One of the major problems in understanding how early humans interacted with and were affected by their environments is finding accurately dated records that let us look both at how climates changed and how plants and ecosystems responded. This work will use new chemical records preserved in stalagmites to help understand how the environment of the Indonesian region has changed over the past 50 thousand years, and how these changes impacted on early humans in the area. We are particularly interested in whether climatic changes were involved in the extinction of Homo floresiensis (the Flores 'hobbit'). Stalagmites are mound-shaped deposits which grow where calcite-laden drip waters fall onto a cave floor. When a drop of water lands on a stalagmite, it deposits not only a thin film of calcite, but also other chemical signals carried down from the soil above. These include isotopes of oxygen recording climate and rainfall, trace minerals telling of the patterns of past seasons, and organic matter reflecting everything from major changes in the overlying vegetation to how soil microbes are causing wood and plant matter to decay. Stalagmites grow upwards, layer by layer, so when cut vertically, an axis through time becomes visible. The calcite is readily dated using radioactive isotopes, so by sampling along this axis, we can recover the entombed chemical signatures, and build up a record of how the world above has changed through time. The most important thing about stalagmites is that because we can recover independent records of both climate and vegetation change from a single sample, they offer a very useful way to investigate how environments respond to climatic changes, without needing to match separately dated records from lots of different contexts. The Indonesian region is very important to Earth's climate, as three major parts of the global climatic system including El Nino and the Australian Monsoon converge there and the region is a major driver for two improtant circulation systems. The area also has a long and diverse human history, with Homo erectus arriving in Java between 1.9 and 1.2 million years ago, and reaching Flores by 800,000 years ago. Early modern humans (Homo sapiens) arrived approximately 60,000 - 40,000 years ago, and the area recently came to prominence again with the discovery of Homo floresiensis. Current evidence shows that these dwarfed hominids were present on Flores from before 95,000 years ago until at least 12,000 years ago, when they went extinct. The cause of their extinction is not yet known, but may have been due to climatic change, a major volcanic eruption, the arrival of modern humans in the area, or a combination of all three. The focus of our work will be answering three major questions: 1) how climate variation affected vegetation regimes, particularly with reference to switches between forest and savannah vegetation - this is an important issue because substantial vegetation changes would impact heavily on how hominid groups foraged and moved around the area; 2) how we can tell the difference between human management of the environment and climatically driven events; and 3) whether the extinction of Homo floresiensis coincided with substantial environmental change. In particular by creating longer term records, we will identify other climatic and environmental events that the floresiensis population successfully lived through, which will help anthropologists understand what additional tipping points may have been needed to trigger extinction.

This project will establish an international research network exploring the Future of the City Centre, through a partnership between Northumbria University; University of Strathclyde; University of Newcastle, Australia; University of Paraiba, Brazil; and the University of South Africa. The research network will examine how city centres are being transformed by a number of internal, external and contextual factors and the implications of these changes for the Future of the City Centre. The theoretical perspectives will involve past, present and future. Emphasis will be visions for the post-industrial, post-commercial and post-retail city. This theme and the related sub-topics will enable the development of future city models and will help to contextualise urban change. Provision for creative industries, cultural events and different forms of entertainment may offer vitality, together with visitors and responsible tourism. City authorities are starting to realise that structural changes are happening in city centres, and are responding by establishing core groups of officers to consider these issues. This proposal will provide a distinct focus on innovation for the Future of the City Centre. It will also enable academic research to inform new policies, from an inter-disciplinary perspective incorporating views from different cities. The research network is proposed at a time when governments, communities, business, artists, entertainers, historians, sociologists and others, are re-evaluating their interactions with cities. The key aim of this research network is to explore the Future of the City Centre, informed by international perspectives of expert knowledge from a range of disciplines in each locality. Invited speakers will represent education, local government, non-government organisations, business and community groups. There will be four symposiums over 24 months. They will take place in four different continents and establish a view from developed and developing countries. While individual cities cannot represent continents or even countries, they can be indicative of responses from different geographies, governance systems, cultures, heritage and populations. The UK Government Office for Science City Futures Project established Newcastle upon Tyne as pilot city. According to the United Nations, Joao Pessoa in Brazil is the second greenest city in the world. Newcastle, Australia, has established a leading smart city approach, as part of its future. Mogale City in South Africa has created an integrated development plan, as a statement of independence from Pretoria. The universities and academics chosen from the cities for this proposal are each offering distinctive perspectives. Professor Giddings promotes the arts, architecture, and urban design in the culture of communities; Professor Silva researches sustainable urbanism; Dr Jefferies investigates public and private partnerships; and Professor Rwelamila practices city management systems. In addition Dr Rogerson will offer data and methodologies from the University of Strathclyde Institute of Future Cities. Each symposium will include selected speakers who will be asked to prepare position papers to establish the context for debates on the Future of the City Centre. Speakers will represent academia, local government, non-government organisations, businesses and communities. The outcome will be possible scenarios that may be formed into the inter-disciplinary policies. It is proposed that 20 invitees will attend each symposium over a two-day period, together with open access for all interested parties. In addition to world-wide availability of the project data through the website, publications and other outputs, participants will work with their local policy makers to develop novel scenarios. The focus on exploring a range of perspectives during an era of fundamental change will assist cities around the world to re-assess their strategies.

