Fostering safe and inclusive public spaces where women and girls' feel safe is of national and international concern. In the UK, the murders of Sabina Nessa in 2021 and sisters Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman in 2020 show that there is a need to improve the safety of public spaces, notably urban parks, and enhance women's feelings of safety whilst using them. Public parks have been shown to have numerous benefits for health and wellbeing, yet research consistently finds that personal safety is a significant factor constraining women's access to and use of green spaces, thereby reducing those benefits. Indeed, the Office for National Statistics (2021) found that feeling unsafe walking alone in public places such as streets, busy transport hubs and local parks, disproportionately affects women and girls, particularly after dark. Gender disparities are greatest for park settings where 81% of women reported feeling unsafe walking alone after dark, compared with 39% of men (ONS, 2021). Moreover, across Europe, women are between 2.5 and 5.7 times more likely to feel unsafe walking alone than men after dark, according to the European Social Survey. Some countries, such as Norway, have managed to significantly narrow this gender gap. Effective prevention of VAWG in urban parks involves designing and managing these public spaces in ways which both deter potential offending and ensure women and girls feel safe. Building upon and harnessing the findings of recently completed research into women and girls' safety in public parks led by Barker and Holmes, this partnership collaboration between West Yorkshire Police, the Mayor of West Yorkshire, West Yorkshire Combined Authority, Keep Britain Tidy, Make Space for Girls, Leeds Women's Aid, the ESRC Vulnerability and Policing Futures Research Centre and the University of Leeds aims to foster a paradigm shift in the way professionals think about women's safety, develop regional and national guidance for safer, women friendly parks and co-design new research activities that seek to understand how holistic multi-agency approaches involving sympathetic crime prevention and landscape design, neighbourhood policing and park management can contribute to preventing and reducing VAWG in parks, enhance feelings of safety and build trust and confidence in policing. Crime prevention design can be intrusive, unsightly and exclusionary, which could actually increase women and girls' fear, and reduce footfall, which itself acts as natural guardianship as people pass through a park. It can also have other potentially negative environmental and social impacts, such as the impact of safety lighting and vegetation management on biodiversity and the impact of physical security measures on accessibility and social inclusion. The project will co-design new directions in research that create new ways to think about park design and park policing that contribute to the effective prevention and reduction of VAWG and build confidence in policing, while ensuring that crime prevention is sympathetic to the park environment, mitigates environmental impacts and does not convey a message of alertness or fear, which is the opposite of the sense of nature, freedom and calmness that green spaces offer. Outcomes from this project include: research-informed, co-produced regional and national guidance for safer, women friendly parks; an international symposium on women's safety in public spaces; making parks safer places for women and girls through changing the ways professionals think about women's safety and strengthening multi-agency partnership working; and co-designed plans for new research activities linked to this agenda.

In a circular economy, clean growth is achieved by increasing the value derived from existing and planned economic infrastructure, products and materials which in turn significantly reduces or eliminates negative externalities. Increased value can be achieved by maintaining the integrity of a product or material at a higher level, using products longer, cascading their use in adjacent value chains and designing pure, high quality feedstocks (avoiding contamination and toxicity). A circular economy approach to plastics addresses simultaneously the accumulation, impact and costs in the environment whilst maintaining applications for multiple high value purposes. To translate potential to reality requires new circular plastics systems that a) co-ordinate and integrate key system players and activities across the value chain b) are underpinned by rigorous scientific research evidence; c) promote novel and creative approaches to the circulation and cascading of plastics in society and; d) demonstrate and proof points in support of decision-making and action at varying s Ths proposal will connect excellent institutional research activities within a single highly visible Multidisciplinary Plastics Research Hub - "ExeMPlaR" led by the University of Exeter to provide the first stage in a comprehensive, systematic and coordinated approach to the formation of a novel and creative circular economies, using regional demonstrators in the SW of England to test a number of key building blocks. This will be based on system-oriented innovation and high quality inter-disciplinary and collaborative scientific research within a proven, cohesive circular economy framework to address both the cause(s) of the problems and efforts to solve them rather than just treating the symptoms. This research effort involves the demonstration of the technical feasibility and superior economic, material, health, environmental and social value of a circular economy system re-design against a current linear base case. Expert-led, technical solutions by themselves however are unlikely to be effective and require in addition a theory of change that connects human behaviours, social systems and structures with circular economy principles. ExeMPLaR will bring together business, policy, community, environmental, and media representatives with a shared 'narrative' (in this case , a new Circular Plastics Economy) values and ideas, to jointly identify and work on a complex set of activities and pilot projects, that together form an effective innovation ecosystem (WP1). EXeMPLaR will undertake a novel and creative approach to impact by applying the principles of networks of transformative change into a circular economy project. ExeMPLaR therefore focusses on the current plastic system and address the potential to create higher value from existing plastic flows, create new opportunities for regional design and closed loop manufacturing and community initiatives, reduce negative externalities and create networks for transformational change to co-design and support systems innovations required at regional scale. To achieve this vision many challenges have to be overcome. To start the process of creating effective regional plastics economies, ExeMPLaR will synthesise an authoritative evidence base to inform regional actions, interventions and evaluation. This will build on a wide range of world leading plastics research at Exeter. We will translate these findings into the first stage of an evaluation tool and apply these to three front runner regional interventions, and additional smaller projects co-designed and prioritized by our network, to test opportunities for re-using, replacing or eliminating certain categories of fossil fuel derived plastic. After testing the impacts, outcomes and value creation potential we will address the potential challenges and enablers to replication and scaling these interventions at regional and national scale.