LANDMARK (LAND MAnagement for flood RisK reduction in lowland catchments) will evaluate the effectiveness of realistic and scalable land-based NFM measures to reduce the risk from flooding from surface runoff, rivers and groundwater in groundwater-fed lowland catchments. We will study measures like crop choice, tillage practices and tree planting, that have been identified by people who own and manage land, to have the greatest realisable potential. NFM measures will be evaluated for their ability to increase infiltration, evaporative losses and/or below-ground water storage, thereby helping to store precipitation to reduce surface runoff and slow down the movement of water to reduce peak levels in groundwater and rivers. However, we need to carefully examine the balance between increased infiltration, soil water storage and evaporative losses under different types of NFM measures, because long-term increases in infiltration could actually increase groundwater and river flood risk if there is less capacity within the ground and in rivers to store excess precipitation from storm events. Also, following a review of the available research to date, other researchers (Dadson et al, 2017) came to the conclusion that land-based NFM measures would only provide effective protection against small flood events in small catchments. As the catchment size and flood events increase, the effectiveness of land-based NFM measures in reducing flood risk would decrease significantly. However, this idea needs to be tested further. Currently, there are many unanswered gaps in knowledge that make it hard to include land-based NFM measures in flood risk mitigation schemes. The Environment Agency tell us that there are no case studies on land-based NFM measures to support decision making, with most focusing on leaky barriers made from trees. Yet, land-based NFM measures have potential to do more than just reduce flood risk, including improving water quality, biodiversity and sustainable food and fibre production. So in LANDMARK, we will carry out research to help to fill this evidence gap, and test the ideas Dadson et al. proposed about land-based NFM using the West Thames River Basin as a case-study area. We will work at three spatial scales (field, catchment and large river basin) and explore modelling scenarios, developed with people who own and manage land and live at risk of flooding, to look at how land-based NFM could affect flooding. Scenarios will include experiences in the recent past in July 2007 and over the winter of 2013-14, and how future land use and management could affect flood risk in 2050 as the climate changes. We will consider how government policy could change after we leave the EU to support land-based NFM. Work will be carried out in five stages: (1) we will bring together available maps, data and local knowledge on current land use and management, and use this to create scenarios for modelling experiments to explore land use and management measures impact on events from the past and in the future; (2) we will make measurements to see how below-ground water storage and infiltration vary between different land-based NFM in fields where innovative land management is being practiced; (3) we will collect data from sensors sitting above the ground, flying on drones and on satellites to see how vegetation and soil moisture vary across large catchment areas; (4) we will use all the data collected from 1-3 to run modelling experiments across a range of scales, linking together models that capture soil and vegetation processes, overland and groundwater flows and catchment hydrology, exploring variation in model outputs; and (5) we will create web applications to display and explore the outputs from the modelling experiments. All this work will be supported by workshops, field visits, reports and resources to support people and their learning about how land-based NFM measures work and could be used to reduce flood risk.

Sea-level rise is one of the most profound aspects of human-induced climate change and its steady but uncertain rate of rise will transform the world's coasts in the coming decades threatening millions of coastal and flood plain residents. While this is understood in a technical sense, wider society has not grasped the scale of change produced by expected rise in sea level over the next century. In the UK, with its large legacy of coastal defences, this issue is especially challenging. Many defences are uneconomic to maintain and renew, and widespread 'realignment' is planned within the strategic process of Shoreline Management Planning (SMP). Realignments reactivate natural sediment processes which enhances self-adjusting natural protection with both risk-reduction and aesthetic benefits. However, the transformation from a defended to a realigned coast is especially challenging to implement and will be an important focus of this research. There has been surprisingly little consideration of how the transition to a realigned coast can be facilitated and enabled across the full range of physical and social perspectives. Efforts to better understand the full range of adaptation options and their implementation, including realignment, offer potentially significant rewards in terms of tangible enhancement of coastal resilience. CoastalRes aims to develop and demonstrate prototype methods to assess realistic pathways for strategic coastal erosion and flood resilience in the light of climate change, including sea-level rise. We will accomplish this aim via three objectives. Objective 1. Co-produce a comprehensive set of representative coastal archetypes that describe the open and estuarine coasts of England and Wales in terms relevant to building coastal resilience, including present and future demography, hazards, sea-level rise, contrasting geomorphology, shoreline position, land use patterns and management legacy. This will include early and fully participatory engagement with stakeholders to consider their knowledge and experiences and define the full range of archetypes. Objective 2. Identify and evaluate a comprehensive range of strategic high level adaptation options, considering their physical suitability, economic efficiency, social acceptability and pathways of application (potential sequence in time) and impact on UK resilience. This will include a systematic literature-based review combined with two regional stakeholder workshops organised with the Coastal Group Network and the Environment Agency. Objective 3. Taking three common and representative coastal archetypes, design decision pathways to maintain and enhance resilience based on the menu of adaptation options. This will include consideration of a range of factors including policy choices, cost implications, risk trade-offs and public participation in problem specification and decision making. These adaptation pathways for resilience will be validated with representative real sites. The use of coastal archetypes for the analysis, rather than case studies, is novel and allows generalisation from individual cases to develop generic and transferable guidance. Crucially, our analysis considers all the open coasts and estuaries in England and Wales, as estuaries contain a large proportion of the assets and activities exposed to marine flooding. In contrast to previous work, which has tended to rely on consultation and 'outreach' to stakeholders, our research will have a genuinely participatory approach. This will allow us to achieve a consensus understanding with a large and diverse group of relevant Project Partners, including the key organisations the Environment Agency and Maritime District Authorities. The CoastalRes Project will provide a solid demonstration of a transition to a more balanced, resilient and sustainable portfolio of adaptive options on the UK coast and provide a foundation for further research in this area.

