In recent years, Malaysia has experienced a number of landslide disasters resulting from extreme tropical rainfall. Landslides have occurred in several parts of Malaysia, such as Paya Terubong (Penang), Highland Towers (Kuala Lumpur), Hulu Langat and Pos Dipang (Perak). These landslides cost millions of pounds of property loss and hundreds of lives. On 21 October 2017, 11 workers were killed in a landslide at a construction site on Malaysia's Penang Island. The October 2002 landslide in Kuala Lumpur which completely destroyed several houses and killed six members of a family and the 2011 Hulu Langat landslide, where 15 children and a caretaker in an orphanage were killed are still in the public's memory. Population increase and subsequent urbanization have demanded the development of new residential and areas and roads in mountainous areas where there is an increased risk of slope failures. Malaysia's population is projected to rise to 41.5 million by 2040, up from 28.6 million in 2010. This proposal will produce a qualitative hazard map delineating areas prone to landslides in the Langat River Basin, Peninsular Malaysia. The hazard map will identify landslide-prone areas, including expected changes in landslide susceptibility as a result of climate change. Langat River Basin is most urbanized river basin in Malaysia. Important conurbations include towns such as Cheras, Kajang, Bangi and Putrajaya (the administrative capital of Malaysia). The basin has an area of about 2350 km2. The area has been experiencing numerous landslides disasters and has been identified by the Malaysia Public Work Department in its National Slope Master Plan Study as landslide-prone area. The proposal will involve close collaboration with the Public Works Department and the National Disaster Management Agency in Malaysia and several industrial partners to ensure the adaptation of the proposed map in practice.

Landslides and floods are globally occurring natural hazards that pose a significant threat to human life and sustainable development. The most severe losses due to landslides occur in the less economically developed countries of Asia and South America, particularly in those with mountainous topography, earthquakes and monsoonal climates. Landslides and rockfalls in these regions often detach fractured bedrock and deliver large boulders downslope that block roads, destroy buildings and kill people. On entering the river channel network, boulders may be bulldozed by large floods and block hydropower infrastructure, jeopardizing electricity supply and the economy. Thus, boulders may cause a cascade of hazards. This project addresses specific landslide and flood risk management problems brought to our attention by stakeholders impacted by boulders in the Upper Bhote Koshi catchment in Nepal, one of the most landslide and flood-prone countries in the world. This project also addresses a lack of data and scientific understanding of (i) boulder production on hillslopes (e.g. by landslides), (ii) boulder transport in floods. In this two year project, an inter-disciplinary team of researchers will work closely with project partners to (1) map boulders and investigate the controls on boulder production on hillslopes by landslides and rockfalls, (2) develop a new real-time GPS boulder tracking system with which to improve understanding of boulder movement in floods and monitor hazardous boulders (3) engage with stakeholders to incorporate findings into disaster management plans and ultimately to increase resilience to landslide and flood hazards. The project will focus on the Upper Bhote Koshi (UBK) catchment to the north east of Kathmandu, Nepal, and has been designed with specific end users in mind in the UBK that are dealing with boulder hazards related to landslide and floods. This area is particularly vulnerable to boulder hazards as it is the main road link between Nepal and China and contains several major hydroelectric power plants including the Upper Bhote Koshi Hydroelectric Power plant (UBKHEP). The catchment encapsulates the multitude of natural hazards faced by Nepal. In 2015 the catchment was shaken by the Gorkha earthquake generating some of the highest densities of landsliding anywhere in Nepal. In July 2016, a complex monsoon flash flood entrained extremely large boulders (>8 m) some of which became jammed in the sluice gates of the UBKHEP culminating in more than $110 m damage to the power station. The power station remains closed resulting in lost revenue and compromising Nepal's energy supply. As the power company rebuilds and a further hydroelectric power station is built just downstream, it will be vital to properly account for future boulder hazards in landslide and floods. The project brings together an interdisciplinary team of researchers based in the UK, Germany and Nepal with several project partners that have helped to define the problems that this project will address. The boulder hazard map and boulder tracking system developed in this research will help make the Bhote Koshi Power Company and wider hydropower industry more resilient to landslide and flood hazards. The research will also benefit organizations managing transport infrastructure and communities living on steep, landslide prone hillslopes in the Bhote Koshi. We will hold two project workshops bringing together project partners and relevant stakeholders from industry, local communities and government institutions with the help of Practical Action Consulting Nepal, to research boulder hazard perception and enhance uptake of this research into risk management practice at local and national governance level and ultimately to aid development in Nepal and South Asia.