Temperature records are critical for understanding past and future climate. However, reconstructing past temperature dynamics is incredibly difficult. Of the currently available terrestrial archives of past temperature, these are often spatially limited, suffer from ambiguity around calibration, or require large sample sizes. These issues have prevented the development of a high resolution, high density network of terrestrial temperature records. This is now often considered the single most significant gap in the palaeoclimate archive. Here, we seek to provide a breakthrough in the field of temperature reconstruction by developing a new palaeothermometer. For this, we use speleothems (cave stalagmites). Speleothems grow in layers, which can be dated like the rings in a tree. The chemistry in each layer offers an unprecedented resolution of environmental information, constrained by an absolute age model over 500,000 years. At the Lancaster Environment centre, we have recently developed a technique which allows phosphate to be extracted from the stalagmite layers. This is a critically important advance in the research field, as phosphate-oxygen isotopes are known to be controlled by temperature dynamics. Our first measurements of the phosphate-oxygen isotope composition in cave drip waters and modern cave calcite provide clear evidence that the cave temperature signal can be captured and stored within the speleothem record. As the internal temperature of shallow cave systems are known to reflect the external average air temperature (plus or minus localised effects), this provides an exciting opportunity through which a truly independent terrestrial temperature record may be built. This research aims to build and test a modern-day calibration between cave temperature and speleothem phosphate-oxygen isotopes. This will enable a platform from which precisely dated, well preserved, independent temperature records can be confidently obtained from the global archive of speleothems at a spatial and temporal scale hitherto unprecedented.

Terrorist attacks are becoming more deadly, and terrorist groups are beginning to engage in tactics with the specific aim to cause maximum casualties. Such attacks range from those targeting personnel, e.g. in crowded places such as Istanbul Airport and Manchester Arena, or those targeting infrastructure, e.g. Metrojet Flight 9268. In order to ensure that engineers provide effective and efficient protection systems, we must fully understand how a blast load develops in a complex, crowded environment, and how the presence of obstacles and obstructions alters the propagation of a blast wave. Whilst it is known that a blast wave will reflect off and diffract around an obstacle, accurate quantification of this effect and a detailed understanding of the mechanisms governing this behaviour have, to date, eluded researchers in the field of blast protection engineering. This project aims to address this knowledge gap through experimental work at a world-leading facility, involving direct measurement of blast wave parameters both at the source and downstream of the obstacle. This experimental work will be supplemented with cutting-edge numerical analysis, using tools specifically designed for simulation of blast wave propagation in complex environments. Both of these approaches will then be combined to develop generalised relationships for the interaction of blast waves with obstacles, enabling a semi-empirical tool to be developed for rapid calculation of the flow field surrounding an obstacle following detonation of a high explosive. This project aims to prove the concept of porous blast barriers, i.e. barriers comprising a series of smaller obstacles rather than a large, imposing, (typically concrete) monolithic structure. Such designs, it is envisaged, will become the next generation of urban blast protection strategies: engineered systems with tailored properties to achieved maximum blast protection, but compatible with a modern, open, green city. Blast protection systems that do not look like blast protection systems.

International research suggests that in response to climate change global cities are now engaging in strategic efforts to effect a low carbon transition. That is, to enhance resilience and secure resources in the face of the impacts of climate change, resource constraints and in relation to new government and market pressures for carbon control. But significant questions remain unexplored. First, limited research has been undertaken internationally to comparatively examine how different cities in the north and south are responding to the challenges of climate change. Second, it is not clear whether the strategic intent of low carbon transitions can be realised in different urban contexts. Consequently, we propose to establish an international network, to be undertaken between leading scholars on urban climate change responses as an important step towards addressing these deficits. The network will focus on the research and policy issues involved in comparing and researching the broader dynamics and implications of low carbon urbanism. This network includes Australia, China, India, South Africa and the US and builds on existing scholars and research teams with whom we currently have bilateral and ad hoc collaborations. Our proposed collaboration is designed to create greater density of network connections and enhancing the depth of each connection by three sets of initiatives: 1. International Networking Opportunities: The first element of the ESRC initiative will be to support significant international research opportunities for UK researchers. We will undertake programmed and structure visits to each national context to: increase knowledge of one another's research and plans; to gain intelligence about the research landscape in the partner countries in this field in order to build up a global picture of research expertise; to exchange ideas about possible future collaborative research projects; and to build personal relationships that are at the heart of successful long-distance research partnerships. 2. International Comparative Collaboration: The second element of the network is to facilitate interaction between the partners in the research network and with a wider group of UK and international researchers through two connected forum that will meet four times. A. International Research Workshops (Network partners plus other relevant UK and international researchers). These meetings will focus primarily on enhancing comparison and collaboration with a wider group of researchers but will also serve as an important opportunity for developing publications in the form of special issues and edited collections. B. Network Partners Research Forum (Network partners only). The network will also sponsor a number of much smaller research forums, focused on the network partners. These workshops will enable a structured and protected space for the partners to share the findings from their ongoing work, and to explore and examine the implications of the issues and themes emerging from the larger workshops in this context. 3. International Network Infrastructure: The third element will focus on establishing the necessary infrastructure for promoting effective international research collaboration. The network will pursue two projects. A. Information Infrastructure: Durham will establish a website that facilitates collaboration among international partners. All partner researchers and institutions will have the opportunity to present and regularly update information about their ongoing research. The website will also serve as a base for communicating about events, visits, awards, etc. The website will also host audio and video recordings of workshops. B. International Network Coordinator: Additionally Durham will support a 20% network coordinator to manage and organize the visits, workshops, teleconferences and the website.