UK coasts provide recreation, transportation, commerce, natural beauty and food for coastal communities. However, they face interrelated challenges from issues such as climate change, coastal realignment, demographic shift and infrastructure development. Managing such issues can be difficult, with coasts and their seas providing diverse meanings and values for their stakeholders and communities. In this respect, coastal residents, users, and managers experience challenges in coherently and meaningfully attending to livelihoods, health and wellbeing, as well as natural biodiversity, ecosystem productivity and conservation. This complexity highlights the need to develop and evaluate fair and transferrable approaches to promote sustainable use of diverse coastal resources. This will be critical to strengthening resilience: the ability to anticipate, withstand, adjust to, and thrive after disruption and change. We consider five foundational types of capital resources shown to help coastal communities build resilience: human, social, natural, physical, and financial. Elsewhere, place-based policy interventions have been shown to strengthen these types of capital and help build resilience through developing stronger relationships between people, their location, and their environment. However, examples like education campaigns, enforcement initiatives, and community engagement are often designed through the lens of place-based histories, identities, and community values unique to the place where they are implemented. Such interventions may work in one place, but not the other, or may disparately strengthen certain capitals of local concern at the expense of others. We thus come to a conundrum. If policy interventions are influenced by place-based community values where they are designed and implemented, how can we take transferable lessons from one coastal community to another, using interventions that reliably account for each of the five capitals? ARISE: Advancing Resilience and Innovation for a Sustainable Environment, is designed to propose, develop and evaluate an intervention framework to practically address this puzzle. We will gather evidence to develop best-practice intervention methods, applicable across places and regions, focussed on achieving balanced strengthening across each of the five capitals.

Delivering sustainability transitions in diverse places across the UK entails changes in how we live and work across diverse issues such as land use planning and management, food and diet, energy production, transport and mobility and achieving net zero policy goals. The changes associated with sustainability transitions can be perceived in terms of winners and losers, incumbents and change-leaders, and often act as loci of disagreement, contestation over values and judgements about what is fair or just; for example, the recent controversy on the so-called '15-minute city' and debates about political intervention and freedom associated transport measures in Oxford. These 'flashpoints' are relevant not only to the places in which they emerge, but also for debate and policy action on delivering sustainable places nationally. Such flashpoints raise important issues about how common sustainability transitions are governed at different geographic scales, the ways in which past conflicts shape present-day contestation and the types and levels of engagement promoted and experienced by different interest groups. Accordingly, we need to understand what makes for a flashpoint issue on sustainable living: how such issues emerge, how they are framed, and how changes to governing sustainable living can promote ways of working with communities that promote participation and the co-production of solutions. The Governing Sustainable Future (GSF) project aims to examine how we can build new ways of understanding and acting on place-based sustainability contestations that address the local and non-local causes of conflict. GSF brings together a unique collaboration of social scientists and regional (Devon, UK) partners, who have a long history of working together, along with national partners, to address this question through novel and established social science and participatory approaches that are alert to questions of power and social difference. These collaborative relations underpin the research programme, embedding Co-production, Equality Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) and Sustainability principles in our research practice. GSF addresses four overarching aims associated work packages, that reflect our theoretical approach to identifying, analysing and intervening in sustainable policy conflicts: To develop an approach that helps us to understand local and non-local causes of conflicts that emerge in a particular place but also have connections to other places and evolve over time. To present new ways of thinking about places and relations between places that can help to unlock new solutions to sustainably policy conflicts. To develop innovative collaborative and participatory methods for responding to place-based sustainability conflicts (in Devon, UK) and apply to policy challenges on the ground. To generate new understandings of how participatory processes can support public and stakeholder engagement with the local and non-local causes of place-based sustainability conflicts, and progress action on just transitions in the UK. A core principle of GSF will be to make clear connections between insights from regional experience and recommendations for national policy and practice. Our team includes leading experts in discursive and participatory research methods, theories of place and sustainable transitions, environmental policy and politics, environmental controversy, and just transitions, plus key regional policy and practice organisations. Team members play a leading role in other major UKRI investments into sustainable living. The University of Exeter will provide match-fund support, which reflect considerable research synergies and institutional commitment to applying knowledge from this project. Together we will co-produce timely policy insights for achieving equitable and sustainable places.

Context: Peatlands are one of the world's most important habitats and the largest terrestrial carbon store. However, 80% of UK peatlands are damaged and deteriorating, meaning they are often a carbon source rather than sink. This trend is alarming in the context of the climate emergency. Restoring peatland is therefore an urgent UK action, necessary to meet the net zero commitment. The UK Committee on Climate Change has recommended restoration of at least 50% of upland peat and 25% of lowland peat by 2050 to contribute to the net zero target. Changing agricultural use of peatland is likely to lead to the highest per hectare emissions savings implementable in the UK. However, the number of peatland hectares restored remains low despite support mechanisms in Scotland and England. How to achieve large-scale peatland restoration is under-researched, and agricultural environments and communities are facing intersecting stresses which inhibit the necessary transformative practices. Challenge: RESPECT takes a holistic approach to this real-world challenge through interdisciplinary research which supports landholders to undertake peatland restoration and reduce carbon emissions through land use change. Two case study regions - the Forth and Humber Catchments in Scotland and England - will be investigated in-depth, where tensions exist between food production, historic environment preservation, carbon sequestration and ecological restoration. Questions: RESPECT investigates a number of questions in this context. Where should peatland restoration take place based on the current and future physical capacities of agricultural land in the case study regions? How should peatland restoration be implemented based on the social capacities of key land stakeholders in the case study regions? How can landholders seeking to restore peatland be best supported in their decision-making to reduce emissions, as well as deliver other social and environmental benefits? What governance reforms are required to facilitate peatland restoration on agricultural land? Finally, how can the data, methods and tools established in the case study regions be scaled up to the national level? Overview: RESPECT will produce data, methods, landholder tools and proposals for governance reforms to change agricultural practices on peatland and contribute to the UK's net zero target. RESPECT will achieve this by collating data through novel interdisciplinary collection, modelling and engagement methods. These data will establish the capacity of land and land users to contribute to the net zero target as well as generate other social and environmental co-benefits, balanced against conflicting land use demands, within the context of climate change. Informed by this baseline data, RESPECT will produce the Peatland Triage Tool (PTT), providing decision-support for landowners, land managers, farmers and crofters (collectively 'landholders') seeking to undertake peatland restoration. Governance reforms will be proposed to scaffold the social innovations necessary for transformative change. Outputs will be scalable and replicable with national significance. Application and Benefits: RESPECT will produce new thinking and transdisciplinary research outputs about facilitating landholders to deliver land use change for net zero and manage conflicting land use demands. RESPECT uses an innovative combination of both data and methodologies to address land use change, and carefully considers the social and physical capacities of the land and land users to effect change. The PTT will provide decision-support in a useful and accessible way. Combined with the expertise in policy implementation and support from project partners, RESPECT will develop a game-changing approach to reducing emissions from land use.

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.