Business and agricultural drivers focussing on sustainability, coupled with UK policy focus in these areas have led to the increasing demand for the food and drink sector to manage its own environmental impacts. Industry-led methods such as ISO standards and PAS2050 have been available for some time to assess supply chains and products, but frequently lack the precision regarding the sensitivity to local variables and farm management practices to yield reliable information about how such impacts can be managed on the farm. Recently, the Cool Farm Alliance (a UK based CIC) has been formed as a cross-sector organisation to develop and manage a "farmer friendly" GHG calculator called the Cool Farm Tool. It has benefitted from significant NERC funding in the past and as a result of this is recognised as the de facto practical tool for farm gate GHG assessments. Examples of its application to drive changes in the supply chains of global businesses include PepsiCo (https://www.2degreesnetwork.com/groups/2degrees-community/resources/cutting-carbon-farm/) or more generally at www.coolfarmtool.org. The Cool Farm Tool won the 2015 Oxford Farming Conference "Practice with Science" award and has been shortlisted for the Times Higher Education Awards in two categories. The above demonstrate the applicability of the Cool Farm Tool to annual field crop and livestock systems. However, key processes relating to perennial production systems in the Cool Farm Tool are somewhat lacking, in particular in biomass carbon storage, soil carbon storage in perennials, and post-harvest processing. In the scientific studies to date, these components have been identified as being critical in deciding the GHG balance of crop production. Representation of perennial cropping systems will provide the necessary framework to integrate bioenergy crops in the Cool Farm Tool. Renewable energy, and bioenergy as part of this, is topical and of increasing importance to policy and industry because of its potential to support UK and global needs for low carbon and secure energy. As such, adding capability for such systems in the CFT will open new markets for the CFA and enable the addition of significant NERC research. There have been many research activities in recent years to conduct such assessments with several key studies funded by NERC, and in which the University of Aberdeen has participated. In addition, there are also several businesses in the energy sector specifically focussed on bioenergy (e.g. Terravesta, Rokwood) and it is part of the energy portfolio of major energy companies such as BP and Shell, and electricity generators such as EDF, E-ON, Drax, and Vattenfall (via ETI; Milner et al., 2015). In this project we will work closely with the Cool Farm Alliance and food and drink and bioenergy industries to add these necessary functionalities to the Cool Farm Tool. The inclusion of the above will ensure that the assessment of agricultural raw materials destined for food, feed, and energy markets can be performed in a consistent manner to enable fair cross-comparison and benchmarking. It will have the additional benefit of serving farmers and different industry sectors in assessing the relative benefits of crops and co-products which serve both end-markets (such as wheat, straw, and oilseed rape for bioethanol and bioenergy as alternatives to food or feed) and for agricultural waste, such as manure. This tool will aid farmers and land-owners to improve energy and input use efficiency and thus improve profitability. From the start of the project, we will establish a cross-sector working group to: 1. determine the key needs of end-users in the bioenergy domain 2. to identify the key science algorithms and methods to be employed 3. make the proposed developments "Cool Farm Tool ready". This will ensure that the project translates NERC-funded research into an industry endorsed product for immediate use by the relevant end-users.

Every year the UK produces millions of tonnes of waste which is landfilled. There are over over [ ]Mt waste wood alone produced in the UK each year. In addition there are large areas of land (e.g. disused landfill sites, coal-mines and water treatment facilities where energy crops could be grown to add remediation and improve land quality. It is well known that fast growing species such as willlow are efficient at sequestering heavy metals and other contaminants from the ground. When the crops are harvested the contamination is effectively transformed from a dispersed contamination on land to a much more concentrated form in the crop. Energy can then be extracted from the crop and the residues from the conversion process are easier to manage than the original dispersed contamination. However, care must be taken to ensure that the contaminated components are sequestered rather than being released to air, water or land in a way that could have negative environmental impacts. This work will study existing and new plantations of energy crops to evaluate their utility in remediating land and the net environmental impact of this approach. We will also monitor the behavrour of the envrionmental contaminants in a range of different conversion processes to establish the pathway they take under different conditions. This is important for evaluating the environmental impact of the system but it also provides useful information for engineers charged with designing the conversoin plant, so that they know how to adjust process conditions, materials and predict any changes in performance associated with the waste fuel. The focus of this work is energy crops grown on contaminated land. However, its application is much wider than that. The UK has a limited amount of land that can be used to provide renewable bioenergy. However, a vast quantity of wastes are produced that could sustainably deliver energy. In order to do this sustaianbly and effiiciently it is impmortant that engineers have access to data on how the contaminants in waste behave during conversion and this proejct will provide that, allowing more efficient design, lower environmental impact and supporting industrial deployment of these facilities.

