Engineered nanomaterials (ENMs) are found in many consumer products including cosmetics and personal hygiene goods. Nanomaterials are also found in additives for diesel fuels to improve fuel efficiency. These materials will come into contact with the environment, for example, if they are washed down the sink, or if they become airbourne, however we currently have no idea about whether they are hazardous or not and regulations are not in place to control their release or treatment. The life cycle of ENMs in the environment is not known and there exist large knowledge gaps in this field. The reason for this is that the concentrations and properties of ENMs in consumer products are largely unknown (or not indicated by companies). Very little is known about the behaviour or lifetime of ENMs in the water effluent and soils as it's extremely hard to monitor this behaviour, as we do not have the tools to detect these tiny materials in very complex environments. This project will apply new and sophisticated experimental characterization tools for predicting potential environmental risks associated with the use of selected consumer products incorporating ZnO, Ag, TiO2 and CeO2 ENMs. An overarching goal is to evaluate which are the critical charateristics of ENMs (size, chemistry etc.) which may cause damage to the environment through two of the most predominant environmental pathways - from the effluent of a waste water treatment plant to waters and also from sewage sludge to soils. This information will ultimately to provide guidance to regulators on policy and to industry about how to design "safe" classes of ENMs and mitigate against risk, while avoiding overregulation. Avoiding overregulation is vital, as we do not want to re-experience what happened e.g. at Fukushima, where 160,000 people were forced to relocated without need, since the risk presented to regulators and the government was too high. This has since resulted in 1,599 deaths, as the displaced residents are suffering from health problems, alcoholism and high rates of suicide. Our team has an extensive track record in developing unique techniques to track these nanomaterials in complex environments and will apply their knowledge of this field to tackle this extremely pertinent concern. The projects experimental approaches include both physical science experiments and toxicological approaches, generating results to improve our limited understanding of the potential environmental hazards. The results generated from the project will also contribute to our very limited knowledge on various aspects of the fate, transport, bioavailability, and ecotoxicity of ENMs and will allow us to answer questions such as "can toxic doses of ENMs reach organisms or are these concentrations negligible at the point of exposure to the organism?", "if they are toxic, is it possible to re-engineer ENMs such that they do not present a risk", "do the nanomaterials dissolve or change their chemistry in the environment and ultimately detoxify and how does this vary between the different nanomaterials?", "which nanomaterials present the greatest risk and how do we minimise the environmental and health risks of these hazardous materials without overly precautionary regulations". This multifaceted strategy will make a major development in understanding the fate of ENMs in the environment to guide policy regulation whilst avoiding unnecessary overregulation, and ultimately guide the safe development of these materials for future commercial exploitation.

The challenge: Water resources in many UK river catchments are over-allocated, leading to conflict over water and restrictions on some uses during drought events. Pressures on scarce freshwater supplies will likely be exacerbated in future decades as a result of rising demand from population growth, along with increases in the frequency and intensity of droughts due to climate change. To address these challenges, new water supply infrastructure is being planned by many water companies, supported by regional and national model-assisted water supply planning studies. However, such 'water supply infrastructure' models lack sufficient detail to analyse the effects of catchment management measures and their interactions with built infrastructure, such as changing land or agricultural management practices and new policies for water allocation and demand management (e.g. abstraction license reform, water trading, payment for ecosystem services via land management contracts, etc.). A new approach to water resource management is needed in UK water scarce catchments, which utilises custom-designed portfolios of climate-resilient infrastructure and policy measures to support sustainable management of water for businesses and communities, the environment, and agriculture. Aim: Enable decision-relevant understanding of how new catchment scale assets (e.g. water supply infrastructure), landscapes (e.g. land management and agricultural production systems), and policies (e.g. water sharing and trading schemes) can increase resilience and climate change adaptability of water resource systems, enabling competing demands of limited water resources to be balanced cost-effectively while minimising impacts on the environmental and freshwater ecosystems. Methods: Connect an extended version (with water trading) of the UK's leading open-source water resource management model (used by 11 water companies) to open-source distributed hydrologic, land-use and agricultural production models. This novel proof of concept interconnected land & water biophysical hydro-economic simulator will be linked to decision analysis under uncertainty approaches, such as multi-criteria trade-off optimisation, to optimise the adaptive adoption of complex portfolios of water-land management interventions in UK catchments. A web-based catchment visualisation tool will enable to toggle back and forth between a map-based catchment intervention portfolio and trading view, and a multi-metric performance dashboard so that stakeholders and decision-makers can assess portfolios of interventions and pre-approved water trades. Case study: The Cam and Ely Ouse is one of the four pilot catchments identified by the Environment Agency (EA) to trial abstraction reform. Impact: By designing and implementing a proof-of-concept management approach based on integrated land-water simulation, optimised trade-off based climate change decision-making, and interactive visualisation the project aims to enable a transformation of how catchment level planning (investments, water policies) decisions are made. This could improve the UK's land-water climate resilience, minimising the economic, social and environmental cost of water scarcity under climate change. Given the need to design new environmental conservation subsidies for UK farmers (post-CAP), the proposed outputs will provide an objective framework to understand how different land and agricultural management changes beneficially (or not) impact catchment water outcomes. The approach will be as general as possible to enable subsequent wider application (e.g. to operational drought management (real time water allocation), flood protection, etc.).