This research project involves a partnership between two networks from the 2010/11 AHRC ‘Researching Environmental change’ programme. The ‘Performance Footprint’ network brings expertise in using site-specific performance to promote awareness of environmental change in diverse settings. The ‘Living Flood Histories’ network has explored how situated flood narrative and memorialisation practices can bring new insights in how to engage public groups, at changing flood risk. This proposed 12 month project responds to an invitation from the Environment Agency (EA) to explore how situated performance and flood narratives might be used to engage ‘hard to reach’ urban floodplain groups, at risk from flooding but without recent flood experience. Such groups may be disconnected in both physical and human terms (e.g. divided by urban planning, lacking in community cohesion), proving unresponsive to recent policy initiatives emphasising the importance of community-led adaptation planning in dealing with flood risk. This project aims to stimulate awareness of these issues, and encourage local resilience-building, by researching and facilitating two inter-related, site-specific performance events, in direct collaboration with local volunteers. The chosen sites in Bristol (Eastville) and Bradford (Shipley) have been identified by the EA, and feature heavily canalised watercourses partly hidden from public view. The research process will begin by reviewing the findings of the contributing research networks, and considering their application in the project context. How might situated narratives and performances best be framed to encourage local engagement with flood risk? Can the ‘after the flood’ memorialisation practices of other communities be used as a creative means to inform ‘before the flood’ resilience-building in the chosen site contexts? Can creative participation be employed as a means for: developing and enhancing ‘a watery sense of place’; exploring uncertainty around future climate scenarios; understanding issues around ‘distributed responsibility’ for flood risk response. Local engagement strategies will be developed in collaboration with facilitation experts. Volunteer participants will be involved in a project development period, with regular creative workshops and discussions extrapolating the research concerns. A key objective will be to use the process of working towards creative outcomes to help generate a context in which expert and local knowledges are equally valued. Dialogues will be facilitated between local participants, flood scientists and other experts, EA and local council representatives. The development period will lead towards participatory public performance events, presented in the context of festive community gatherings (e.g. street parties). A model of ‘distributed performance’ will be pioneered, involving a range of interconnected presentations offered by various groups and individuals in different microsites within the floodplain vicinity. This will maximise potential for local involvement, and emphasise the ecological theme of connectivity between people and places. Responses to these events among residents will be sought, and the outcomes of the two projects cross-referred, in order to develop research findings. Project outcomes will be captured and disseminated through: a guidance/action pack for potential future users; interdisciplinary research articles and presentations; documentation presented on collaborating networks’ websites. The research results will be of interest to a wide range of disciplines and professions: researchers in theatre/performance studies, physical and cultural geography, social history; professionals in flood risk management (EA, local authorities); social engagement professionals. Attention will be given to how the research can generate sustainable follow-through in the case study settings, and how the research outcomes are cascaded to other urban flood risk groups.

