The final decision on EU funding for Horizon 2020’s five Joint Technology Initiatives has been made—leaving research into societal challenges with a reduced budget.
The JTIs, established under the Lisbon Treaty, had their budgets decided last week, separately from the Horizon 2020 budget. Cuts of between 2.5 and 5 per cent have been made to the Commission’s original proposal.
As part of Horizon 2020’s final budget of €70.2 billion, the programme’s third pillar, societal challenges, which funds collaborative research and JTIs—had its budget reduced by 15.2 per cent from the initial €80bn proposed by the European Commission. But as a result of the smaller cuts to JTIs, the reduction for the collaboration part of the third pillar is closer to 20 per cent, according to data released by the European Parliament.
The Parliament originally wanted the JTI budgets to be decreased by an amount matching the overall Horizon 2020 budget reductions. The Council of Ministers, however, opposed any cuts. A negotiation insider told Research Europe that ministers wanted to protect the JTIs because their funding is matched by industry, meaning that more would be lost through cuts.
On 26 February, the Parliament and the Council agreed to cut the Innovative Medicines Initiative and the Fuel Cells and Hydrogen initiative by 5 per cent each, and the remaining JTIs by 2.5 per cent.
Compared with the Council’s no-cuts proposal to the JTIs, the small reduction has returned about €237 million to collaborative research, according to the Parliament.
For universities, however, the final deal is a disappointment. “We see no specific reason to justify this discriminatory treatment,” said Kurt Deketelaere, the secretary-general of the League of European Research Universities. “The societal challenges cannot be used as a milk cow for the other priorities in the years to come.”