This proposal builds upon four related research projects: Norwich University of the Arts Impact Case Study, Public engagement with the Norfolk Broads, enhancing public understanding and engagement with nature conservation (2019); Visualisations of space debris (Off Earth. NIXON. 2021); Building Platform Technologies for Symbiotic Creativity in Hong Kong (NIXON Et al, 2021) and Future Cinema Systems (NIXON Et al, 2022). Working in close partnership with the Broads Authority and using archive material and maps contained in the Strategic Flood Risk Assessment report 2018 (a detailed study of the impacts of rising sea levels and effects of Climate Change), using 3D modelling, and volumetric video, I will create realistic and immersive visualisations, which reimagine past, present, and future landscapes accurately, depicting the Broads and East Anglia coastal areas under threat from rising sea levels. Practice-based research will be presented in visually aesthetic and immersive form within a specialist visualisation system, where viewers can experience the East Anglia and Broads landscape by moving through a virtual world, viewing realistic representations which will be augmented with flood risk visualisations, enabling audiences and stakeholders to experience, explore and consider the effects of flooding upon the Broads and East Anglia coastline. The specialised screen and sound system will provide the viewer with enhanced immersion, creating a greater sense of embodiment, and presence. This research combines latest volumetric capture and advanced 360-degree screen and surround sound technologies to create a platform for immersive content development and viewing. Through the integration of these technologies and powered by artificial intelligence, deep learning, virtual reality, augmented reality, interactive narrative and generative aesthetics, the system will deliver innovation. Working together they will create a new interactive and immersive architecture for participant spectators. The system will be a vital resource for practice-based research and experimentation to explore archive content, aesthetic, and cultural domains, generate digital assets for training and education in health, sport and architecture and areas where the accurate simulation of real-life situations is applicable. The system will enable audiences to explore the landscapes of the past, present, and future with greater immersion measured by considering image quality, 3D vision, field of view, tracking level, sound quality, user perspective and resolution. The system contains highly immersive characteristics, thus providing greater sensations of embodiment, and through viewing autonomy will provide the viewer with enhanced sensations of presence, in virtual environments, presence is understood as place illusion-the qualia of being located inside the virtual word (Slater, 2009). To achieve the goal of introducing new artistic expression and content through the system I will focus on leveraging important developments on machine learning, and generative models, providing a platform for artists and designers working with Generative Adversarial Networks and Creative Adversarial Networks. The project will facilitate greater collaboration between creative practitioners, and the technology sector.The outcomes will include new creative media practice, and immersive and interactive image experiences which can be exploited by the scientific, creative, and cultural industries and provide innovative ways of engaging in global challenges.

This project stems from a current research project: AHRC Pathways to Understanding the Changing Climate: time and place in cultural learning about the environment. It takes what we have learnt about children's relationships with their dwelling places and how intercultural interchange influences that as a starting point for facilitating an ongoing pilot project in South Africa namely the Aller River Pilot Project (ARPP). The goal of the ARPP is to engage local communities in the rehabilitation of a local waterway that is crucial to the livelihoods of these communities. The project's main strategy for delivering this rehabilitation and sustained maintenance is to recruit, train and stipend a group of young people from communities along the river (the 'Eco Champs'). These young people will lead the rehabilitation through engaging the local community and the schools in the local community. Our input (PUCC FOF) will begin at the end of the first phase of the ARPP when the main rehabilitation work of the river will already have been completed. We will continue the work with the Eco Champ team and the eco clubs that they will have set up in schools in the community. We will use our method of child-led walking interviews to develop a cartogram of the communities and to identify what sorts of relationships the children in these urban settings along waterways have with their dwelling places. We will use this as the basis for the interchange element of our project. The interchange partner in the UK will be a group of young people in the Norfolk Broads called the Youth Rangers who will be working with the Broads Authority (BA) to reconnect with their local waterways. The participant-led walking interviews alongside a stakeholder consultation conference will be used to identify small scale infrastructure support to facilitate the sustainability of the rehabilitation work. The projected outcome of this project for the community in South Africa will be an explicit and consolidated sense of personal connection to dwelling places including local waterways and an enhancement of commitment to maintaining these in a state that will contribute to the health and wellbeing of the local communities that rely on it for sanitation. Similar (if less extensive) outcomes are projected for the Youth Rangers in the Norfolk Broads. We will measure our impact through the data gathered during the walks that will be completed at the beginning and the end of the project and we will also use the data gathered by the ARPP and BA to elaborate our understanding of how our intervention has impacted on the local community. Our work has the potential to contribute to the following Sustainable Development Goals: Goal 3 (Good Health and Wellbeing), Goal 6 (Clean Water and Sanitation), Goal 10 (reduced Inequality), Goal 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities) and Goal 17 (Partnerships for the Goals). Examples of how this will be achieved are the improvement in health and sanitation and through the stronger social cohesion, enhanced commitment to community responsibility, effective local agency and a deepened sense of an explicit connection to place. This project will instigate collaboration between people in similar circumstances with regard to the role of water in their dwelling places. The partnerships created will have significant potential for the way in which locally affected communities respond to globally determined consequences of changing climates, in both the meteorological and socio-political sense. Moreover, this project extends the interdisciplinary collaboration between Education and Social Anthropology which will further the aims of the network for the Living with Environmental Change Initiative. Whilst this is not intended to be a research project we will be able to use the impacts of the project to elaborate our understanding of the relationships that children have with place and how global interchange affects that.

