Open-air rock art panels are an iconic component of the UK's prehistoric heritage. Over 3500 rock art panels still exist across the UK from the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age periods, between 6000 and 3800 years ago. However, this art is non-renewable and there is growing evidence that the rate of panel deterioration is increasing in association with environmental change. As such, management interventions are urgently needed, but the underpinning science essential to guide approaches and decisions is still quite limited, especially for identifying panels at greatest risk and developing holistic strategies to sustain rock art survival into the future. With this background, we performed various scientific investigations over the past three years on the environmental and mineralogical basis of rock art deterioration in Northumberland to identify factors most associated with panel deterioration. This highly successful work showed that panel condition was strongly correlated to local soil salinity and the height of each panel, and also showed that panel deterioration was a non-linear process over time. Therefore, we have a growing understanding of the scientific basis of deterioration. However, this early work employed a condition assessment method that was excellent for research, but did not consider the uniqueness of panel attributes for prioritising panel care nor was it fully usable by non-specialists without assistance; both traits we feel are essential for widespread implementation. This project will rectify these initial shortcomings by co-producing a user-friendly condition assessment, risk evaluation (CARE) toolkit and how-to-guide. The proposed work fits perfectly into the AHRC's innovative "Care for the Future" theme as it provides us with an opportunity to expand our successful scientific research, but then uses an arts and humanities approach to translate our "science" into a more workable human tool for protecting rock art. We first will use a participatory/co-production approach with heritage managers, end-users (e.g., land managers/owners and volunteers) to define required CARE outcomes. New environmental data then will be obtained for rock art new locations in Northumberland, the Republic of Ireland and Scotland to further calibrate and validate the CARE tool. In parallel, focus groups and pilots in Northumberland will be used to co-produce outcomes amenable to non-specialists. Ultimately, we will generate a scientifically-grounded, user-friendly toolkit, which includes a "how-to-guide" for field use that will assist end-users in making decisions on panel care without specialist expertise. In essence, we will create an "early warning" system for use by non-specialists, which will aid heritage managers in their safeguarding of rock art. The project employs cross-disciplinary scholarship (i.e., environmental science, management, and resource expertise) and co-production with local communities and end-users. The work endeavours to make the core science behind our recommendations easily understood and publicly available via a range of dissemination routes, and to contribute to the growing ethos of Open Science reflected in the cultural/heritage sector and the natural and physical sciences. Our project specifically builds on two AHRC/EPSRC-funded Heritage and Science Cluster themes, "Decay of ancient stone monuments" and "Transformation and resilience of our landscapes, archaeology and built heritage: defining responses to societal and environmental pressures". Both Clusters assessed the role of environmental resilience on stone monument protection, which we now combine in our efforts to further develop the CARE outcomes. The project involves academics from Newcastle University, Queen's University, Belfast, and University of West Scotland with Project Partners from English Heritage, Northumberland County Council, and Northumberland National Park. All activities will be guided by a Steering Committee.

We have found that soils in cities are more effective sinks for carbon than agricultural soils. Urban soils typically carry a burden of fine-grained materials derived from often a long history of demolition. These materials include cement dust, which contains calcium silicate minerals, and also lime (calcium hydroxide). What we have found is that calcium derived from these minerals combines rapidly with carbonate in solution, which ultimately is derived from two sources - plants or rainwater. The rate at which this process occurs is extremely rapid, typically 100 T CO2 are removed from the atmosphere for each hectare of ground monthly; that's in a patch of ground the size of a football pitch. The amounts of carbon stored in urban soils as a consequence of this process are around 300 T C per hectare (compared with 175 T C per hectare in agricultural soils), and this is achieved rapidly after demolition (within very few years). We want to make sure that construction activity takes advantage of these findings, to help compensate for the CO2 emissions that arise from burning fossil fuels, and to contribute to the UK's ambitious targets for reducing our emissions. The potential is there - if engineered soils are strategically and systematically designed to have a carbon capture function we believe that around 10% of the UK's 2011 CO2 emissions could be captured in this way, as part of normal construction activity. The costs involved are far less than energy and capital intensive CO2 scrubbing systems that are fixed to specific plant, such as a power station. What's more, the design involves a range of ecosystem services and involves broadening the concept of 'Carbon Capture Gardens', which we have found to be very acceptable among a wide range of stakeholders, as pleasant spaces are created that communities can enjoy and engage with. The proposed research is intended to address some significant questions: 1) Can we reproduce the soil carbonation process artificially, so we can be sure of the carbon capture value? 2) How can we validate the process, so that claims of carbon sequestration can be trusted? 3) Is the process genuinely worth doing, in the context of UK and global CO2 emissions reduction targets? 4) What effect does the process have on soils, especially their strength and ability to drain rainwater, thus preventing flooding? 5) What effect does this approach have on plant and animal communities? Will the plants that we want grow in ground that has been treated to optimize carbon capture? 6) How does this process fit in with existing regulations that affect brownfield sites? 7) Under what circumstances is the process economically viable, given the geographical controls on availability of materials? 8) Can individuals use this approach in their own gardens? During the project, we will work with a wide range of stakeholders, from industry, local authorities and environmental groups as well as academics. We will engage students in monitoring work as part of the dissemination process. All the work will be openly published in appropriate forms, and we expect to build a growing community network associated with the project.

