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French president’s climate talent search nabs 18 foreign scientists

Emmanuel Macron 

©FNMF/N. MERGUI/Flickr

By Elisabeth Pain

French President Emmanuel Macron’s effort to lure disgruntled foreign climate scientists to France—especially from the United States—has produced its first harvest. France today announced that Macron’s Make Our Planet Great Again initiative has recruited its first class of 18 scientists. The list includes some prominent names, including climate impacts researcher Camille Parmesan, who received a share of the 2007 Nobel Prize for her contribution to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

In June, just a few hours after U.S. President Donald Trump announced the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris climate accord, Macron cheekily invited disgruntled U.S. scientists to relocate to France and “make our planet great again.” A week later, the French government unveiled a website that soon spelled out the details: It was offering 3- to 5-year grants, worth up to €1.5 million each, to attract about 50 high-level foreign climate scientists. Overall, the program totaled around €60 million in direct funding and in-kind support.

More than 1800 scientists expressed initial interest, 450 were deemed eligible, and 255 submitted applications. Ninety were then invited to submit proposals in collaboration with a French institution. The French National Research Agency (ANR) ultimately received 57 proposals, which were reviewed by a 9-member international panel chaired by Corinne Le Quéré, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in Norwich, United Kingdom. The proposals were “high quality and in cutting edge fields,” Le Quéré says.

Macron and French research minister Frédérique Vidal announced the 18 initial grants at a Paris event held on the eve of the One Climate Summit, which aims to harness global financial backing for climate action on the 2-year anniversary of the Paris climate accord. Many of the winners currently work at academic or federal government laboratories in the U.S., but the list also includes researchers now based in Canada, India, and European nations.

Parmesan, who is originally from Texas and currently a professor at the University of Plymouth in the United Kingdom, says that, at first, “none of us [knew] what to make of” Macron’s initiative. But she decided it was “absolutely fabulous, and a very appropriate response to Trump pulling out of the Paris accords.” Parmesan, who studies how global warming might affect species and ecosystems, was also feeling stymied by what she sees as declining funding opportunities in the U.S. and U.K. Now, she will join a center for theoretical and experimental ecology in Moulis where, starting next fall, her work will include studying how animal movements caused by climate change might bring diseases into Europe.

The €1.5 million grant is “the opportunity I’ve been waiting for,” says Parmesan, noting that France also offers “some really unique facilities and infrastructure” that could aid her work.

Another winner, Italian climate scientist Alessandra Giannini, has been based at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society, affiliated with Columbia University’s Earth Institute in Palisades, New York, since 2003. She’s looking forward to the “opportunity to really focus on the research,” rather than scrambling for funds, she says. Giannini will be joining two meteorology and oceanographic laboratories in Paris, where she will investigate the physical processes underlying uncertainty in climate change projections in the tropics. But she doesn’t see her move “as a drastic change, because nowadays our scientific community is global, [and] we work on similar topics.”  

Spanish marine biologist Núria Teixidó, who holds a position at Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn in Naples, Italy, and is currently a visiting scientist at Hopkins Marine Station of Stanford University, says her new grant will give her the means to hire help and develop scientific independence. By joining the Ocean Observatory of Villefranche-sur-Mer, Teixidó says she will also be able to expand her research on the effect of ocean acidification on marine ecosystems to include possible mitigation measures.

For some winners, accepting Macron’s invitation comes with risks. Some will leave tenured positions, and for many, the details of their 5-year positions still need to be worked out.

There also are some risks for France, Le Quéré says. “If France invests in new instruments and new areas of research and then the people leave … you lose all this investment.” But “if [the winners] remain in France,” she says, funders may face the question of how to maintain support for a growing field.

In a public statement this afternoon, SNCS-FSU, a trade union for researchers based near Paris, criticized the initiative as “a pure communication stunt that doesn’t bring any additional support for French research.” SNCS-FSU also called the benefits given to scientists from abroad “an insult to French scientists … whose commitment is not correctly rewarded in their own country.” Part of the French scientific community has long called for more funding for institutions and more permanent positions for young researchers, who often see themselves forced out of academia after 6 years of postdoc due to French employment laws.

Together with Germany, which joined the initiative in September with a commitment of €15 million, France will conduct a second round of proposal evaluations next spring. “It’s very clear that France is going to address climate change,” Le Quéré says. “Not just in terms of research but in terms of action.”

Source: Science Mag