at climate research from a different angle by looking at how many scientific papers each country put out.
The US was at the top of their list, followed by the UK, and China was in third place.
The researchers saw “a steep rise” in the number of Chinese papers that were published and learned that Scandinavian universities were the best in the world at studying CO2 emissions and the effects of climate change on society and the economy.
“Only three developing countries stand out in all analyses: Costa Rica, the Fiji Atoll, and Zimbabwe,” the team said, adding that countries with the most publications were also the best prepared for climate change.
Climate action does not have to be done only with money from the government, of course. The First Movers Coalition of the World Economic Forum is a group of companies that agree to use their buying power to make markets for new clean energy technologies.
US Vice President Joe Biden started this at the COP26 Climate Summit in Glasgow. So far, more than 35 companies from around the world have signed on to help get green technologies into high-carbon industries by 2030.
The team from Sussex says that some possible climate technologies aren’t getting enough money. For example, only 0.2% of the money has been spent on a type of geoengineering that involves putting particles of sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere to stop global warming.
Out of the 1,000 projects they looked at, 36% were about how to adapt to climate change, 28% were about energy systems, 13% were about transportation and mobility, 12% were about geoengineering, and 11% were about getting industries to use less carbon.
The team says that people are also not thinking about the “deeper spiritual implications of low-carbon transitions,” such as how they might change people’s relationships with the environment or lead to a new set of values or emotions that are more focused on sustainability.
To make things more fair, they want more money for climate tech research in areas like theology, food science and technology, neuroscience, sports studies, and classics, which they say “offers modern researchers a lot to learn from the past.”
