For over four decades Tate has built its conservation science labs and materials research around key parts of the UK's national collection of British and International art ranging from 1500 to the present day. The generation of knowledge pertaining to historic British paintings and modern and contemporary art (M&CA) in particular, has grown into a resource of national and international significance. Tate's modern and contemporary art research strengths now encompass 20th century paints, innovative cleaning science, plastics and polymer analysis. This forms the core expertise, knowledge and opportunities offered to others nationally and internationally, including through funded projects, post-graduate fellowships, doctoral studentships, collaborative funded research, informal partnerships and within the Conservation Department itself. Excluding the Turner Bequest, 60% of Tate's collection (or 23,455 items) consists of works dating from c.1945 onwards. Over the past decade, the acquisition of modern and contemporary art into the UK's national collection has accelerated to the point where M&CA works now constitute 90% of all new acquisitions and gifts to Tate. The preservation of the UK's cultural heritage must be centred around the appropriate characterisation of materials, as determining optimal, sustainable storage and display conditions becomes increasingly urgent and requires addressing through collaborative heritage science. This is particularly relevant for artworks containing new, lesser-known, degradable, and other novel materials within sculpture and installation art, paintings, and works on paper collections. Tate's capacity to offer access to in-house scientific expertise, mobile and fixed equipment and laboratories would immediately increase by more than 40% through the RICHeS access conservation scientist role. Our expanded access model will be developed and evaluated through a new partnership with the National Trust for their recently developed Modern Art in the Historic House research initiative, and additionally finessed through access case study opportunities with The Courtauld Institute of Art, Victoria and Albert Museum, and others, to help ensure that our expanded access offer is ready, discoverable, and user-friendly by 2026. In addition to the enhanced access afforded by the essential RICHeS scientist role, the expansion of Tate's AHRC Capability for Collections (CapCo) funded equipment will underpin the deepening and broadening of Tate's M&CA materials research and offer. This will quickly lead to enhanced research and engagement through developing new knowledge of these materials and artworks. The bench equipment requested will expand our existing polymer analysis capability and the portable equipment requested will facilitate investigations at other Tate sites, with our Plus Tate partners and beyond; enabling us to better support collections nationally. When combined, the award will facilitate new questions, new research, new collaborations, and contribute to a range of key impacts in the preservation of M&CA across the heritage sector. This investment is vital to the future of the UK's M&CA art collections, where we collectively work to understand and provide solutions for the evolving challenges represented by modern and contemporary art; particularly within the context of the ongoing climate emergency. The existing expertise and achievements of the Tate team and collaborators, the transformative investments already made through CapCo, and the investments to be made through RICHeS will result in a sea-change in the way heritage science is inspired at Tate and accessed by others, which will undoubtedly underpin and strengthen Tate's vision to establish a national modern and contemporary art research hub within the next decade.