The Centre for Climate Change Transformations (C3T) will be a global hub for understanding the profound changes required to address climate change. At its core, is a fundamental question of enormous social significance: how can we as a society live differently - and better - in ways that meet the urgent need for rapid and far-reaching emission reductions? While there is now strong international momentum on action to tackle climate change, it is clear that critical targets (such as keeping global temperature rise to well within 2 degrees Celsius relative to pre-industrial levels) will be missed without fundamental transformations across all parts of society. C3T's aim is to advance society's understanding of how to transform lifestyles, organisations and social structures in order to achieve a low-carbon future, which is genuinely sustainable over the long-term. Our Centre will focus on people as agents of transformation in four challenging areas of everyday life that impact directly on climate change but have proven stubbornly resistant to change: consumption of goods and physical products, food and diet, travel, and heating/cooling. We will work across multiple scales (individual, community, organisational, national and global) to identify and experiment with various routes to achieving lasting change in these challenging areas. In particular, we will test how far focussing on 'co-benefits' will accelerate the pace of change. Co-benefits are outcomes of value to individuals and society, over and above the benefits from reducing greenhouse gas emissions. These may include improved health and wellbeing, reduced waste, better air quality, greater social equality, security, and affordability, as well as increased ability to adapt and respond to future climate change. For example, low-carbon travel choices (such as cycling and car sharing) may bring health, social and financial benefits that are important for motivating behaviour and policy change. Likewise, aligning environmental and social with economic objectives is vital for behaviour and organisational change within businesses. Our Research Themes recognise that transformative change requires: inspiring yet workable visions of the future (Theme 1); learning lessons from past and current societal shifts (Theme 2); experimenting with different models of social change (Theme 3); together with deep and sustained engagement with communities, business and governments, and a research culture that reflects our aims and promotes action (Theme 4). Our Centre integrates academic knowledge from disciplines across the social and physical sciences with practical insights to generate widespread impact. Our team includes world-leading researchers with expertise in climate change behaviour, choices and governance. We will use a range of theories and research methods to fill key gaps in our understanding of transformation at different spatial and social scales, and show how to target interventions to impactful actions, groups and moments in time. We will partner with practitioners (e.g., Climate Outreach, Greener-UK, China Centre for Climate Change Communication), policy-makers (e.g., Welsh Government) and companies (e.g., Anglian Water) to develop and test new ways of engaging with the public, governments and businesses in the UK and internationally. We will enhance citizens', organisations' and societal leaders' capacity to tackle climate change through various mechanisms, including secondments, citizens' panels, small-scale project funding, seminars, training, workshops, papers, blog posts and an interactive website. We will also experiment with transformations within academia itself, by trialling sustainable working practices (e.g., online workshops), being 'reflexive' (studying our own behaviour and its impacts on others), and making our outputs and data publically available.