UK nature-based solutions, such as tree planting, must engage with the agricultural sector, given that agriculture uses more than 70 per cent of the land in the UK and is a major emitter of greenhouse gases (GHGs). Meeting the UK's tree planting targets and reducing agricultural GHG emissions may require converting current agricultural land to alternative land-uses. Agroforestry, where trees are deliberately combined with agriculture on the same piece of land, is one alternative land-use that maintains food production, but which can also drive down GHG emissions, deliver key ecosystem services, and create and improve (rural) livelihoods. Agroforestry supports several goals not only relevant to Net Zero, but for the UK government's 25 Year Environment Plan and Clean Growth Strategy. However, the environmental and societal benefits of agroforestry can only be realized through widespread adoption by key stakeholders, including farmers and land managers. The overall objective of the AF Futures project is to co-develop strategies to overcome barriers to, identify facilitators of, and increase opportunities for agroforestry practices in different UK contexts. Research focused on understanding the similarities in preferences and perceived challenges identified by different stakeholder groups, as well as how these might be addressed in local and national contexts will be conducted with AF futures, using a multidisciplinary approach. Integration of the natural, social and economic, sciences and arts and humanities is central to activities within AF Futures. Research addressing how regulatory structures, economic incentives, socio-economic drivers and impacts, and agronomic intervention shape agroforestry practices will be integrated through different disciplinary lenses. The arts and humanities will be used to create visual transitions from past representations of agroforestry to agroforestry futures, which integrate socio- economic outcomes and future biodiversity and ecosystem services, if adoption of different particular agroforestry approaches occurs.

The U.K. population is projected to reach 80 million by 2050 and it is anticipated that the overwhelming majority will continue to live in cities. Besides becoming more densely populated, future cities will be surrounded with expanding urban areas. Interactions within cities; across urban areas and with surrounding cities, towns and 'rural' areas with the rest of the UK will place new and different demands on infrastructure, whether housing, energy, transport, freight distribution and disposal of waste. Decisions that are made now will have profound implications for the resultant pressures on transport, living space, energy use, and ecosystem services (the benefits humans receive from ecosystems). These decisions will play out at two fundamentally different spatial scales. First, and by far the better understood, are those decisions that concern individual households and their neighbourhoods. These include issues of how their members move around, what kinds of housing they occupy, how their energy demands and waste production are reduced, and how their negative influences on the wider environment generally will be limited. Second, broad scale strategic decisions regarding regional planning will determine where in the U.K. population growth is primarily accommodated. This will determine, and be shaped by, the kinds of transport and energy infrastructure required, and the environmental impacts. Obviously these two sets of decisions are not independent. The demands for and impacts of broad scale development (whether this be the creation of new urban areas or the intensification of existing ones) - and thus how this is best achieved to deliver sustainability- will be influenced not by the typical demands and impacts exhibited now by households, but by the way in which these have been changed in response to the modification to the associated infrastructure. This makes for a challenging problem in predicting and evaluating the possible consequences of different potential scenarios of regional development. The proposed study SElf Conserving URban Environments (SECURE) will address this grand challenge of integration across scales (the global aim) by developing a range of future regional urbanization scenarios, and exploring their consequences for selected high profile issues of resource demand and provision (transport, dwellings, energy, and ecosystem services) alongside sustainable waste utilisations. In doing so, it will build on findings of research outputs of several previous SUE projects and harness its relationship in the context of policy and economic growth. The study includes specific research objectives under five broad cross-cutting themes - Urbanisation, Ecosystems Services, Building and Energy, Stakeholder Engagement and Policy Integration across themes. SECURE is designed to assemble novel deliverables to bring about step change in current knowledge