This research project involves a partnership between two networks from the 2010/11 AHRC ‘Researching Environmental change’ programme. The ‘Performance Footprint’ network brings expertise in using site-specific performance to promote awareness of environmental change in diverse settings. The ‘Living Flood Histories’ network has explored how situated flood narrative and memorialisation practices can bring new insights in how to engage public groups, at changing flood risk. This proposed 12 month project responds to an invitation from the Environment Agency (EA) to explore how situated performance and flood narratives might be used to engage ‘hard to reach’ urban floodplain groups, at risk from flooding but without recent flood experience. Such groups may be disconnected in both physical and human terms (e.g. divided by urban planning, lacking in community cohesion), proving unresponsive to recent policy initiatives emphasising the importance of community-led adaptation planning in dealing with flood risk. This project aims to stimulate awareness of these issues, and encourage local resilience-building, by researching and facilitating two inter-related, site-specific performance events, in direct collaboration with local volunteers. The chosen sites in Bristol (Eastville) and Bradford (Shipley) have been identified by the EA, and feature heavily canalised watercourses partly hidden from public view. The research process will begin by reviewing the findings of the contributing research networks, and considering their application in the project context. How might situated narratives and performances best be framed to encourage local engagement with flood risk? Can the ‘after the flood’ memorialisation practices of other communities be used as a creative means to inform ‘before the flood’ resilience-building in the chosen site contexts? Can creative participation be employed as a means for: developing and enhancing ‘a watery sense of place’; exploring uncertainty around future climate scenarios; understanding issues around ‘distributed responsibility’ for flood risk response. Local engagement strategies will be developed in collaboration with facilitation experts. Volunteer participants will be involved in a project development period, with regular creative workshops and discussions extrapolating the research concerns. A key objective will be to use the process of working towards creative outcomes to help generate a context in which expert and local knowledges are equally valued. Dialogues will be facilitated between local participants, flood scientists and other experts, EA and local council representatives. The development period will lead towards participatory public performance events, presented in the context of festive community gatherings (e.g. street parties). A model of ‘distributed performance’ will be pioneered, involving a range of interconnected presentations offered by various groups and individuals in different microsites within the floodplain vicinity. This will maximise potential for local involvement, and emphasise the ecological theme of connectivity between people and places. Responses to these events among residents will be sought, and the outcomes of the two projects cross-referred, in order to develop research findings. Project outcomes will be captured and disseminated through: a guidance/action pack for potential future users; interdisciplinary research articles and presentations; documentation presented on collaborating networks’ websites. The research results will be of interest to a wide range of disciplines and professions: researchers in theatre/performance studies, physical and cultural geography, social history; professionals in flood risk management (EA, local authorities); social engagement professionals. Attention will be given to how the research can generate sustainable follow-through in the case study settings, and how the research outcomes are cascaded to other urban flood risk groups.

ResAnth addresses the interlinked risks of climate change, coastal flooding and erosion, and the UK's historic waste legacy for coastal community and ecosystem resilience. Coastal flooding and erosion will accelerate under climate change. Our past industrialisation has left a pollution legacy of over 1,700 historic coastal landfills and 3,000 hectares of contaminated land also at risk from coastal flooding and/or erosion (CCC 2018; POST 2021). By 2100 the number of people exposed to coastal floods and erosion, and therefore legacy coastal waste, will increase significantly and almost half legacy waste sites are within 100m of environmentally sensitive areas such as protected wetlands or bathing waters (Brand et al. 2018). Many sites are already eroding, releasing pollution, plastics, asbestos and/or medical waste into our coastal environments with limited understanding of pollution risk to people or the marine environment. Without intervention one in 10 could erode by 2055. Many UK coastal landfills are at increasing future risk e.g., at Lyme Regis, the Spittles Lane landfill contains 50,000 tonnes of waste on an eroding cliff top and will "almost certainly erode" releasing material to the beach without intervention (Nichols et al. 2020). How we manage the intergenerational burden of our past coastal waste disposal and its accelerated risk to society and ecosystems in a changing climate is a "burning imperative" (Environment Agency 2022). In a "call to arms", coastal Local Authorities have identified the enormity of this problem with almost 50% reporting waste sites eroding, or 'at risk'. Yet we do not have sufficient evidence to: 1) build robust business cases to manage (by defending, remediating or 'letting alone') these sites; 2) inform sustainable coastal management decision-making (Shoreline Management Plans) that takes account of the presence of waste; and 3) engage and support those communities who will live with these decisions. Working in 3 'at-risk' UK geographic areas we will: Investigate the risk of waste and pollution release under more severe flooding and coastal erosion scenarios. Assess the harm this pollution will do to coastal environments and adjacent communities. Increase collaboration between a range of stakeholders to understand the different kinds of environmental and social challenges involved. Facilitate inclusive debate on future efforts to manage these risks using established methods and arts-based activities to reach new audiences. Work with communities and policy makers to explore and co-develop policy options and practical actions that will build resilience, and identify potential co-benefits for people and place. Ensure the project's approach, methods and key findings for coastal resilience measures can be scaled across the UK. Assessing the range of risks associated with coastal waste release and building an inclusive and practical 'toolkit' of responses will benefit: 1) organisations who manage the coast, conserve and protect people and habitats; and 2) landowners and communities who use and appreciate the coastal environment for its amenities and cultural value. We have designed a novel 'Community Atlas' to share information, conclusions, and arts outputs with these groups, and that allows citizens to upload their own information and stories about coastal change. ResAnth has been co-conceived with our Project Partners through collaboration, in particular, with; 1) Environment Agency, local authorities, and coastal partnerships to identify research needs; 2) the Climate Change Committee and Policy Connect to understand policy gaps; and 3) engagement with communities through arts-science initiatives.