The role of arts and humanities research in engaging communities with the water environment has received recent attention but there has been little exploration of the potential of interdisciplinary arts and humanities research for interrogating the decision-making process itself, understanding the varied perspectives of the actors within it, and enabling the co-creation of shared visions for future landscapes and their effective management. The HydroSpheres network aims to address this by exploring with landscape decision-makers the use of interdisciplinary co-design methods to deconstruct the decision-making process itself and develop new models that enhance both decision-making processes and the ways in which we manage landscapes in the UK. We focus on a case study presented by our project partners the Sheffield Lakelands Landscape Partnership, a four-year (2019-2022) Heritage Lottery Fund programme in the Upper Don river catchment to the north-west of Sheffield, South Yorkshire. We define the Sheffield Lakelands as a marginal landscape, caught between the Peak National Park and the urban-industrial corridor of the M1 motorway. It is also a hydrological landscape, defined by its historic and contemporary roles in the storage and supply of water for the industrial and post-industrial city, and by its potential role in protecting populations downstream against flooding under future climate change. The way in which landscapes are managed is governed by a complex web of interactions among decision-makers and stakeholders (some visible, some tacit, others entirely unexplored). A recognition of the various conflicts, antagonisms and diverse values attached to particular landscapes is central to understanding the everyday decision-making experience in the marginalised hydrological landscapes addressed by the HydroSpheres network. George Monbiot recently argued that a radical new participatory approach to socio-environmental concerns is needed, which thrives on divergent political energies of different stakeholder communities who nevertheless share a sense of belonging within a locality - or a landscape. Others have similarly argued 'for forms of participation that take 'the antagonism [...] constitutive of human societies' as their point of departure rather than the Habermasian consensus-seeking [of top-down decision-making]' (Roth et al., 2017). The HydroSpheres network takes as its starting point the possibility of a new co-design-based 'radical hydrology' that foregrounds issues of conflicted human responses to landscape among the diverse community of decision-maker-stakeholders. This is a prerequisite for understanding and transforming decision-making processes for the holistic management of landscapes in increasingly uncertain ecological, economic and political futures. To this end, the network brings together researchers from literature, creative writing, design, performance, and geoscience, with third-sector, governmental, and corporate decision-maker-stakeholders from the Sheffield Lakeland Landscape Partnership. Participants will collectively explore their own preconceptions about landscape decision-making; envision new ways of capturing different understandings of landscape value; and boldly state new decision-making criteria and processes that celebrate diverse, perhaps conflicting ideals rather than pragmatic compromise. The network will host a series of researcher-stakeholder workshops exploring the distributed nature, changing dynamics, and legacies of decision-making in marginal hydrological landscapes. Using co-design methods (design fictions, storytelling, scenario planning, performance) the network will seek to establish a transformative agenda for the integration of the human with the quantitative in future landscape decision-making.

What is the problem? Habitat and biodiversity loss are a global nature emergency, and urbanisation is a key driver. With the UK now one of the most nature-depleted countries in Europe, governments have recently introduced policies for nature recovery that operate through spatial planning systems. We call this 'Nature Recovery Planning', and it employs new market-oriented logics to count, evaluate, and mitigate habitat and biodiversity loss. From Autumn 2023, the English government will introduce Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG). Ecologists will assess the quality and quantity of the habitat destroyed due to development. Developers will then mitigate this loss either by creating areas set aside for nature recovery on the development site or by purchasing offsite biodiversity credits. In Scotland, recently introduced planning policies emphasise the need to consider 'natural capital' (the idea that nature has economic value and provides essential services to humans) but BNG is not mandatory. However, at present, we do not have data on the extent of habitat and biodiversity loss associated with planning decisions under the previous and new policy regimes in either nation, which makes it difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of these new policies. We also do not know how much weight ecological considerations will hold compared to the other social, spatial, economic, and environmental objectives balanced by planning systems. Furthermore, it is unclear how the types and scales of mapping used for nature recovery and spatial planning relate to one another. Importantly, the introduction of new forms of ecological assessment raises wider theoretical questions about whose view of nature is conceptualised, counted and valued, and the democratic and social justice implications of these changes for key actors. What will the project achieve? This interdisciplinary project will provide the first analysis of Nature Recovery Planning in the context of wider spatial planning systems. It will generate: The first robust quantitative ecological assessment of habitat and biodiversity loss associated with planning decisions in England and Scotland, comparing the effectiveness of emerging nature recovery policies with previous policy regimes. A groundbreaking qualitative analysis of the weight and status granted to ecological considerations compared to other social, economic, and environmental objectives in spatial planning processes across England and Scotland. A detailed study of the mapping processes of nature recovery and spatial planning, comparing their logics, studying the degree of integration between them, and exploring their impact on the production of urban and natural space. The first in-depth understanding of the ways that emerging policy is changing the types of ecological knowledge and expertise that are valued in the planning system, exploring the social justice and democratic implications of the change for different actors in planning systems. A series of recommendations to improve planning policy and practice to better respond to habitat and biodiversity loss. We will produce robust interdisciplinary research that generates new, timely appraisals of this emerging policy approach, and is of academic relevance to scholars beyond planning studies, including environmental economists, conservation researchers, ecologists, geographers, and political ecologists. Findings will be of immediate interest to government policymakers, planning and ecology practitioners, conservation NGOs, and community groups, and the project has strong support from major national organisations in these areas. It will be supported by a match-funded Knowledge Exchange Associate, who will ensure findings inform policy and practice.

