Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

Extreme weather causes damage to our infrastructure services such as energy supply, information and communications technology (ICT), transport, water supply, and more. Many of our infrastructure services are interdependent, and a failure in one sector leads to failure in other sectors. For example, failure of an electric substation due to extreme heat or flooding could lead to power cuts, reduced ICT services, and transport disruption because our road (eg. traffic lights) and railway networks need electricity to operate. Finding these infrastructure weak points that have a disproportionate impact across several infrastructure networks is essential for infrastructure resilience. Moreover, as our infrastructure has an operational lifetime of several decades or more we must act now to be prepared for future extreme weather. However, current adaptation plans are often done separately by each infrastructure sector (e.g. rail, ICT) and therefore by design do not consider infrastructure interdependencies. This proposal presents an alternative approach to adaptation planning that breaks down industry silos and uses H++ ("worst-case") extreme climate change scenarios. High emissions and H++ scenarios predict the equivalent of Mediterranean heat for Birmingham and the West Midlands in the future. This proposal will consider the impact that extreme heat would have on infrastructure of the region as a whole. Particularly, it will look for weak points that could cause multiple failures across several infrastructure sectors. The project will use best-practice examples of heat-resilient infrastructure from Mediterranean cities to identify potential adaptation strategies that could be used in the Midlands. Best practice examples will be those that deliver long-term sustainability and multiple benefits, such as urban greening, which can provide climate regulation to build heat resilience, but also improve air quality, provide sustainable urban drainage, and positively influence health and well-being. The weakest infrastructure links and examples of best practice will be shared with infrastructure operators/owners to facilitate holistic, evidence-based adaptation planning. The adaptation approach can be used in other cities and for other extreme weather types. Guidance documents will be created so the method can be applied nationally and internationally in different situations and regions. The library of best practice examples of sustainable heat-resilient infrastructure and heat adaptation measures will be available online for global dissemination. This proposal specifically addresses the LWEC challenge by applying a system-of-systems approach to develop heat resilient infrastructure at a city and regional scales. Birmingham is an excellent demonstrator; HS2 and the new terminus station will arrive in the city by 2026. 51,000 new homes are required for the growing population. It also faces multiple challenges that will be exacerbated by extreme heat including increasing demand for electricity and utilities, an urban heat island effect, and transport networks which are currently operating at capacity. Now is the time for effective adaptation planning before long-term decisions and irreversible infrastructure development are undertaken. Crucially, as the West Midlands moves to devolved government there is the opportunity for leading regional research like this to shape governance plans. Dr Emma Ferranti undertakes challenge-led research in urban climatology and infrastructure meteorology. She holds a NERC Knowledge Exchange Fellowship with networks including infrastructure operators, local authorities, planners, and professionals passionate about urban-greening. This Fellowship will enable her to establish a new multidisciplinary research area in decision-centric adaptation planning that utilises research excellence from the Schools of Engineering, and Geography, Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Birmingham.

