Biotechnology & Biological Sciences Research Council
The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) is the UK funding agency for research in the life sciences.
Sponsored by Government, BBSRC annually invests around £470 million in a wide range of research that makes a significant contribution to the quality of life for UK citizens and supports a number of important industrial stakeholders including the agriculture, food, chemical, healthcare and pharmaceutical sectors. BBSRC carries out its mission by funding internationally competitive research, providing training in the biosciences, fostering opportunities for knowledge transfer and innovation and promoting interaction with the public and other stakeholders on issues of scientific interest in universities, centres and institutes.
Areas core to BBSRC’s remit include food security, and bioenergy and industrial biotechnology.
Within these areas, BBSRC funds research projects and initiatives to investigate the ability to adapt to a changing environment and mitigate the effects of climate change.
BBSRC’s community of researchers encompasses a wide range of disciplines, making it uniquely well placed to deal with issues as diverse as tackling emerging and endemic diseases of farmed animals and crops, developing sustainable agricultural systems and practices, producing new liquid transport fuels from sustainable plant-derived sources, and ensuring healthy populations of pollinating insects.
Brian Harris, Head of BBSRC’s Agriculture and Food Sector, says
'Partnerships such as Living With Environmental Change are extremely important. There is great value in working together with organisations which share our overarching vision that science must underpin solutions to many of the important global issues we face. Living With Environmental Change represents a helpful vehicle to provide strategic focus to, and derive added value from, the bioscience BBSRC supports relevant to climate change mitigation and adaptation. It encourages strategic and collaborative approaches, and promotes knowledge exchange that will help ensure world-class research carried out in the UK will inform evidence-based policy making and stimulate the emerging green economy.