What will the UK's critical infrastructure look like in 2030? In 2050? How resilient will it be? Decisions taken now by policy makers, NGOs, industrialists, and user communities will influence the answers to these questions. How can this decision making be best informed by considerations of infrastructural resilience? This project will consider future developments in the UK's energy and transport infrastructure and the resilience of these systems to natural and malicious threats and hazards, delivering a) fresh perspectives on how the inter-relations amongst our critical infrastructure sectors impact on current and future UK resilience, b) a state-of-the-art integrated social science/engineering methodology that can be generalised to address different sectors and scenarios, and c) an interactive demonstrator simulation that operationalises the otherwise nebulous concept of resilience for a wide range of decision makers and stakeholders.Current reports from the Institute for Public Policy Research, the Institution of Civil Engineers, the Council for Science and Technology, and the Cabinet Office are united in their assessment that achieving and sustaining resilience is the key challenge facing the UK's critical infrastructure. They are also unanimous in their assessment of the main issues. First, there is agreement on the main threats to national infrastructure: i) climate change; ii) terrorist attacks; iii) systemic failure. Second, the complex, disparate and interconnected nature of the UK's infrastructure systems is highlighted as a key concern by all. Our critical infrastructure is highly fragmented both in terms of its governance and in terms of the number of agencies charged with achieving and maintaining resilience, which range from national government to local services and even community groups such as local resilience forums. Moreover, the cross-sector interactions amongst different technological systems within the national critical infrastructure are not well understood, with key inter-dependencies potentially overlooked. Initiatives such as the Cabinet Office's new Natural Hazards Team are working to address this. The establishment of such bodies with responsibility for oversight and improving joined up resilience is a key recommendation in all four reports. However, such bodies currently lack two critical resources: (1) a full understanding of the resilience implications of our current and future infrastructural organisation; and (2) vehicles for effectively conveying this understanding to the full range of relevant stakeholders for whom the term resilience is currently difficult to understand in anything other than an abstract sense. The Resilient Futures project will engage directly with this context by working with relevant stakeholders from many sectors and governance levels to achieve a step change in both (1) and (2). To achieve this, we will focus on future rather than present UK infrastructure. This is for a two reasons. First, we intend to engender a paradigm shift in resilience thinking - from a fragmented short-termism that encourages agencies to focus on protecting their own current assets from presently perceived threats to a longer-term inter-dependent perspective recognising that the nature of both disruptive events and the systems that are disrupted is constantly evolving and that our efforts towards achieving resilience now must not compromise our future resilience. Second, focussing on a 2030/2050 time-frame lifts discussion out of the politically charged here and now to a context in which there is more room for discussion, learning and organisational change. A focus on *current resilience* must overcome a natural tendency for the agencies involved to defend their current processes and practices, explain their past record of disruption management, etc., before the conversation can move to engaging with potential for improvement, learning and change.

Asylum seekers who appeal against initially negative decisions are more than twice as likely to be successful if their case is heard in North London than if their case is heard in Newport or Manchester. This is true for all asylum seekers in the UK, but also applies to specific nationalities. Iranians, for example, enjoy a 34% success rate at one hearing centre and only an 18% success rate at another, Afghans' success rates vary from 31% to 17% depending upon the court, and Zimbabweans' from 54% to 22%. These geographic disparities have not been investigated in the UK because the data on appeal success rates is not publicly available. This proposal draws upon two successful freedom of information requests (FIRs) however, in order to piece together the geography of asylum appeal success rates (see Figure One, case for support). An examination of these disparities is important for various reasons. First, asylum seekers who appeal may be facing a lottery in terms of the court that hears their case, which is arbitrary and unjust. Second, immigration law firms and their clients (such as the Legal Services Commission) may be facing an uneven landscape in terms of the degree of success they can expect in different parts of the country. Understanding this 'lawscape' will empower them with the knowledge to direct their resources more effectively. Third, official bodies with responsibility for asylum appeals, such as the Ministry of Justice and UKBA, need information and analysis in order to make a judgement about whether steps should be taken in order to improve the geographic consistency of the asylum appeal system. Fourth, the wider legal community, beyond immigration law, should be alerted to the existence and impact of geographic disparities in legal processes. The obvious research question arising from these disparities concerns why they exist. Accepting that the discrepancies are unlikely to have occurred by chance (less than 0.01% likelihood according to statistical analysis of the FIRs), four explanations present themselves. First, there may be administrative processes that direct strong cases towards certain courts, although preliminary enquiries put to officials from UKBA, immigration judges and practising immigration lawyers do not support this explanation. Second, some asylum seekers have legal representation and others do not, and this geography of legal aid may be driving the discrepancies. In light of the 10% contraction in legal aid funding in the UK as part of recent austerity measures, this explanation seems particularly important to address. Third, different judges may be predisposed towards particular decisions. This was the finding of quantitative US-based research that demonstrated that the gender and age of immigration judges has significant impact over their decisions, underscoring the importance of investigating this set of factors in the UK case (Ramji-Nogales et al, 2009). And fourth, there may be differences in the daily practices of courts - their rhythms, cultures and routines. This set of factors, centring upon courts as distinct and non-homogenous places, remains understudied in legal geography as well as legal studies more broadly. This research will examine the relative salience of these four groups of variables in explaining disparities in asylum appeal success rates. In so doing, the research will bring together qualitative and quantitative forms of analysis in order to generate a rich and innovative set of explanations for the disparities; constitute the first statistically informed UK-based analysis of national disparities in asylum appeals; impact upon the way policy makers, politicians and lawyers in the field of immigration law, as well as appellants, approach their activities; and have wide implications for the theoretical and empirical study of the relation between geography and law in the future.

