Area of investment and support

Area of investment and support: Digital solutions

The aim of this programme is to work with business and public sector users to exploit the rich diversity and potential of public, and possibly commercial, data to create innovative digital services that deliver economic, social and environmental benefits.

Budget:
£5 million plus up to £3 million capital investment and £2 million funding for the NERC Environmental Data Service is available to support this programme
Duration:
2019 to 2025
Partners involved:
Natural Environment Research Council (NERC)

The scope and what we're doing

The NERC Digital Solutions programme works with business and public sector users to exploit the rich diversity and potential of public and, possibly, commercial data to create innovative digital services that deliver economic, social and environmental benefits.

The Digital Solutions programme will deliver broad, lasting impact through the delivery of economic and societal benefits from data held both by NERC and third parties. To achieve this it  works closely with stakeholders across the non-academic community in order to generate a step-change in the availability and usefulness of data products to users, allowing them to readily exploit this information.

The programme is taking collaborative approaches towards:

  • facilitating the acquisition of environmental and multidisciplinary datasets
  • delivering impact, in policy, economic and societal terms, from the use of data.

The programme aims to facilitate access to not only environmental data but also new and exciting multidisciplinary datasets. Data will be easily found and accessed by new users from the business and policy communities. Implementation of the FAIR principles for data management provides a foundation upon which data can be used to unlock new insights. The programme takes interdisciplinary and collaborative approaches to the provision of solutions.

The Digital solutions programme aims to deliver impact in both policy and economic terms from the use of data, improving outcomes for people as well as the environment. Evidence of this will be provided through the use of case studies, narratives and data journeys.

The programme intends:

  • to be widely regarded as having listened sensitively to the needs of existing and potential users
  • to have built a cohesive and expanded research, business and policy user community
  • to have worked proactively to overcome barriers to uptake and impact.

It should become synonymous with fostering service innovation.

Who to contact

Kirsten Dutton

Email: digitalsolutions@nerc.ukri.org

Last updated: 12 September 2023

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