Next year is the centenary of the 1924 Mount Everest Expedition, with huge press and public interest anticipated in the anniversary of George Mallory's and Andrew Irvine's deaths. The AHRC Other Everests network (AH/W004917/1) has brought together international scholars, archivists, curators, professional societies, heritage charities and the mountaineering community to critically reassess the legacy of the Everest expeditions and has featured as a best-practice case study in the AHRC Creative Communities report By All, For All: The Power of Partnership. The network has developed a commitment to researching the hidden histories of indigenous high-altitude labour on these expeditions but faces a challenge. Late imperial meta-narratives of heroic white masculinity dominate popular narratives and perpetuate racial stereotypes, as well as dominating forms of commemoration and representation. Other Everests is seeking to critically engage with public discourse in 2024, delivering two major commemorative interventions that will be co-produced with partners from India, Nepal and Tibet, enabling us to share postcolonial perspectives on these expeditions from the contemporary Greater Himalayan region with the wider public. With project partners the Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers (RGS-IBG), the National Trust (NT) and the Kendal Mountain Festival (KMF), we have developed two main objectives: a major exhibition and a commissioned film score. The exhibition will be co-curated with stakeholders from Archive Nepal and The Confluence Collective (an activist collective of young scholars and artists from Kalimpong, India) in conjunction with the Tibetan artist Nyema Droma. It will feature archival photographs of indigenous workers on Everest from the RGS-IBG collections, as well as newly commissioned art installations showcasing contemporary mountaineering and environmental issues in Tibet. The exhibition will be installed June-November 2024 in the NT's Wray Castle on the shores of Windermere, one of the Lake District's premier tourist destinations, enabling us to engage with a huge and diverse range of visitors. The exhibition also forms part of the KMF2024. We will commission the composer and sound artist Lee Affen to compose an original film score for the 1922 silent film Climbing Mount Everest. The newly scored film will premiere at KMF2024, supported by a series of lectures highlighting the significant contribution of indigenous high-altitude workers to the 1920s Everest expeditions. Our overall aims are to challenge and inform the public understanding of Everest and to enable voices from the region to give their own perspectives on the legacies of these late imperial expeditions. We aim to use the co-curation process to pilot methods for digital recovery and repatriation of archival materials, supporting the strategic goals of the RGS-IBG to diversify access to its collections. We will create a 3D digital version of the exhibition in Matterport that will form part of a permanent legacy website for the exhibition archived by the RGS-IBG. Digital versions of exhibition outputs will be hosted on Archive Nepal's digital platform and a physical version of the exhibition will be installed in a marketplace in Kalimpong, enabling us to make archival sources accessible to people whose histories feature in those archives.

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.

The ways we have lived with energy in the past has often changed - and will change again. The question is: what changes do we want and how do we tell these stories of change? The 'Stories of Change' project works with a range of communities to explore the varied and changing ways in which humanity has lived with energy in the past, and the choices available to us all in the future. It draws on history, literature, social and policy research and the arts to encourage a more imaginative approach to energy choices. The project supports the cross-party commitments to decarbonisation that sit at the heart of the UK Government's Climate Change Act. Research has shown that many people feel disengaged, disempowered or actively hostile to the kinds of changes to the UK's energy system required to meet the targets embedded in the Act. Societies the world over are faced with pressing shared challenges about future energy choices. Polling points to wide acceptance that actions will be required to reduce demand and cope with future environmental hazards. But new developments and measures to manage or reduce demand can generate conflict. Our project seeks to make space to work through the areas of conflict and identify elements of a collective vision. We are inspired by the example of the Mass Observation movement's stories of everyday life in the UK, above all in the 1930s and 1940s. Their work combined a desire to give ordinary people a voice, radical innovations in social research and bold new ideas about media and the arts. It has inspired our three objectives: 1. To listen to and give a platform to more diverse, often unheard, voices; 2. To mobilise change through research and the arts, and; 3. To innovate in use of digital media. 'Stories of Change' is organised around three mini research projects, or 'stories' and one cross-cutting project 'Energetic' that supports these, and draws wider conclusions. The project works with communities in three locations; each representing a different area of life. 'Policy Story: Demanding Times' gathers a novel mix of communities of interest around energy policy, and generates new accounts of energy policy and politics past, present and future. 'Industry Story: Future Works' is rooted in the English midlands, and seeks to unearth fresh accounts of the long relationship between energy, industrial making and landscape, and explores where it might go next. 'Everyday Story: Life Cycles' engages with the role that energy resources have played in shaping communities and everyday life in south Wales, from migration, for example from within Wales and as far as Somalia to work with coal, to new movements of people and things that support the UK's largest wind array. We are working with stories because they offer a popular and engaging route into thinking about the past and present and imagining possible futures, and also because stories, narratives and narration are concepts that people from a range of academic and creative disciplines can gather around. History, digital storytelling, fictional narratives, and scenarios of the future all communicate different ideas about the consequences of change for everyday life, and explain different perspectives and attitudes towards change. We will gather these stories - old and new - into an online publicly accessible collection (our 'Stories Platform'). We will offer pathways ('stories') through the materials, but it will also be easy for users to browse, or make up their own stories of change by threading material together using digital tools we provide. The academic team will also produce academic articles and a book, policy briefs and popular materials. The communities, our creative partners and the research team will also collaborate to produce a mix of creative writing, songs, short films, performances and museum and festival shows.

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.