Disaster managers and development planners from around the world have realized that their skills and expertise could be put into action well before an extreme event happens, to enormously reduce suffering and avoid catastrophe. While this type of action was historically not possible, new "Forecast-based Financing" systems are now being piloted in more than 15 countries. These pilots automatically trigger preparedness actions based on a forecast of an extreme event, providing financing before a potential disaster actually happens. However, in many flood-prone locations in sub Saharan Africa, the dynamics of flooding are not well understood, nor is there clarity on what should be done if certain types of flooding are forecasted. What is driving the flooding, and the flood forecasts? What preparedness actions build resilience, and which ones undermine local capacities? The FATHUM team proposes to bring together a group of interdisciplinary researchers who will work with the existing pilots to analyze and research how this new type of Forecast-based Financing system can quickly respond to forecasts of extreme events, while still contributing to long-term resilience goals and reducing the need for disaster response. The first group of researchers will tackle flooding itself. A mixed group of hydrologists and climate scientists will explore the causes of different types of floods, and identify what atmospheric patterns could allow the most important types of floods to be predicted. Opening two positions for "Applied Forecasting Impact Fellows", much of the research will be carried out by scientists from the African regions that are being studied, and will culminate in recommendations and maps for predictability in other regions that could also implement such Forecast-based Financing systems. The second group of researchers, will explore further the "why" of flooding. They will investigate the reasons behind the fact that certain floods are more impactful than others, and identify patterns of resilience stemming from local and indigenous knowledge. This will be grounded in an understanding of the rapidly changing environment in sub-Saharan Africa, ultimately helping identify what forecast-based actions can contribute to long-term meaningful change. While there is a good deal of research on both resilience building and disaster response, disaster managers in the existing 15 pilots are struggling to understand what types of action can meaningfully fit in this "forecast-based" middle ground. FATHUM researchers will work directly with the practitioners to explore these answers. The third research group builds on the first two, examining more concretely how humanitarian systems are currently structured, and where Forecast-based Financing can fit in. Why do humanitarians not already make use of the many types of flood forecasts around the world? FATHUM will map the science-policy-practice interface to identify what promotes or inhibits the use of forecast information, and what "successful" use of such information really looks like. Lastly, the fourth research stream is an interdisciplinary group of researchers that will explore the potential and constraints for scaling up the concept of Forecast-based Financing. Integration with existing systems, such as safety nets and risk insurance schemes, will be explored collaboratively with the existing pilot projects. Ultimately, FATHUM is a novel combination: expertise from academia that is integrated seamlessly into existing disaster risk management projects, allowing practitioners to work with scientists to self-examine and reflect on a game-changing new way of working in the humanitarian sector. Critical scrutiny of the hydrometeorological aspects as well as the socioeconomic implications of taking action based on a forecast will provide a foundation for humanitarians and development practitioners worldwide to build on in their own applications of this concept.

