“Cutting the science budget will have a direct impact on our ability to save lives. It will compound the increasing difficulty faced by humanitarian organisations to deal with greater and more diverse hazards affecting all parts of the world – from Cockermouth to Calcutta,” warns the Director of the Humanitarian Futures Programme at King’s College, London.

Dr. Randolph Kent points to the range of global humanitarian hazards seen in 2010 and says policymakers and scientists need each other more than ever.

“This is not the time to cut investment in science which is only beginning to develop a two-way dialogue with humanitarian policymakers.  Science offers us innovative solutions to hazards which threaten the lives and livelihoods of millions of vulnerable people and scientists need to work with policymakers to turn their knowledge into practical solutions for human kind.”

He says it is “strikingly evident” that scientists and humanitarian policymakers need resources to engage in collaborative working in order to develop a useful dialogue.  “An obvious example is the information emerging from climate science research which is not understood by end-users such as farmers in Africa.  How can humanitarian policymakers work with scientists to gain understanding to shape their strategies to deal with horrors such as Pakistan and Haiti, if the government starves science of funding?”

Dr. Kent points to the consistent statements of Chief Scientific Advisers to the government – Sir John Beddington and his predecessor, Sir David King – who recognise “the tremendous scope science provides to find solutions to threats facing all kinds of vulnerable people.”

He calls for “every effort to be made to bring scientists to the policy-making table, to inform planners about leading-edge developments which may offer innovative ways of mitigating the range of hazards we’ve seen in 2010 and more dynamic and diverse hazards we will certainly face in the future”.

The HFP Director welcomes the declared aim of the Science Minister, David Willetts, “We need to be better at applying research to practical purposes”.

“What could be more practical than, for instance, exploring how remote sensing, expanding telemedicine in developed and developing countries , can be used to reduce the human toll in catastrophic crises faced all over the world, from earthquakes, mudslides, tsunamis, contamination and pandemics,” asks Randolph Kent.