Welcoming Australia’s new 2021 NRI Roadmap

The 2021 National Research Infrastructure Roadmap (Roadmap) sets priorities for future investment in Australia's national research infrastructure, which comprises a range of nationally significant assets, facilities and services that support leading-edge research and innovation. Image: Australian Government

Yesterday the Morrison Government launched the 2021 National Research Infrastructure Roadmap (Roadmap), which details how future research needs will be incrementally supported over the next five years, building on solid foundations in national research infrastructure (NRI) for the sciences and humanities. Here we provide a Roadmap snapshot through a geoscience lens and explain our next steps in supporting the National Research Infrastructure Investment Plan (RIIP).

Roadmap overview, themes and challenges

“In coming decades, Australia will face significant change and we may need to respond as quickly as we have done recently. Future technological progress will be driven by working across disciplines, collaborating across institutions and accessing state of the art distributed facilities managed by a highly skilled workforce.”

— Dr Ziggy Switkowski AO, Roadmap Chair

AuScope welcomes this Roadmap as a new central guide to our strategic work, including adapting our 5-Year Investment Plan for greater alignment with the Roadmap in the next few months. We are delighted by the volume and quality of contributions to this Roadmap from the national geoscience community that we represent. Diverse geoscientists working in academia, government and industry have all come forward to ensure that Australia’s decadal geoscience challenges (natural resources security and geohazards), and their research themes and challenges, have been duly represented in this Roadmap.

We support the eight key recommendations outlined in the Roadmap (Page 3 - 5), including to:

  1. Adopt the NRI Principles; 

  2. Provide continuity and long-term funding to NRI;

  3. Adopt a challenge framework to support NRI planning and investment; 

  4. Establish an Expert NRI Advisory Group to drive a more effective NRI ecosystem; 

  5. Drive a more integrated NRI ecosystem;

  6. Improve industry engagement with NRI;

  7. Develop a National Digital Research Infrastructure Strategy; and 

  8. Prepare Australia to capitalise on future opportunities.

We are especially pleased to see the challenge oriented view the Roadmap has adopted (3) since AuScope is acutely aware that pressing climate, environmental and social issues, together with critical economic drivers, will see unprecedented demands on the Australian environment, including its Earth services such as critical minerals, renewable energy and groundwater. Consequently, we expect to see ever-increasing reliance on Australia’s geoscience community to address these grand challenges using cutting-edge research instruments, facilities, services and analytics to support their endeavour.

We are also pleased to see geoscience represented in almost all of the Roadmap’s research themes and challenges (pictured in the following image). Amongst them, the largest contributions that the Australian geoscience community makes, and will continue to make, is to Resources Technology and Critical Minerals Processing, Recycling and Clean Energy, Defence, Space, Environment and Climate.

A visual overview of the Roadmap, including eight research themes and challenges, system-wide NRI enhancements to underpin these challenges, and the step-changes to get there. Image: Australian Government

$900 million spend on Australia’s existing NRI

Aside from announcing the Roadmap, Acting Minister for Education and Youth Stuart Robert and Minister for Science and Technology Melissa Price also announced a $900 million investment over five years into the tools, technology and skills to make Australian research even more globally competitive.

This investment is part of the Morrison Government’s provision of $4 billion from 2017-18 to 2028-29 into national research infrastructure. AuScope is pleased to learn that this new $900 million funding announcement will support operations across national research infrastructures. Specific funding allocations thereof are anticipated post-2022 federal election.

Geoscience in the Roadmap

Of the eight research themes and challenges that the Roadmap has identified, geoscience is most strongly represented by Resources Technology and Critical Minerals Processing. Roadmap authors recognise the importance of optimised mining practices in the future, including within extraction, beneficiation and environmental remediation parts of the mining cycle. This will be possible through access to advanced characterisation facilities, high-resolution data (including geochemical, geochronological, geophysical and geodetic data), and mineral processing facilities. Together with the right expertise, these facilities and data will simultaneously critically underpin the critical minerals industry, helping explorers navigate towards new reserves to support Australia’s energy transition, economy and future climate prosperity. 

Additionally, we identify that geoscience supports all of the remaining research themes and challenges in some way. We look forward to exploring the myriad opportunities in each with our geoscience community.

Finally, the Roadmap highlights the critical importance of long-term continental-scale observations from field, remote and space-based sensors, as well as the development of large-scale integrated datasets.  These goals are closely aligned with many existing AuScope and national geoscience activities and provide another significant opportunity to build geoscience programs aligned with the Roadmap objectives.

2021 NRI Roadmap themes and challenges (view in the Roadmap). Image: Australian Government

Aside from geoscience’s central representation in most of the Roadmap research themes and challenges, it also features prominently on Page 31 (in the Resources technology and critical minerals processing section ) and Page 66 (drone-enabled geoscience case study) (view in the Roadmap). Image: Australian Government

Next steps in supporting the 2022 RIIP

Over the coming months, the AuScope management team will refine AuScope’s 5-Year Investment Plan to align with the Roadmap and contribute to building the 2022 Research Infrastructure Investment Plan (RIIP), which will build on the Roadmap and assist the Australian Government in making funding decisions. The RIIP process will be led by the Department of Education, Skills and Employment (DESE) and will take place in the second half of this year.

We look forward to working with our community across 2022 to ensure that AuScope’s contribution to the RIIP process has strong geoscience community support, reflects researchers’ needs and aligns with Australia’s decadal geoscience challenges and our community’s fundamental geoscience questions.

We ask you to read the Roadmap, share it widely with your research group and community, and keep it handy during strategic planning periods. We also invite you to reflect on the emerging research landscape pictured below, highlighting how new techniques and technologies are changing research practice. As the physical and digital world blur, research enablers and researchers must develop stronger partnerships and readily collaborate with their counterparts abroad, unhindered by any technological barriers.

Characteristics of emerging research practice. Image: The Roadmap / DESE

 
 
 
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