There is a major Ebola epidemic affecting parts of West Africa. Ebola is a highly infectious disease that carries a significant risk of death. New therapies and potential vaccines that can be distributed to the affected populations are being developed. Stricken communities have appealed for help. One response from the UK government has been to deploy UK military healthcare personnel to Sierra Leone (operation Gritrock), initially to provide a small facility for affected healthcare workers and to assist with training of local healthcare workers. It is possible that the scope of this involvement will increase, and prudent planning is in place for further deployments. This is the first major, purely humanitarian military deployment since Rwanda (1994). It is known that civilian humanitarian healthcare workers experience complex ethical tensions when deployed as expatriates. Military healthcare workers face both related and different (uniquely military) challenges when deployed in conflict scenarios but it is not known how they will experience the novel ethical challenges and complexities in a purely humanitarian setting, dealing with a highly infectious disease in conditions of near disaster for the affected communities. This project aims to collect interview data on the ethical challenges experienced by the deployed UK military healthcare personnel. It plans to recruit up to 25 nurses, doctors, and allied health professionals. An initial analysis of the resulting data will enable training materials to be developed quickly to benefit those, including civilians, about to deploy to Ebola-affected regions. These materials will be evaluated by a subset of the participants and used to inform, train and support existing and future (military and civilian) deployments during the Ebola outbreak. The data collected will also be used in the longer term to expand and enrich existing understanding of the ethical experiences of expatriate healthcare workers volunteering for humanitarian work in other contexts, for instance working with non-governmental organisations or as part of governmental responses. It is predicted that the UK medical military will increasingly be expected to contribute to similar humanitarian responses in the future. This work will also contribute to military preparation, training, support and policy in other humanitarian contexts.

Since 2011, the Syrian conflict is a constellation of overlapping crises. Each of the related international and regional dimensions necessitate tailored responses within an overarching framework. The recent escalations, conflicts, natural disasters, diseases compound urgent humanitarian needs of the lives of civilians. Together with the start of the conflict, Turkey has taken a proactive approach and now hosting the largest refugee population in the world, which is over 4 million and the vast majority includes women, children and elderly population. In addition to that, Europe hosts the largest number of international migrants (82 million); Hence, Migrant needs are always in centre of European Humanitarian policy.The humanitarian field is complex and a difficult environment to navigate. By stating that undesirable or harmful outcomes may be resulted from the humanitarian response, it is emphasized that the agencies are required to seek for collaboration to diminish or prevent these adverse impacts. Therefore, focusing on innovative humanitarian relief framework emphasizes the development and improvement of the local and national capacity in the response towards the crisis and the requirement to establish stronger ties among National Societies. This project is a global humanitarian initiative led by five international National Red Cross Red Crescent Societies that are Turkish Red Crescent, British Red Cross, Danish Red Cross (Dansk Rode Kors), Bulgarian Red Cross and Red Cross Society of Bosnia and Herzegovina. This country consortium is aimed the development and improvement of the local and national capacity in the response towards the crisis and the requirement to establish stronger ties with the local organizations. By stating that undesirable or harmful outcomes may be resulted from the humanitarian response, it is emphasized that the agencies are required to seek for collaboration to diminish or prevent these adverse impacts. It could be used as a reference tool for developing a country consortium or strengthening an existing collaboration among emergency response agencies and wider stakeholders, including local government and local communities.Project community has been working to improve the speed, quality and effectiveness of emergency preparedness and response in the humanitarian community by building capacity at the field, organizational and global humanitarian sector levels. The key principles of collaboration, partnership and non-duplication provide a framework for participating agencies to work together towards improved response. Together with the sharing response concerns, two pillars are determined as a common objective among the National Societies collaboration. Sharing National Societies’ action plans as a response to the emergencies, resources and approaches will be the starting point for understanding each member’s mandate, priorities and ways of working. Opportunities are aimed to develop joint strategies and initiatives will result from analysis of the challenges, weaknesses and/or gaps within Protection and Cash Programs. Developing a common log frame and work plan together as a consortium will ensure that the members are clear on why they are collaborating and what their priorities are. Project teams are working together to develop a cyclical process of experiential learning, action, reflection, and learning, with an aspiration that this cycle is owned by the participating agencies and communicate with the wider sector to improve our ability to respond to emergencies. The participants of this collaboration will work together via preparation meetings, working groups, exchange groups, workshop and trainings. For that purpose, the following objectives are aimed to be achieved within the project:Objective 1: Identifying, compiling and sharing experience and knowledge of four partners National Red Cross Red Crescent Societies on protection and cash-based interventions from their respective contexts regarding migration (British Red Cross, Danish Red Cross, Turkish Red Crescent, Bosnian Red Cross and Bulgarian Red Cross)Objective 2: Strengthening the competence of staff on protection and cash-based intervention to improve HR capacities through exchanges, trainings and on- the -job exercises.