Our national infrastructure - the systems of infrastructure networks (e.g. energy, water, transport, waste, ICT) that support services such as healthcare, education, emergency response and thereby ensure our social, economic and environmental wellbeing - faces a multitude of challenges. A growing population, modern economy and proliferation of new technologies have placed increased and new demands on infrastructure services and made infrastructure networks increasingly inter-connected. Meanwhile, investment has not kept up with the pace of change leaving many components at the end of their life. Moreover, global environmental change necessitates reduced greenhouse gas emissions and improved resilience to extreme events, implying major reconfigurations of these infrastructure systems. Addressing these challenges is further complicated by fragmented, often reactive, regulation and governance arrangements. Existing business models are considered by the Treasury Select Committee to provide poor value but few proven alternative models exist for mobilising finance, particularly in the current economic climate. Continued delivery of our civil infrastructure, particularly given current financial constraints, will require innovative and integrated thinking across engineering, economic and social sciences. If the process of addressing these issues is to take place efficiently, whilst also minimising associated risks, it will need to be underpinned by an appropriate multi-disciplinary approach that brings together engineering, economic and social science expertise to understand infrastructure financing, valuation and interdependencies under a range of possible futures. The evidence that must form the basis for such a strategic approach does not yet exist. However, evidence alone will be insufficient, so we therefore propose to establish a Centre of excellence, i-BUILD, that will bring together three UK universities with world-leading track records in engineering, economics and social sciences; a portfolio of pioneering inter-disciplinary research; and the research vision and capacity to deliver a multi-disciplinary analysis of innovative business models around infrastructure interdependencies. While national scale plans, projects and procedures set the wider agenda, it is at the scale of neighbourhoods, towns and cities that infrastructure is most dense and interdependencies between infrastructures, economies and society are most profound - this is where our bid is focussed. Balancing growth across regions and scales is crucial to the success of the national economy. Moreover, the localism agenda is encouraging local agents to develop new infrastructure related business but these are limited by the lack of robust new business models with which to do so at the local and urban scale. These new business models can only arise from a step change in the cost-benefit ratio for infrastructure delivery which we will achieve by: (i) reducing the costs of infrastructure delivery by understanding interdependencies and alternative finance models, (ii) improving valuation of infrastructure benefits by identifying and exploiting the social, environmental and economic opportunities, and, (iii) reconciling national and local priorities. The i-BUILD centre will deliver these advances through development of a new generation of value analysis tools, interdependency models and multi-scale implementation plans. These methods will be tested on integrative case studies that are co-created with an extensive stakeholder group, to provide demonstrations of new methods that will enable a revolution in the business of infrastructure delivery in the UK. Funding for a Centre provides the opportunity to work flexibly with partners in industry, local and national government to address a research challenge of national and international importance, whilst becoming an international landmark programme recognised for novelty, research excellence and impact.

The first phase of the SUE Programme has focused necessarily on the present, assessing current solutions and their application in the near future, thus providing a strong empirical base on which to build. There now exist both the need and a sufficient body of work to extrapolate the findings to establish and test alternative urban futures: to create a variety of scenarios, building on prior and new work, and predicated on different fundamental assumptions and priorities; to assess those scenarios in terms of design, engineering implementation and measurement of performance; to refine them, in terms of mitigation and adaptation measures, incorporating novel solutions; and ultimately to provide alternative solutions with an associated evidence base and strategies for their implementation. This bid seeks to integrate the outputs of three current SUE consortia (Birmingham Eastside, VivaCity 2020 and WaND) and complementary research on the use of trees to mitigate the effects of atmospheric pollution. The team will work across disciplines to envision and establish alternative futures (using extensive literature on this subject and prior WaND consortium work) and construct scenarios that might flow from each alternative future. The various work packages will then focus on testing specific dimensions of each alternative future vis a vis their design, implementation and performance in the context of case history sites. Each project will engage an expert panel of influential stakeholders who will meet six-monthly to test and help shape new ideas, the chairs of each of the expert panels forming the higher level project steering committee. Panel consultation will be followed by interviews of stakeholders on motivations and the decision-making process, and specific empirical research and modelling. The following high level questions will be addressed via this process: - How does the ab initio conceptualization of sustainability influence design outcomes (e.g. form, density)? How would outcomes change if urban renewal were predicated on either environmental or social or economic overriding drivers? - How does development impact on its environs, and vice versa (e.g. is a 'sustainable' site good for the city / region / country and, if so, in what ways?) and is there an optimum development size to yield optimally sustainable outcomes? - Push versus pull to achieve sustainable outcomes. Much of what is done is thought good (for individuals, society, the environment), what might be wanted (push). Thus decisions are made and people must decide whether or not to take ownership. Might more sustainable outcomes follow if those who must take ownership dictate what is created (pull)? Birmingham Eastside will be used both to develop sustainability ideas and to test them on sites at various stages of planning and development (the research team has unparalleled access via its partnerships with key stakeholders involved in Eastside). Lancaster (with Morecambe, population 96k) and Worcester (94k) will be used to test the outcomes at the scale of smaller urban areas (e.g. market towns) but no attempt will be made to build comprehensive databases as at Eastside. Several other UK and international urban areas (including Sao Paulo, Singapore and an urban area in India) will be used to test a sub-set of the project's findings to assess the transferability of the scenarios to a variety of contexts and thus their general applicability.