Several hundred million Euro investment to combat climate change and its effects on people's lives

Creation of Climate Knowledge and Innovation Community (KIC) signals Europe's commitment to tackling climate change and to making a step-change in its ability to innovate <em>- News Release</em>

Imperial College London News Release
For immediate release
Wednesday 16 December 2009

A several hundred million Euro initiative to combat climate change and its effects on a previously unseen scale is announced today, bringing together world leading universities including Imperial College London and major companies and regions across Europe.

The creation of the Climate Knowledge and Innovation Community (KIC) signals Europe's commitment to tackling climate change and to making a step-change in its ability to innovate, at a time when the world’s leaders are meeting in Copenhagen to agree a new treaty.

The initiative is one of three KICs to be established and part-funded by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT).

The Climate KIC aims to create new technologies and new businesses that will dramatically reduce Europe’s carbon emissions - for example by improving how cities are designed and operate - and enable individual regions to increase their resilience to the predicted changes in temperature, rainfall and landscapes in their area.

Its innovations will also enable people to reduce their individual carbon footprints and live with the effects of climate change.

With €120 million requested from the EIT, the partners have planned to contribute roughly five times that amount so that eventually a total of up to €750 million would be spent over the next four years, on a range of innovation and education programs. However, the detailed numbers that will finally be approved by the EIT have not yet been communicated and are subject to negotiation.

Professor Sir Brian Hoskins, Director of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London, one of the key Climate KIC partners, said: "Across Europe we're already seeing people's lives being altered by the effects of climate change, with increases in forest fires, heat waves, flooding and drought. It's a massive task to both reduce carbon emissions across the world and to ensure that on a local, national and international level, we are able to adapt to the changes that are coming our way. The Climate Knowledge and Innovation Community will enable Europe to adapt and to hugely reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.

A single crop like Poplar tree might be used to manufacture chemicals, materials and liquid fuels together, in a single manufacturing plant

"Researchers and companies across the world have been working on ways of tackling climate change and lessening the impact that it will have, but it's impossible for an individual company, university or country to address on its own the huge challenges that we face. The Climate KIC brings together researchers and industry – both large corporates and smaller enterprises - to tackle climate change head-on. It provides a vital opportunity to make radical changes on the scale we so desperately need."

The Climate KICs' innovations will be created through four linked programmes.

The first of these will focus on cities, where the majority of people live and which account for more than 70% of all CO2 emissions. Here the Climate KIC will design technologies and introduce new systems that can be integrated across whole cities, to massively reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and make them more resilient to the effects of climate change.

The second programme will look at the water and land which people rely on for their basic needs. These needs are becoming harder to meet as populations are growing, demand for basic resources is increasing and resources are threatened by climate change. The Climate KIC will develop advanced systems to manage water resources and the land by using tools and technologies in an integrated way. It will also create crops and agricultural systems that are resilient to climate change.

The third area that the Climate KIC will focus on is manufacturing and energy production. It will develop new, zero carbon ways of using sustainable biological resources. For example, a single crop like Poplar tree might be used to manufacture chemicals, materials and liquid fuels together, in a single manufacturing plant, using some of the crop itself to produce the energy needed for the manufacturing process.

The Climate KIC will develop advanced systems to manage water resources and the land

Finally, the Climate KIC will develop technology to assess climate change - both the emissions causing it and its impacts in terms of extreme climate events. The focus will be on developing information and modelling systems to give an integrated picture that will enable society to manage the effects of climate change at local and regional levels. It will develop techniques and tools to monitor greenhouse gas emissions and analyse the success of different measures to reduce them.

The Climate KIC will also develop a growing army of innovators and entrepreneurs who will devote their careers to inventing and implementing technology to tackle climate change, through pioneering education programmes. Within its first four years of existence the KIC hopes to have helped to create a community of European innovators and entrepreneurs, many tens of thousands strong.

The research partners in the Climate KIC are Imperial College London, ETH Zurich, the University of Utrecht, TU Delft and Wageningen, a French consortium led by ParisTech and IPSL, and a German grouping led by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts and the Technical University of Berlin. The main corporate partners are Bayer, Beluga, Cisco, DSM, EdF, SAP, Schipol Airport, Shell, SolarValley and Thales.

In addition, six regional governmen ts and agencies will be involved in the Climate KIC, including the West Midlands in the UK, to pioneer new approaches to low-carbon living. Companies, institutions and municipalities in each of these areas will give a geographical focus to the Climate KIC's innovation activities and provide areas where it can test-run new developments and innovations.

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For further information please contact:

Laura Gallagher
Research Media Relations Manager
Imperial College London
Email: L.Gallagher@imperial.ac.uk
Tel: +44(0) 20 7594 8432
Out of hours duty press officer: +44(0)7803 886 248

Notes to editors:

Knowledge and Innovation Communities (KICs)

The Knowledge and Innovation Communities (KICs) are an initiative of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT). Their main goals are to create a vision for a sustainable future with strong impact on European society and to transfer higher education, research and innovation activities to the business context and their commercial application by creating e.g. spin-offs and start-ups. The KICs are financially supported by the European Union, which has pledged initial funding of over 300 million Euros, and by corporate partners joining particular KICs. The KICs will be established for periods of up to fifteen years to guarantee mid- to long-term perspectives to the chosen partnerships. In an initial round the EIT has launched three KICs in the fields of climate change mitigation and adaptation, sustainable energy and future information and communication society.

For further information:
www.eit.eurpopa.eu
www.climate-kic-proposal.org