Climate change research needs to be better coordinated | John Dwyer | Environment | guardian.co.uk

The lack of an accepted definition of climate change is one official explanation for the lack of information about how much funding there is for UK climate change research or where it is going. But the problem goes way beyond climate change. Back in the spring Lord Sutherland said the House of Lords science and technology committee he chaired was "quite staggered" to learn that no one can offer a figure for the UK's total public spending on all research.

The figure the CCC put on climate change research in July, £550m, was a guess. A CCC source told Research Fortnight that, when it asked government departments and research councils for data about the projects they funded, they ran into a brick wall: "The data is not held centrally, so you had to go to various departments and to various people within departments in order to find it."