From the archive: Overseeing a big decarbonisation bid

Pulling an interdisciplinary team together can be less daunting than you imagine

To accompany our profile of the Belmont Forum’s current call for international, multipartner teams to work on environmental problems, we are revisiting this interview with Jeroen van Hunen, a professor of earth sciences at Durham University, originally published in June 2021.

Van Hunen’s win in an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council decarbonisation scheme was his first major interdisciplinary project, and he shared some of the lessons he learned along the way. One of them was that time will be short on bids like this, and that necessitates difficult decisions. “You have to make choices,” van Hunen told us. “You can’t just touch everything, even with this amount of funding”—his project won £1.4 million.