and practice. The North East Region will be used as a test bed and evaluation of transitional scenarios leading up to 2050 will quantify the benefits of integration across the scales through conservation across the themes. SECURE will deliver policy formulation and planning decisions for 2030 and 2050 with a focus on creating Sustainable Urban Environment.The contributors to this project are researchers of international standings who have collaborated extensively on several EPSRC funded projects, including the SUE research since its inception. The SECURE team builds on their current collaboration on the SUE2 4M project. The Project consortium is led by Newcastle - Prof Margaret Bell as PI and Dr Anil Namdeo as co-ordinator alongside Dr Jenny Brake with academic partners: Prof David Graham (Environmental Engineering), Prof David Manning (Geosciences); from Loughborough: Prof Kevin Lomas, Prof Jonathan Wright and Dr Steven Firth (Civil and Building Engineering); from Sheffield: Prof Kevin Gaston and Dr Jonathan Leake (Animal and Plant Sciences).

Across the UK political spectrum there is a consensus that communities need to play a greater role in local government, both in the decisions made that affect people's everyday lives, and in the design and delivery of services provided by local government to communities. With the enormous public uptake of digital technologies including broadband internet, mobile phones, laptop and tablet computers, there are opportunities to create more representative and sustainable forms of local democracy and service provision. Digital Civics is the endeavour of developing theories, technologies, design approaches and evaluation methods for digital technologies that support local communities, local service provision, and local democracy. However, this area poses new challenges for researchers across a range of disciplines. It requires researchers that are not only experts in local government and the services they provide (such as education, public health and social care), but also researchers that can: (i) understand the limitations of existing technologies and approaches to design and use; (ii) innovate in the design, delivery and evaluation of services; (iii) produce underpinning technologies that meet the real-world requirements of local service provision and local democracy. The primary goal of our Centre for Doctoral Training is therefore to train the next generation of researchers that can meet these challenges. The Centre has three distinctive features. Firstly, it brings together academics from 5 internationally leading centres of excellence already extensively engaged in Digital Civics research at Newcastle University: (i) experts in human-computer interaction and participatory media from Culture Lab; (ii) experts in security, privacy & trust from the Centre for Cyber Crime and Security; (iii) experts in public health and social care from the Institute of Health & Society; (iv) experts in education from the Centre for Learning and Teaching; and (iv) experts on planning and politics from the Global Urban Research Unit. Working together in a Centre for Digital Civics these academics will lead the training and supervision through a 1-year taught program in Digital Civics, and a carefully coordinated collection of 60 PhD 3-year research projects over the funded lifetime of the centre. Secondly, the research will be conducted in the context of real-world service provision and communities, through the engagement of three local councils (Newcastle, Gateshead & Northumberland) who will act a host partners to the research. The centre also has a significant number of deeply committed commercial, public sector and third sector partners who will actively engage in the design and delivery of the research training. These include many of the leading national and international organisations with a direct interest in building research capacity in Digital Civics. These include Philips Research, Microsoft Research, eBay Research Labs, Orange Labs, IBM Research, BBC R&D, Tunstall, BT Labs, Promethean and SMART Technologies. In addition to these partners, we also have a partnership of local and national social and commercial enterprises, and a network of international academics who will support academic exchanges placements which will provide an international profile to our students' portfolio. Only those collaborating partners who have demonstrated a real and substantial commitment to engage have been included in this proposal. The research training provided to students will be cross-disciplinary in nature and focused upon 3 challenging application domains for digital civics research. These are: local democracy, education, and public health & social care. There will also be 2 underpinning technology training programmes: human-computer interaction and security, privacy & trust. These 5 topics span the research expertise of our 5 international centres of excellence at Newcastle University.