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
Here is a decision-support tool that will enable sustainable coastal energy; this online map viewer can be used for exploring potential future flooding to identify how coastal power stations, substations and distribution grid can be adapted to future climate change impacts and thus become more resilient.
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
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
The role of community learning in disasters is seen to be increasingly important. Education is the lost discipline in terms of understanding behaviour in disasters and emergencies. This interdisciplinary project considers how new technologies and methods in the physical and social sciences can facilitate city evacuations with a focus on plans in London, Birmingham and Carlisle.
Research Council: EPSRC
A digital e-learning tool that encourages flood risk adaptation amongst SMEs. This interactive Web-2 app allows users to communicate with other businesses, share their views and experiences, access key resources and learn from a range of people who have flood experience or expertise. Business people shared their learning about how to run a business in a flood risk area, and on different aspects of their adaptive strategies. The storytelling process was found to encourage critical reflections on business adaptation, decision making and experiential learning that could be usefully shared with other small businesses.
Research Council: EPSRC
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
Despite a wealth of scientific understanding on the importance of GI, the implementation and uptake of GI in new developments in the UK is lacking. It is envisaged that the approach implemented in this project will be adopted by other organisations and stakeholders, and in doing so, will help multi-functional GI-based solutions to become part of business-as-usual city growth in new developments.
Research Council: NERC
With rainfall projected to increase under future climate conditions, research has shown that domestic front gardens play a pivotal role in the control of surface water following heavy rainfall. If you have an outdoor area or parking spaces for your clients, then impermeable paving can generate substantial volumes of runoff during a storm even which can contribute to localised flooding.
Research Council: Other