Britain's ability to respond to the threats of climate change and pollution will be damaged if plans to downsize a key research institute go ahead, ecologists have warned.

The Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH) risks losing a third of its 600 staff and half of its research sites if its main funder, the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), follows through with reform proposals.

The council says the move will leave the centre with a more focused agenda and with critical science projects intact. But many are unconvinced, pointing out that a holistic approach to studying the impacts of climate change is more important than ever.

“We rely on the CEH's papers when making decisions,” says Richard Jefferson, an ecologist at government-funded conservation body English Nature. “It seems ridiculous to be pruning this work back.” His organization is one of several to have submitted objections to the proposal under a NERC-run consultation exercise that ended on 15 February.

Shaky finances have left the CEH with an annual deficit of around £1 million (US$1.7 million) over the past three years. And the government wants the NERC and other research councils to shift resources from dedicated research institutes to competitive grants programmes.

British countryside could suffer because of cut-backs to a key research centre. Credit: B. CARPENTER/CEH

To address these issues, the council wants to reduce the centre's core budget, currently around £20 million, to £15 million. After consulting with the CEH, the NERC proposes to close its research sites at Banchory, Dorset, Monks Wood and Oxford, while retaining just four centres at Bangor, Edinburgh, Lancaster and Wallingford.

Once the £45-million costs of the closures have been met, the NERC will plough the savings into other programmes. But many researchers feel that the CEH's multidisciplinary work cannot be replicated elsewhere.

The centre brings together fields such as chemistry and wildlife management to answer broader environmental questions. Such an approach, many policy experts say, is the best way to generate predictions on issues such as climate-change impacts that can be used by politicians.

This is not a carving back on science.

For example, at the CEH site in Wallingford, west of London, researchers work with climate scientists and ecologists to model how global vegetation will respond to climate change. “The CEH provides the glue between the climate and vegetation models,” says Ian Woodward, an ecologist at the University of Sheffield who has worked with Wallingford researchers. “It's absolutely critical.”

Although the site in Wallingford is not slated for closure, cuts will also be made at the retained sites. So researchers there are nervous about their future.

Pat Nuttall, director of the CEH, says she is currently consulting with programme directors about possible cuts. She stresses that certain crucial projects, such as collecting long-term data sets on biodiversity and water quality, will be retained.

Members of the NERC's 18-strong council, which will meet on 8 March to consider the consultation results, add that the reforms need not cause substantial damage. They argue that reducing duplication of research and high infrastructure costs will allow all crucial CEH work to continue.

“This is not a carving back on science”, says council member Sara Parkin, a programme director at Forum for the Future, a sustainable-development charity in London, who backs the reform plan. “I've been an environmental campaigner for 40 years. I know that we need quality evidence.”