Climate change is one of the major threats of the 21st Century both nationally and globally. This requires a joint response of mitigation and adaptation as enshrined in the UK Climate Change Act, which mandates a Climate Change Risk Assessment (CCRA) every five years and a quinquennial National Adaptation Plan (NAP) to adapt to the climate risks that are identified. Assessing climate risks and adaptation in a consistent manner is scientifically challenging as climate change is manifest in multiple ways (rising temperature and sea level, changing precipitation, etc.) and impacts every human and natural system. Further there are direct and indirect impacts as these effects cascade and interact with other sectors which are often changing due to non-climate processes. Any proposed adaptations need to be assessed in a similar manner including direct and indirect effects and unintended consequences. Earlier UK climate assessments did not fully address this challenge relying in part on expert synthesis for integration, potentially leading to an over focus on direct consequences and leading to inconsistencies between sectors and between adaptation options. The OpenCLIM project is designed to support UK assessment of climate risks and adaptation needs, and future CCRAs and NAPs in particular, by developing and applying a first UK integrated assessment for climate impacts and adaptation. First and foremost we aim to develop an open, innovative and flexible platform to provide an improved capacity for the next CCRA and NAP. Our model will consider UK-wide climate impacts and adaptation in biodiversity, agriculture, infrastructure and urban areas, considering the impacts of flooding, heat stress and changing temperature and precipitation. It will also consider two detailed case studies: (1) an urban analysis of Glasgow and environs (the Clyde); and (2) a more rural analysis of the Norfolk Broads and environs. These will serve as a demonstration and validation exercise to inform the national analysis. Secondly, we will also design an open-access platform with a strong legacy which is flexible to allow further development of the integrated model beyond this funding. We aspire to develop a community model where new and improved models could be easily incorporated and innovative science and new policy questions investigated. Hence future CCRAs and NAPs could be linked to a living science process, drawing on evolving understanding and stakeholder needs. This would include improving knowledge in established sectors and areas, and developing better sectoral linkages and interactions, as well as adding new models of less established sectors and areas as they emerge, including the ability to reframe and pose new questions. Recognising the significant challenge of achieving this second goal, our model will be developed within the UKCIRC DAFNI (Data & Analytics Facility for National Infrastructure) facility for High Performance Computing. The platform will be designed to take the UKCP18 and new UK socioeconomic scenarios to ensure the best scientific inputs. The approach will be explicitly spatial and allow highlighting of geographical hotspot areas and the prioritisation of risks in a systematic and consistent manner including tabulation and mapping of outputs. The models that are included are all physically-based (rather than emulators or rules-of-thumb) and this will enable the generation of new research insights, including climatic risks in the UK. Importantly, the use of physically-based models will allow credible simulation of conditions that have not been previously observed and improve confidence in the results compared to earlier analyses.

All types of ecosystems exhibit connectivity at some level. However, connectivity is the quintessential property of aquatic systems. Connectivity matters in freshwaters because it is the means by which energy, materials, organisms and genetic resources move within and between hydrological units of the landscape (the 'hydroscape'). Hydrological connectivity is a particularly effective vector for multiple climatic, biological, chemical and physical stressors, although other forms of connectivity also link freshwater ecosystems. Our proposal addresses the fundamental question of how connectivity and stressors interact to determine biodiversity and ecosystem function in freshwaters. Connectivity is multifaceted. It may be tangible - water moves downhill or over floodplains, or more subtle - terrestrial organic matter is incorporated into aquatic food webs. Animals and people naturally gravitate to freshwaters, thus providing additional dispersal vectors that can carry propagules to isolated sites. Connectivity may be passive or active and occurs across scales from the local to the global. Freshwater scientists recognise the fundamental role of connectivity in key paradigms such as the river continuum and flood pulse concepts. Land-water connectivity is also the founding principle behind catchment management. However, in reality, a long tradition of focusing on individual stressors, sites, taxonomic groups or habitats, has led to a highly disjointed view of the most intrinsically interconnected resource on the planet. While the need for an integrated approach to water management is universally acknowledged, an understanding of this most fundamental part of the infrastructure of freshwaters is lacking. This is a serious obstacle to meeting critical societal challenges, namely the maintenance of environmental sustainability in the face of multiplying human-induced stresses. Without a more integrated view of the freshwater landscape we struggle to answer basic questions. These include (i) how do organisms, nutrients and energy move naturally within and between landscapes? (ii) how is this basic template altered by different stressors, singly or in combination? (iii) how has widespread alteration of land cover and of the basic infrastructure of freshwaters that largely drives connectivity, redistributed pressures and modified their effects? (iv) how should reductions in stressors and changes to connectivity, that are now widely implemented, be prioritised when seeking to restore biodiversity and ecosystem function? Our primary aims are to (1) determine how hydrological, spatial and biological connectivity impact on freshwater ecosystem structure and function in contrasting landscape types, and (2) use this understanding to forecast how freshwaters nationally will respond to (i) multiple, interacting pressures and (ii) management actions designed to reduce pressures and/or alter connectivity. We will achieve these aims by working at different spatial (landscape vs national) and temporal (sub-annual to decadal vs centennial) scales and using a combination of complementary well established and more novel molecular and stable isotope techniques. We will combine existing data sources (e.g. archived sediment cores, biological surveys and the millions of records held in national databases) with targeted sampling to maximise cost effectiveness and achieve a cross habitat and ecosystem wide reach. Landscape scale thinking has become the new mantra of nature conservation and environmental bodies but the knowledge needed to ensure resilience to climate change and to underpin large scale conservation and restoration of aquatic landscapes is currently lacking. In this regard an understanding of how biodiversity and ecosystem function respond to the changing connectivity x stressors arena in freshwaters is critical. The outputs of the proposed research will deliver the integrated understanding of the hydroscape that is now required urgently.

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.