Ageing in place is critical to the future of ageing societies in Europe. Older people's places are recognised as fundamental to longterm health and wellbeing outcomes - a fact that has been magnified during the Covid-19 pandemic. Yet, critically, almost a third of older people in Europe experience neighbourhood deprivation, a fifth encounter a lack of cohesion, a growing number are homeless, and approximately 3 million people continue to reside in institutional settings. There are significant concerns that efforts are failing to support ageing in place. With its development as a field fragmented across disciplines and sectors, and with few researchers equipped to tackle this fragmentation, innovation in research and policy risks stagnation. This is despite the renewed interest and urgency arising from the pandemic in de-institutionalizing later life residential experiences. HOMeAGE will institute an interdisciplinary, intersectoral and international programme of doctoral training and research that drives the development of new leaders in excellence for the advancement of evidence-based innovation on ageing in place. In tackling the three interconnected challenges of (1) needs and systems, (2) home and belonging and (3) rights and voice, HOMeAGE delivers a unique employability and skills development process for doctoral researchers (DRs) ensuring that they can lead the response to current research and policy deficits. HOMeAGE addresses significant demand for DRs who possess essential competencies to overcome challenges concerning Europe's demographic transition, and 'sticking points' in its developing Silver Economy. HOMeAGE directly addresses the critical priority of enabling 'older people to age in a place that is right for them' within the WHO's Global Strategy and Action Plan on Ageing. Crucially, it also addresses strategic themes in the EU Green Paper on Ageing, and key goals within the UN Sustainable Development Agenda concerning equity and sustainability.

The future of treescapes belongs to children and young people. Yet there is a lack of interdisciplinary research that explores their engagement with treescapes over time. This project aims to re-imagine future treescapes with children and young people, working with local and national partners including Natural England, Forest Research and the Community Forests and Scottish stakeholders. We will identify opportunities and barriers to treescape expansion and pilot innovative child and youth-focused pathways to realising this goal. We will create curricula material which will be disseminated with the support of our project partners, Early Childhood Outdoors and the Chartered College of Teachers. The aim of this project is to integrate children and young people's knowledge, experiences, and hopes with scientific knowledge of how trees adapt to and mitigate climate change in order to co-produce new approaches to creating and caring for resilient treescapes that benefit the environment and society. Drawing on interdisciplinary approaches and in collaboration with stakeholders, the team will produce a 'lexicon of experience' that captures the ecological identities of children and young people. An audit of existing activity in the field of activism and treescapes, with a particular focus on marginalised groups, will inform the project. In particular, the project will produce new material for use by practitioners, educators and policy makers that will inform future treescape planting and will be rolled out nationally, with the help of our project partners. Novel methods for assessing carbon storage in trees and soil will inform a 'tree-twinning' project to enable children and young people to recognise how they can relate to treescapes. Children and young people will draw on the scientific work together with their lived experience to balance their evolving carbon footprint with the changing treescapes they have partnered with. New treescapes will be planted with the help of Community Forests and local authorities. Learning will be enhanced by the scientific project on tree-twinning, embedded within the project, to advance knowledge about the relationship between climate science and urban trees. This research will be carried out with children and young people as co-researchers. The project will focus on hope as a vital ingredient of future planning and philosophically and practically create a set of actions to look to the future while addressing temporalities, including past archival work on trees. It will work with cohorts of young people across early years, primary, secondary and young people out of school, as well as families and communities, to think about and engage with treescapes, to plan as well as plant new treescapes and to engage in treescape thinking and curricula innovation. Working with Natural England as project partners, a toolkit will be developed to guide this work and a set of resources and outputs to be rolled out nationally that inspire and inform future generations of children and young people to become involved in treescapes, which will re-shape the disciplinary landscape of treescapes research and inform policy and practice. Community forest planners, policy-makers and practitioners will better understand how to engage children and young people in treescapes and how to work with their knowledges to inspire and inform future generations. Innovative approaches to arts and humanities, environmental science and social science will produce a new understanding of how combining disciplines can further treescape research with children and young people. The project will also advance methodological understandings of the relationship between children and young people and treescapes with a focus on co-production and attending to lived experience while conducting environmental scientific research. New knowledge in the fields of environmental and social science will create new disciplinary paradigms and concepts.

