C-CLEAR: Cambridge Climate, Life and Earth sciences DTP

The C-CLEAR Doctoral Training Partnership will fund a new generation of PhD students to tackle interconnected challenges in climate, life, and Earth sciences. This matters because the most pressing environmental problems—such as how ecosystems respond to warming, or how carbon moves between land, ocean, and atmosphere—do not fit neatly inside a single academic discipline. Traditional PhD programmes often train students within one field, leaving them ill-equipped to connect, say, a climate model to a soil microbe or a glacier to a fishery. C-CLEAR bridges that gap by embedding cross-disciplinary training from the start. If the programme succeeds, it will produce researchers who can work across biology, geology, and climate science. These are the people who will inform how the UK adapts its infrastructure—coastal defences, water supplies, agricultural systems—to a changing climate. The abstract provides no specific figures on student numbers or costs, so the impact is described qualitatively: a steady pipeline of scientists capable of linking fundamental Earth-system understanding to real-world decisions. This is a training grant, not a research project, so its primary output is skilled people rather than a single discovery.