Newcastle University and Kyoto University to lead a one-year Climate Adaptation project 2022
To mark the tenth anniversary of RENKEI, the British Council has awarded £200,000 to a Climate Adaptation project led by the universities of Newcastle and Kyoto and involving all the consortium’s members. Climate Change is one of the group’s priority areas, and this project, which starts in March 2022, builds on the work already done over the past several years.
The programme will focus on the researcher response to the interdisciplinary, global challenge of climate adaptation and resilience. Making the most of renewed opportunities to travel while incorporating the lessons learned about virtual collaboration, it adopts a hybrid model: a cohort of early career researchers and mentors with a broad range of research interests will be paired up to work together online before meeting at an Autumn School held in Kyoto, the first in-person RENKEI academic workshop since 2019. This will be followed up by online events, and participants can also apply for longer in-person visits.
Besides these events, the project outputs are expected to include an ongoing RENKEI early career researcher exchange programme and mentoring scheme, templates for the replication of successful activities in future RENKEI programmes, and a small number of seed-funded research projects led by early career researchers. The project aims to define a cutting-edge agenda for future research and policy impact; raise visibility of the RENKEI network and develop stronger partnerships with external stakeholders; and deepen collaboration between climate change researchers at various career stages, strengthening bilateral and multilateral RENKEI partnerships.