Landslides and floods are globally occurring natural hazards that pose a significant threat to human life and sustainable development. The most severe losses due to landslides occur in the less economically developed countries of Asia and South America, particularly in those with mountainous topography, earthquakes and monsoonal climates. Landslides and rockfalls in these regions often detach fractured bedrock and deliver large boulders downslope that block roads, destroy buildings and kill people. On entering the river channel network, boulders may be bulldozed by large floods and block hydropower infrastructure, jeopardizing electricity supply and the economy. Thus, boulders may cause a cascade of hazards. This project addresses specific landslide and flood risk management problems brought to our attention by stakeholders impacted by boulders in the Upper Bhote Koshi catchment in Nepal, one of the most landslide and flood-prone countries in the world. This project also addresses a lack of data and scientific understanding of (i) boulder production on hillslopes (e.g. by landslides), (ii) boulder transport in floods. In this two year project, an inter-disciplinary team of researchers will work closely with project partners to (1) map boulders and investigate the controls on boulder production on hillslopes by landslides and rockfalls, (2) develop a new real-time GPS boulder tracking system with which to improve understanding of boulder movement in floods and monitor hazardous boulders (3) engage with stakeholders to incorporate findings into disaster management plans and ultimately to increase resilience to landslide and flood hazards. The project will focus on the Upper Bhote Koshi (UBK) catchment to the north east of Kathmandu, Nepal, and has been designed with specific end users in mind in the UBK that are dealing with boulder hazards related to landslide and floods. This area is particularly vulnerable to boulder hazards as it is the main road link between Nepal and China and contains several major hydroelectric power plants including the Upper Bhote Koshi Hydroelectric Power plant (UBKHEP). The catchment encapsulates the multitude of natural hazards faced by Nepal. In 2015 the catchment was shaken by the Gorkha earthquake generating some of the highest densities of landsliding anywhere in Nepal. In July 2016, a complex monsoon flash flood entrained extremely large boulders (>8 m) some of which became jammed in the sluice gates of the UBKHEP culminating in more than $110 m damage to the power station. The power station remains closed resulting in lost revenue and compromising Nepal's energy supply. As the power company rebuilds and a further hydroelectric power station is built just downstream, it will be vital to properly account for future boulder hazards in landslide and floods. The project brings together an interdisciplinary team of researchers based in the UK, Germany and Nepal with several project partners that have helped to define the problems that this project will address. The boulder hazard map and boulder tracking system developed in this research will help make the Bhote Koshi Power Company and wider hydropower industry more resilient to landslide and flood hazards. The research will also benefit organizations managing transport infrastructure and communities living on steep, landslide prone hillslopes in the Bhote Koshi. We will hold two project workshops bringing together project partners and relevant stakeholders from industry, local communities and government institutions with the help of Practical Action Consulting Nepal, to research boulder hazard perception and enhance uptake of this research into risk management practice at local and national governance level and ultimately to aid development in Nepal and South Asia.

