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
It is important to build community resilience for future climate impacts as well as develop more productive conversations about climate change within the context of flooding.
Research Council: ESRC
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
Whilst in the possession of a wealth of data and abundant local knowledge, emergency responders often find it challenging to apply existing flood ‘hotspot’ data to assist strategic planning and operational response. An interdisciplinary team of researchers with project partners from the City of Leicester, UK, evaluated the resilience of emergency response during extreme flood events, including the accessibility of the city to emergency responders during extreme flooding. The results uncovered aspects of flooding that stakeholders were unaware of, i.e. the ‘hotspot’ areas which would directly become inundated, and the indirect, cascading impacts of flood events of different magnitudes on emergency response times at a cityscale.
Research Council: NERC
Property level surface water management:
Research Council: EPSRC
WATCH THIS SPACE: Reliable and comprehensive flood forecasting is crucial to ensure resilient cities and sustainable socio-economic development in a future faced with an unprecedented increase in atmospheric temperature and intensified precipitation.
Research Council: EPSRC