The future of treescapes belongs to children and young people. Yet there is a lack of interdisciplinary research that explores their engagement with treescapes over time. This project aims to re-imagine future treescapes with children and young people, working with local and national partners including Natural England, Forest Research and the Community Forests and Scottish stakeholders. We will identify opportunities and barriers to treescape expansion and pilot innovative child and youth-focused pathways to realising this goal. We will create curricula material which will be disseminated with the support of our project partners, Early Childhood Outdoors and the Chartered College of Teachers. The aim of this project is to integrate children and young people's knowledge, experiences, and hopes with scientific knowledge of how trees adapt to and mitigate climate change in order to co-produce new approaches to creating and caring for resilient treescapes that benefit the environment and society. Drawing on interdisciplinary approaches and in collaboration with stakeholders, the team will produce a 'lexicon of experience' that captures the ecological identities of children and young people. An audit of existing activity in the field of activism and treescapes, with a particular focus on marginalised groups, will inform the project. In particular, the project will produce new material for use by practitioners, educators and policy makers that will inform future treescape planting and will be rolled out nationally, with the help of our project partners. Novel methods for assessing carbon storage in trees and soil will inform a 'tree-twinning' project to enable children and young people to recognise how they can relate to treescapes. Children and young people will draw on the scientific work together with their lived experience to balance their evolving carbon footprint with the changing treescapes they have partnered with. New treescapes will be planted with the help of Community Forests and local authorities. Learning will be enhanced by the scientific project on tree-twinning, embedded within the project, to advance knowledge about the relationship between climate science and urban trees. This research will be carried out with children and young people as co-researchers. The project will focus on hope as a vital ingredient of future planning and philosophically and practically create a set of actions to look to the future while addressing temporalities, including past archival work on trees. It will work with cohorts of young people across early years, primary, secondary and young people out of school, as well as families and communities, to think about and engage with treescapes, to plan as well as plant new treescapes and to engage in treescape thinking and curricula innovation. Working with Natural England as project partners, a toolkit will be developed to guide this work and a set of resources and outputs to be rolled out nationally that inspire and inform future generations of children and young people to become involved in treescapes, which will re-shape the disciplinary landscape of treescapes research and inform policy and practice. Community forest planners, policy-makers and practitioners will better understand how to engage children and young people in treescapes and how to work with their knowledges to inspire and inform future generations. Innovative approaches to arts and humanities, environmental science and social science will produce a new understanding of how combining disciplines can further treescape research with children and young people. The project will also advance methodological understandings of the relationship between children and young people and treescapes with a focus on co-production and attending to lived experience while conducting environmental scientific research. New knowledge in the fields of environmental and social science will create new disciplinary paradigms and concepts.

Water for all is the aim of this consortium. The UK water sector faces grand challenges over the coming decades: increasing population, ageing infrastructure, and the need to better protect the natural environment all under conditions of uncertain climate change. The application of traditional technology-based solutions alone is not the way forward. We propose the use of 'tailored solutions' to address these challenges by combining measures to suit specific circumstances and constraints to achieve flexible and adaptive water systems. The project will undertake research in 8 technical themes, each of which individually pose disruptive questions, demonstrate the potential for, and lead transformation. However, they will not be viewed in isolation. When considered in combination, taking a systems view, they can be combined as 'silver baskets' of broader tailored solutions able to work synergistically for existing and new infrastructure in order to achieve transformative impact. Tailoring water solutions does not mean lower quality water services for different sectors in society; rather, it means fair, bespoke solutions appropriate to variations in the natural environment, population distribution, and legacy infrastructure. In this way the project will address the needs of water for all. Our consortium is built around a core based on the Pennine Water Group (PWG) which has been supported continuously by three EPSRC platform grants since 2001. The PWG's strength and international reputation is founded on a balance of fundamental and applied research via a multi-disciplinary approach focusing on urban water asset management. This consortium broadens the PWG to include new expertise to provide tailored water solutions for positive impact. At Sheffield, this will include new collaborations with experts in energy systems, robotics, automation, and management. Externally, the consortium includes internationally-leading experts from Exeter for household and community scale water efficiency, Imperial College for treatment and emerging contaminants, Manchester for social practices, Newcastle for climate change impacts, risk modelling and cities/infrastructure integration, and Reading for catchment processes. All members bring wide international collaborative networks that will link with the scientific and engineering research needed to deliver the silver baskets of tailored solutions. To achieve the envisioned transformation requires time and a step change in the way in which the UK water sector identifies, develops and applies innovation. Stakeholders need to move out of traditional silos and collaborate to creatively co-produce knowledge and action. Academics, scientists and engineers must work across disciplines and stages in the knowledge production process to deliver the complex socio-technical solutions needed to meet the challenges facing the UK water sector. Collaboration is especially relevant in a sector that is not accustomed to working together and does not have a shared vision of how to meet its grand challenges. A unique feature of this consortium is the development of the Hub that will revolutionise the way innovation is delivered to the UK water sector. The Hub aims to provide transformative leadership and accelerate and support innovation through partnerships for the co-production of knowledge across the water sector. Underpinned by world class science and engineering research the Hub will facilitate the development and communication of a shared visionary roadmap for the UK water sector, stimulate and demonstrate new tailored approaches to address the grand challenges, create a process for selecting potentially transformative tailored socio-technical solutions in line with the roadmap and enable the accelerated generation of collaborative, responsible innovation across the UK water sector.