The UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) provides independent research and training in the environmental sciences. It gathers and applies knowledge, improves understanding and predicts the behaviour of the natural environment and its resources. It is one of the seven UK Research Councils that fund and manage scientific research and training in the UK. NERC is the research council that does earth system science: focusing on advancing knowledge of planet Earth as a complex, interacting system.

Total grant-in-aid from the UK Government is £224.5 million, supplemented by £35.6 million external funding. It directly employs 2596 staff and supports 965 staff in higher education institutes, 70 Research Fellows, 1017 PhD students and 337 Masters students. Relevant current thematic programmes include 'Soil Biodiversity', 'Environmental Genomics', 'Post-Genomics and Proteomics', 'Geneflow in Plants and Micro-organisms', ‘Rural Economies and Land Use’ and 'Marine Productivity'. Around 16% of NERC's total expenditure (i.e. 53.6 million euros) is classified as 'biodiversity'. This includes expenditure in NERC's Research and Collaborative Centres, including the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (which has one of its five divisions devoted to terrestrial freshwater and microbial biodiversity), the Southampton Oceanographic Centre, the Plymouth Marine Lab and the Centre for Population Biology.