In order to promote the mobilisation of researchers around major objectives and priority scientific tools, CNRS-INSU finances, coordinates and implements, with its partners, programmes of national scope, covering a wide range of scientific themes from the Earth system to the Universe: astronomy and astrophysics, ocean and atmosphere, continental surfaces and interfaces, solid Earth.
National programmes operate on the basis of annual calls for tender and are the subject of structuring and thematically coherent partnerships with other CNRS institutes, other research bodies, agencies, civil society and industry.
In order to more clearly assert the role of the national programmes, these will be broken down into three complementary tools, distinguished by the nature and duration of the projects supported, the financial envelopes and the number of units involved.
These new tools are designed to encourage the emergence of more exploratory, structuring and ambitious projects that cut across disciplines and fields, to promote the use of large-scale instruments, in particular IR and TGIR research centres with a national, European or international dimension, and to provide better support for space-related projects.