WATCH THIS SPACE: It is likely that 80% of the world’s population will live in urban centres by 2050. As transport is a very significant contributor to global carbon emissions, as well as road congestion and urban air quality problems, it is important that everyone is encouraged to rethink their personal mobility behaviour.
Research Council: EPSRC
Water-monitoring flying robots to help rapidly respond to accidents and improve management of water resources. The AquaMAV has sufficient battery capacity for 14 minutes of flight in air at 10m/s, which corresponds to a 5km range at which the robot can dive into water and return to base with a collected water sample.
Research Council: EPSRC
Blue-Green infrastructure aimed to increase understanding of people’s perceptions and provide a methodology for the robust evaluation of the multiple functionalities of Blue-Green infrastructure which demonstrates the relative significance of benefits in context specific locations. This tool compliments CIRIA BeST (Benefits of SuDS Tool), and the team are now embarking on a new EPSRC-funded research project – Achieving Urban Flood Resilience in an Uncertain Future
Research Council: EPSRC
Flooding is recognised as a critical business threat, though seldom sufficiently prioritised for developing a coping strategy. It was perceived as an unavoidable risk that required community level engagement (structural protection, better drainage system, proper drainage maintenance). Nearly half of SMEs examined had neither considered the risks nor implemented coping strategies, those that had usually extended generic business risk strategies to deal with immediate impacts of EWEs. Supply chain impact potential was often unrecognised. As part of this project, the ‘What-If’ Scenario Portal (WISP) was developed as a series of interlinked toolkits used for mapping the projections of future weather-related hazards developed.
Research Council: EPSRC
SMEs must be prepared for the disruption that an extreme weather event (EWE) can bring and have contingency plans in place to help their immediate recovery to secure their long term survival. This project aimed to understand how each group of decision-makers is affected by and responds to EWEs, and to identify the synergies and conflicts between their decisions that affect community resilience. The aim of the research is to develop an integrated decision-making framework that supports the individual and collective actions of local policymakers, households and SMEs, in such a way that the actions result in the improved resilience of local communities to EWEs.
Research Council: EPSRC
Evidence suggests that environmental crisis narratives, rather than spur people to take action, prompt feelings of anxiety, helplessness and disempowerment. Ultimately these narratives may serve to foster apathy and denial, discouraging people from considering alternatives or taking control. Behaviour change interventions, also aimed at encouraging environmentally-considerate behaviour, have tended to ignore concerns about status, ethical values and beliefs, identity, quality of life and fun, thereby stripping life of much that people value. This project addresses the need for a step-change in society’s notion of everyday life (ie the small achievements and intuitions that provide our compass) to take account of a future with distinctly different environment, opportunities, and states of uncertainty.
Research Council: AHRC
UASs can be easily deployed – often hand launched – to assess damage across large areas, and provide emergency responders with the opportunity to assess situations quickly: this allows prioritisation of resources and effective deployment. One aspect of the research focuses on addressing challenges in flying UASs in non-ideal situations, for example, maintaining performance during adverse weather conditions, during intermittent loss of communication with the base station, overcoming the loss of operator visuals, providing the ability to recover the vehicle without a runway and avoiding potential collisions with unexpected obstacles.
Research Council: EPSRC
This project is of broader interest to business – uncovering how coasts (beaches, dunes and engineered defences) and rivers behave during storms. Of particular interest is the effect of previous storms and floods moving sediment (ie shingle, sand and river bed material) so that the beach or river is in a different (perhaps weaker) condition when a second flood event arrives. The movement of sediment is difficult to predict as it mostly happens during storms, so our knowledge of these processes is currently lacking.
Research Council: EPSRC
Our intent is to work out and demonstrate how resilience to floods and droughts can be achieved using integrated systems of Blue-Green and Grey assets, no matter how climate changes in future, assuring continuous, long term service delivery.
Research Council: EPSRC
This is a creative contribution to the ways in which citizens and communities live with each other and their environment in relation to water in a range of UK neighbourhoods. The research asks a series of questions about what communities are, how they function, and the role of environmental (water) assets and issues in the coming together of communities, conflicts within and between communities, and progress to interconnected community and environmental resilience. The ongoing online forum provides a space for the Towards Hydrocitizenship project team and anyone else interested in water to share thoughts, ideas, other projects, and generally to be part of creative conversations about water and water issues.
Research Council: AHRC