A Brave new world for UV research (and more)

There won't be enough Indians, but at least there'll be fewer chiefs ...

UV research in New Zealand will soon be falling under a different umbrella. It’ll be a bigger umbrella, but I’m not yet sure if it will be as effective as blocking UV damage from sunlight. Most of our current effort - such as it is - is within the National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research (NIWA). But that’s all going to change.

We’re heading for change throughout the New Zealand science sector. Following the recent “Science System Advisory Group Report: An architecture for the future”, led by Sir Peter Gluckman that was published in August 2024 (and worth a read), the Government has decided to again tinker with research structures in New Zealand. It’ll be the biggest shake-up since 1992 - with the formation of the Crown Research Institutes, including NIWA. Sadly, NIWA will have come and gone - with three sets of branding logos - within the span of my own research career. ☹

For my colleagues at NIWA, changes will include the long overdue merging with MetService NZ to stop the wasteful duplication in weather forecasting, and the newer idea of merging with Geophysical and Nuclear Sciences (GNS). It’s hard to think of a name encompassing these diverse groups. I asked my AI advisor Claude, who suggested it might be called “GeoSpheres”. But that doesn’t quite capture it for me. One of the existing Institutes, Callaghan Innovation, is slated for the scrap heap. With its demise, heaven knows what will happen to our ability to maintain measurement calibration standards. Without these, measurements are meaningless.

Funding is already abysmally low, and there’s no proposal to increase it. And, no doubt, any economies of scale from having fewer chiefs and management teams will be more-than swallowed up by the cost of new logos and the like. To keep up with other developed economies, New Zealand scientists will have to punch well above their weight, as funding for science is currently about half that of the developed world, as shown below.

Gluckman and his team also illustrate what looks like the folly of New Zealand’s under-spend on research in the plot below. There’s a clear relationship between the per capita rates of research spending and GDP.

Countries with a higher expenditure on research clearly do better. Of course correlation doesn’t mean causation, and it may alternatively mean that only the wealthier countries can afford to sponsor research. Whichever, both our research expenditure and our GDP are well below that of countries we like to compare ourselves with.

The future for science funding in New Zealand is grim. We’re already in a crisis with under-spending in Health; and with the disintegration of world order we’re witnessing under tRump, more money will be allocated for Defence, leaving less for constructive pursuits like Research.

The USA is close to the top of both trees. But maybe not for long. The good news is that we kiwis don’t have to put up with the likes of dingbat donny and his goons frustrating current research efforts in the USA. Because his backers want to downplay Climate Change, he’s already acquiescing to their demands by causing mayhem at NIWA’s ‘sister’ organisation in the USA, NOAA. But perhaps it’s not such good news for us after all. If he succeeds, there’ll be a direct impact on our ability to provide UV forecasts for the public. Smartphone UV apps like UVNZ and GlobalUV rely on predicted ozone fields that are based on satellite-derived measurements from NOAA. This is just one of many services that are under threat.

It’s only the tip of a much larger problem caused by tRumpian meddling. His wider aim is to subvert all action on climate to appease his backers in the fossil fuel industry, while pretending there’s no problem.

Perhaps Climate Change isn’t a problem for him personally. He’s merely the catalyst. And he’s rich (or so he says). But, for his grandkids or their kids, even their family estate at Mar-a-Lago (current elevation 4.6 metres above sea level) could be under threat. Although the IPCC reckons it will be hundreds of years before the Atlantic Ocean is lapping around its doors, if climate-guru James Hansen’s predictions are correct, that could occur much faster - perhaps within a century based on paleo-climatological evidence. It will take about twice as long before salt-water encroaches tRump Tower (elevation 10 metres) in New York City. Either way, tRump will by then be long consigned to the scrapheap of history.

If he really doesn’t believe Climate Change is happening, why his sudden interest in taking over higher latitude countries like Canada and Greenland? For some reason, he’s not nearly as interested in Mexico (apart from the ever-burgeoning Gulf of Mexico).

Oops. I see I’ve digressed from the original UV theme. It’s OK now though. Just fixed it by adding those last two parenthetic words to the title. 😊