The new climate projections from the UK have just been released and as part of this, next year, there will be the release of outputs from a number of very high resolution climate models across the UK. These models are able to represent the daily cycle of rainfall, and rainfall characteristics like intensity, duration and frequency of occurrence, much better than coarser resolution models that have been used previously and can therefore help us to understand how short-duration intense rainfall events and flash floods might change in the future. Here we propose to couple them, for the first time, with new, high-resolution flood models for small rapid response catchments, like Boscastle, or urban areas that suffer from flash floods. Together they will be used to update guidance for urban drainage design and methods for urban surface water flood risk assessment in the UK: priorities identified in the National Flood Resilience Review (2016) and restated in the UK Adaptation Sub-Committee's UK Climate Change Risk Assessment 2017 Synthesis Report: Appendix on Urgency Scoring Tables which identified "Risks of sewer flooding due to heavy rainfall" as an area where "more action is needed to deliver sustainable drainage systems, upgrade sewers where appropriate and tackle drivers increasing surface runoff (e.g. impermeable surfacing in urban areas)." This will include new 'uplifts' that can be applied to design storm events to represent climate change effects on storms and recommendations on the updates of existing methods and tools used to tackle surface water flooding. FUTURE-DRAINAGE will add to the evidence-base for the UK Climate Change Risk Assessment and the National Adaptation Programme; and is aligned with the UK Government's 25 Year Environment Plan (2018), specifically the goal of reducing risk of harm from environmental hazards and of adapting to climate by improving climate resilience in the UK. The importance of revised rainfall uplifts and new guidance for UK urban drainage design and urban flood resilience is evidenced in the letters of support our project team has solicited from UK water and sewerage companies, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency and informal support from the Environment Agency who considers the work is of particular relevance to applications in surface water management and design of storm water systems. Therefore, FUTURE-DRAINAGE will deliver nationally important research outputs for uptake by government agencies and industrial sectors to improve climate change adaption and resilience in the UK.

The Centre for Climate Change Transformations (C3T) will be a global hub for understanding the profound changes required to address climate change. At its core, is a fundamental question of enormous social significance: how can we as a society live differently - and better - in ways that meet the urgent need for rapid and far-reaching emission reductions? While there is now strong international momentum on action to tackle climate change, it is clear that critical targets (such as keeping global temperature rise to well within 2 degrees Celsius relative to pre-industrial levels) will be missed without fundamental transformations across all parts of society. C3T's aim is to advance society's understanding of how to transform lifestyles, organisations and social structures in order to achieve a low-carbon future, which is genuinely sustainable over the long-term. Our Centre will focus on people as agents of transformation in four challenging areas of everyday life that impact directly on climate change but have proven stubbornly resistant to change: consumption of goods and physical products, food and diet, travel, and heating/cooling. We will work across multiple scales (individual, community, organisational, national and global) to identify and experiment with various routes to achieving lasting change in these challenging areas. In particular, we will test how far focussing on 'co-benefits' will accelerate the pace of change. Co-benefits are outcomes of value to individuals and society, over and above the benefits from reducing greenhouse gas emissions. These may include improved health and wellbeing, reduced waste, better air quality, greater social equality, security, and affordability, as well as increased ability to adapt and respond to future climate change. For example, low-carbon travel choices (such as cycling and car sharing) may bring health, social and financial benefits that are important for motivating behaviour and policy change. Likewise, aligning environmental and social with economic objectives is vital for behaviour and organisational change within businesses. Our Research Themes recognise that transformative change requires: inspiring yet workable visions of the future (Theme 1); learning lessons from past and current societal shifts (Theme 2); experimenting with different models of social change (Theme 3); together with deep and sustained engagement with communities, business and governments, and a research culture that reflects our aims and promotes action (Theme 4). Our Centre integrates academic knowledge from disciplines across the social and physical sciences with practical insights to generate widespread impact. Our team includes world-leading researchers with expertise in climate change behaviour, choices and governance. We will use a range of theories and research methods to fill key gaps in our understanding of transformation at different spatial and social scales, and show how to target interventions to impactful actions, groups and moments in time. We will partner with practitioners (e.g., Climate Outreach, Greener-UK, China Centre for Climate Change Communication), policy-makers (e.g., Welsh Government) and companies (e.g., Anglian Water) to develop and test new ways of engaging with the public, governments and businesses in the UK and internationally. We will enhance citizens', organisations' and societal leaders' capacity to tackle climate change through various mechanisms, including secondments, citizens' panels, small-scale project funding, seminars, training, workshops, papers, blog posts and an interactive website. We will also experiment with transformations within academia itself, by trialling sustainable working practices (e.g., online workshops), being 'reflexive' (studying our own behaviour and its impacts on others), and making our outputs and data publically available.