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.

Domestic environmental technologies (DETs) such as solid wall insulation, ground source heat pumps and rainwater harvesting have an important role to play if the UK is to meet its environmental objectives around carbon emissions, water conservation and energy use. Many such technologies are cost effective and simple to install, and schemes such as the forthcoming Green Deal make them financially possible for more people. However, if they are to become widely adopted they must be seen as a 'social norm' within communities. An effective way to do this is to encourage interaction between 'local experts' who have installed such technologies, and their neighbours. In this way, best practice can be spread through a community. Digital technology can be used to promote this, by providing information about local experts, mediating communication, creating enjoyable games through which people interact, and rewarding those who contribute their time. This project will work with Bristol Green Doors, a community interest company which promotes events to support communities in shared learning around DETs, to develop and assess a set of distributed mobile services to inform, entertain and engage local community members in sharing best practice. It will also look at how local business recommendations that emerge from such sharing can be tracked and assessed for effectiveness, and so potentially monetised in an online business model. The project will investigate (i) whether and how digital technology can be used to catalyse the spread of best practice within communities, and (ii) whether and how this results in a demonstrable impact on the local economy which can be digitally tracked. It's four objectives are: A. Understand how best-practice sharing around DETs currently takes place in the community, what barriers there are, and what ideas stakeholders have for improving it. B. Develop in collaboration with the community a set of distributed services to support best-practice sharing and recommendation tracking. C. Assess the effectiveness in spreading best practice, acceptability to the community, and impact on local business of different feature sets and functionality the distributed services provide. D. Assess the project with regard to generality of lessons and insights; identify both general and more situation-specific learnings for use in digital enablement of community best-practice sharing and the stimulation of local business. The resulting services will be deployed in the Bristol area by Bristol Green Doors, resulting in increased engagement with DETs by the community. The service platform will be released open source, for use by other organisations involved in community engagement with DETs, and training will be provided through engagement workshops and documentation. The more general research results will be shared with businesses, policy makers and community organisations interested in the spreading of best practice within communities through workshops and publication in both academic and popular venues.

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.

The proposed research answers the question: How can existing suburban neighbourhoods be best adapted to reduce further impacts of climate change and withstand ongoing changes? We are interested in adaptations to the built environment, through changes to individual homes and larger neighbourhood scale adaptations (urban re-design). Climate change will affect everyone in the UK in the future, but the scale and intensity of change will depend on where you live. Equally the capacity of individuals and communities to adapt and change in the face of climate change also depends on where you live because of how wealthy you and your neighbours are, of the type of house and neighbourhood you live in and how effectively local policy makers and public service providers will respond to the challenge. This research focuses on the adaptation of suburban neighbourhoods because it is the most common type of urban area in the UK, housing 84% of the population. There is an urgent need to understand how to adapt the built environment in suburbs now, to ensure that they are liveable and sustainable in the future. Failure to do so could have significant human, environmental and economic consequences (such as fatalities from heat stress, ill health from reduced air quality, reluctance to use local outdoor environments, damage to homes and gardens, and adverse impact on property markets). Successful adaptation and mitigation measures will be those that perform well technically (i.e. they protect people and property from climate change impacts) but are also those that are the most practical and acceptable for those who have to make them happen (i.e. we have to be able to afford them and want to live with them). Our research design, the research method and the choice of collaborators reflect both the technical and socio-economic aspects of adaptation. We will work with existing research (by the SNACC team, BKCC and others) to test various adaptation 'packages' for their technical and socio-economic performance in different types of suburb defined in terms of the type of area (e.g. Victorian, post-war, 1980s) but also in terms of the capacity of communities in those areas to do something about climate change impacts. Using 6 neighbourhoods from 3 cities (Bristol, Oxford and Stockport) we will work with key agents of change (e.g. home owners, elected members and planners) using advanced modelling (of climate change, house prices and adaptation outcomes), tools that allow participants to visualise what 'adapted' neighbourhoods will look like, and deliberative methods from social sciences, to generate a portfolio of adaptation strategies that are feasible, and fully endorsed by stakeholders. The practice relevance of adaptation strategies is central to the SNACC project. We have assembled a team of academic partners (from University of the West of England, Oxford Brookes University and Heriot-Watt) and stakeholder partners (Bristol City, Oxford City and Stockport Councils, and White Design) as well as ARUP (consultants) that reflects a broad range of stakeholders that can implement the findings in the built environment. We are supported by five leading Visiting Researchers from the USA, Sweden (X2), Australia and Portugal who will offer international insights in good practice: an essential element in climate change research. We are also supported by an advisory group of from DCLG, CABE, RTPI, Constructing Excellence SW, Forum for the Future, the Modern Built Environment Network and The Improvement and Development Agency for Local Government (IDeA) which is committed to collaboration and effective dissemination. This team will ensure our findings are presented in forms appropriate for different audiences, and communicated to a wide network of policy, practice, public and academic beneficiaries. The outcomes will contribute, practically, to securing a sustainable future for the UK's suburbs in the face of climate change.