The Beijer Institute

The Fund’s grants to the Beijer Institute (the International Institute for Energy, Related Resources and the Human Environment) in Sweden were its first in climate change, an area with which it became increasingly concerned throughout the 1980s. The project aimed to stimulate broader scientific participation in global warming issues and to create a five-year action agenda of policy options. At the time, climate change was not well recognized by national or international governmental bodies. Initially enacted through the World Commission on Environment and Development, the Beijer Institute then continued the project, which it expanded to include the orchestration of a series of international meetings of biologists, ecologists, and policymakers and the creation of an International Advisory Group on Greenhouse Gases. The project made significant contributions to the United Nations Environment Program’s 1987 international agreement limiting chlorofluorocarbon production, also known as the Montreal Protocol.