The demand for water, energy, and food (WEF) is increasing with a growing population and a larger proportion of people living high hydrocarbon dependent lifestyles. This is placing unprecedented pressure on global WEF resources, a situation that will be exacerbated with a shifting climate. To meet this demand and to ensure long-term WEF security there is a need for integrated, efficient, and sustainable resources management across the sectors. This is essential to enhance and maintain quality of life, and requires the overall system to adapt over appropriate timescales. Analogous to the human immune system, resilience can be enhanced by learning from shocks to the WEF nexus that lead to recovery and adaptation through improving the systems long-term memory. Through shocks to the system (vaccination in this analogy), society is provided the opportunity to improve resilience and sustainable management of the WEF sectors. In this context, shocks are represented by: 1) historic events, 2) controlled experimental manipulation, and 3) defined inputs to models. This project will identify the interconnections between Water Energy and Food (WEF) through the development of an integrated framework and will reveal the vulnerabilities in the system and the diverse connections between the three facets of the nexus. The project consists of three work packages (WPs) that cover a diverse array of scenarios for both aquatic and terrestrial systems integrated with a social science and economic modelling. In WP1 the response of aquatic food organisms to the shock of delivering the water and energy infrastructure plan will be investigated, culminating in the development of planning decision support tools based on integrated hydrodynamic and agent based models. WP2 will take an experimental, field based, and modelling approach to investigate the response of agriculture (focusing on soils and crops) to flooding under alternative climate change scenarios and based on historic data. The social aspects of shifting agricultural regimes, e.g. greater use of bioenergy crops in areas liable to flooding, will be investigated and quantified. WP3 will provide the social and economic modelling that will gather and analyse data obtained from the case studies and provide feedback to improve the models. Further, WP3 will investigate potential barriers to dissemination and uptake of the results within institutions and by end users that may benefit with the view to develop approaches that ameliorate for this. This work package is also dedicated to ensuring delivery of impact which will be enabled through close collaboration with several non-academic partners including industry. Delivery of the project will be managed by a team with diverse interdisciplinary expertise (including engineers, ecologists, agriculturalists, mathematicians, and social scientists) from the Universities of Southampton, Bath, London, Nottingham, Aberystwyth University, Loughborough University, University College London, HR Wallingford, and supported by the Science and Technology Facilities Council. The team has a proven track record in project management, and strong links to industrial partners and other end users. The project will benefit industry, regulators, government, academia and the general public. The findings will be disseminated to: the academic community through publication of high impact research articles; the public through engagement via national and local media and internet and social networking platforms, and a structured Outreach programme involving schools and local science exhibitions; government through political outreach; and key stakeholders via relevant publications and participation in steering group workshops. The outputs will enable regulators to improve guidelines and to streamline the decision making processes for the benefit of industry and the nation as a whole.

The Supergen Bioenergy Hub will bring together academic, industrial an policy stakeholders to focus on sustaianable bioenergy systems. It will adopt an interdisciplinary approach focused on key innovation stages. Research at UK universities will generate new knowledge and insights in sustainable bioenergy, while incubating UK science to deliver its commerical potential and working with researchers to ensure their knowledge is diffused across the innovation community for wider benefit. This will deliver impact with policy makers via our well-established policy connections and a focused policy-makers only forum to address their key concerns. It will deliver impact with industrialists via an industry forum that will connect innovators with UK scientists and engineers who can support them. It will deliver impact with the wider sustainable energy and product community by establishing a professional forum which will support training of commercial professionals and key knowledge transfer in new knowledge areas. Above all it will foster stronger connections between the academic, industrial and policy sectors in a way that supports advancement of sustainable bioenergy in the U.K.

Peatlands store more carbon than any other terrestrial ecosystem, both in the UK and globally. As a result of human disturbance they are rapidly losing this carbon to the atmosphere, contributing significantly to global greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. We propose to turn this problem into a solution, by re-establishing and augmenting the unique natural capacity of peatlands to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and to store it securely for millennia. We will do this by working with natural processes to recreate, and where possible enhance, the environmental conditions that lead to peat formation, in both lowland and upland Britain. At the same time, we will optimise conditions to avoid emissions of methane and nitrous oxide that could offset the benefits of CO2 removal; develop innovative cropping and management systems to augment rates of CO2 uptake; evaluate whether we can further increase peat carbon accumulation through the formation and addition of biomass and biochar; and develop new economic models to support greenhouse gas removal by peatlands as part of profitable and sustainable farming and land management systems. Implementation of these new approaches to the 2.3 million hectares of degraded upland and lowland peat in the UK has the potential to remove significant quantities of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, to secure carbon securely and permanently within a productive, biodiverse and self-sustaining ecosystem, and thereby to help the UK to achieve its ambition of having net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.