Gravity measurements exert a particular fascination ranging from the everyday experience of feeling the gravitational force holding us on ground to the mysteries of general relativity and space time. Compared to other forces gravity is surprisingly weak, making shielding of gravitation practically impossible. Gravity measurements are ideally suited to look deep inside the ground and they have been used for over 100 years in fields as oil and mineral exploration, underground mapping and climate research. However, although gravity measurements are highly valued, there are some drawbacks in terms of long and tedious measurements and geological noise. GG-TOP responds to an increasingly pressing demand for a holistic development programme driving sensitivity of instrumentation, modelling instrument and geological noise, discriminating underground objects, fusing and presenting the information from multi-sensor systems. The GG-TOP consortium is truely multi-disciplinary uniting fundamental and applied physicists, civil and electrical engineers and archaeologists behind a joint goal. GG-TOP has a strong Stakeholder compontent with interactions at all levels and potential users directly influencing the research programme. GG-TOP will explicitly evaluate the potential of its new technology in applications as diverse as urban infrastructure (pipes, cables...) and void (cellars, tunnels,..) mapping, seabed inspection, archaeology and fundamental tests of physics. We anticipate the outcome of this programme to be a technology suite adaptable to various needs and leading to a range of follow-on product development programmes.

The U.K. population is projected to reach 80 million by 2050 and it is anticipated that the overwhelming majority will continue to live in cities. Besides becoming more densely populated, future cities will be surrounded with expanding urban areas. Interactions within cities; across urban areas and with surrounding cities, towns and 'rural' areas with the rest of the UK will place new and different demands on infrastructure, whether housing, energy, transport, freight distribution and disposal of waste. Decisions that are made now will have profound implications for the resultant pressures on transport, living space, energy use, and ecosystem services (the benefits humans receive from ecosystems). These decisions will play out at two fundamentally different spatial scales. First, and by far the better understood, are those decisions that concern individual households and their neighbourhoods. These include issues of how their members move around, what kinds of housing they occupy, how their energy demands and waste production are reduced, and how their negative influences on the wider environment generally will be limited. Second, broad scale strategic decisions regarding regional planning will determine where in the U.K. population growth is primarily accommodated. This will determine, and be shaped by, the kinds of transport and energy infrastructure required, and the environmental impacts. Obviously these two sets of decisions are not independent. The demands for and impacts of broad scale development (whether this be the creation of new urban areas or the intensification of existing ones) - and thus how this is best achieved to deliver sustainability- will be influenced not by the typical demands and impacts exhibited now by households, but by the way in which these have been changed in response to the modification to the associated infrastructure. This makes for a challenging problem in predicting and evaluating the possible consequences of different potential scenarios of regional development. The proposed study SElf Conserving URban Environments (SECURE) will address this grand challenge of integration across scales (the global aim) by developing a range of future regional urbanization scenarios, and exploring their consequences for selected high profile issues of resource demand and provision (transport, dwellings, energy, and ecosystem services) alongside sustainable waste utilisations. In doing so, it will build on findings of research outputs of several previous SUE projects and harness its relationship in the context of policy and economic growth. The study includes specific research objectives under five broad cross-cutting themes - Urbanisation, Ecosystems Services, Building and Energy, Stakeholder Engagement and Policy Integration across themes. SECURE is designed to assemble novel deliverables to bring about step change in current knowledge and practice. The North East Region will be used as a test bed and evaluation of transitional scenarios leading up to 2050 will quantify the benefits of integration across the scales through conservation across the themes. SECURE will deliver policy formulation and planning decisions for 2030 and 2050 with a focus on creating Sustainable Urban Environment.The contributors to this project are researchers of international standings who have collaborated extensively on several EPSRC funded projects, including the SUE research since its inception. The SECURE team builds on their current collaboration on the SUE2 4M project. The Project consortium is led by Newcastle - Prof Margaret Bell as PI and Dr Anil Namdeo as co-ordinator alongside Dr Jenny Brake with academic partners: Prof David Graham (Environmental Engineering), Prof David Manning (Geosciences); from Loughborough: Prof Kevin Lomas, Prof Jonathan Wright and Dr Steven Firth (Civil and Building Engineering); from Sheffield: Prof Kevin Gaston and Dr Jonathan Leake (Animal and Plant Sciences).