VENTURA is a digital service based on interdisciplinary systems approaches to infrastructure that allows end-users to explore housing and water system planning options through a virtual participatory process supported by state-of-the-art process-driven models. The research involves co-creating a web-based and end-user led prototype called a virtual decision room (VDR) to help movements towards a sustainable digital society. The VDR will be co-created with local government, the local community, regulators and water utility companies ('end-users') to collaboratively plan and evaluate the environmental sustainability of urban growth planning scenarios using co-designed water neutrality indicators during the project. The VDR will use a whole-water system Digital Twin (FuturaWat) that supports evidence-led water neutral planning for place making. This will be achieved by integrating two state-of-art digital tools: GIS-based ground risk calculator (GRISC) and whole-water system model (CityWat) with a participatory process to facilitate end-user discussion and decision-making on housing and water system planning scenarios. The key novelty of the proposed research is in applying systems approaches to infrastructure planning, collaborative working and sustainability evaluation. The VDR will be tested by applying it to Greater Manchester and London Borough of Enfield case study examples to enable end-users to align their strategic planning and water management priorities. The VENTURA concept was co-developed with our project partners, who have helped us formulate Greater Manchester (GM) and London Borough of Enfield (LBE) case examples. In GM the work will directly support the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) 'levelling up' strategies and help them to holistically address 'challenges to delivery when considering wider issues such as flood risk, brownfield land remediation, environmental degradation and wider resilience to climate change'. The LBE case example will support Enfield Council in their transition to a digital platform that will enable correlation of infrastructure needs with investment opportunities and help them to more effectively engage with local communities and discuss local plans, which currently do not include water demand and water quality evaluation because of lack of evidence. Both case examples will explicitly account for community perspectives through collaborations with partner local NGOs: Thames21 (LBE) and The Mersey Rivers Trust (GM). VENTURA directly addresses the current UK Government's high-profile strategic initiatives including 'Planning for the future' White Paper and the National Digital Twin Programme. In particular, VENTURA provides a proof-of-concept for the White Paper's highly ambitious proposals that seek to reduce the duration of the planning cycle significantly, supporting net gains in the quality of the environment and front-loading public engagement in the planning system to the plan-making stage of place-making. The research will adapt traditional working practices to help the work become more sustainable. This will be formalised through the development of a sustainability policy for the research and will include initiatives such as monitoring and managing environmental performance by embedding into project management, reporting progress and sharing good practice with other EPSRC projects.

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.

Urban environments are home to the majority of people on the planet and so ensuring these systems provide healthy, productive and resilient environments is critical. Green infrastructure - which we define as a network of multi-functional green space and other green features - is a key component of urban systems and the main reservoirs of much urban biodiversity. But how do we manage green infrastructure to maximise the benefits these features bring to humans and wider ecosystem functioning? Here we focus on gaining a better predictive understanding of diversity associated with green infrastructure can be optimised to enhance ecosystem services. Biodiversity is widely recognised to be a key driver of multiple ecosystem functions (i.e. ecosystem multifunctionality), underpinning the provision of numerous ecosystem services for humanity, as well as undesirable disservices. Manipulation of biodiversity therefore has considerable potential to significantly improve how we construct and manage engineered and urban ecosystems. A major gap in knowledge hampering our ability to harness the benefits of biodiversity in urban areas is understanding how attributes particular to green infrastructure in urban environments affect biodiversity-ecosystem multifunctionality relationships. This knowledge is important for the design and management of urban green infrastructure to maximise ecosystem service provision in wider urban landscapes. Moreover, the mechanisms by which landscape form and biodiversity influence ecosystem services and mitigate against disservices operate at different scales, and we lack understanding of how these mechanisms operate and scale in urban landscapes. A further gap in knowledge is how the diversity of urban forms interact with the diversity of neighbouring peri-urban and rural forms to affect ecosystem services and disservices in urban landscapes. Here we address these gaps in knowledge to understand how biodiversity can be used to enhance ecosystem multifunctionality in urban landscapes at contrasting scales. We focus on ecosystem services of carbon capture, cycling and storage, urban cooling, and water holding capacity, and disservices of greenhouse gas emissions, pathogen prevalence, and tick-borne pathogens; these services and disservices are intrinsically linked to green infrastructure and there is an established mechanistic basis for a link to biodiversity. We will integrate knowledge of biodiversity-ecosystem multifunctionality relationships into a modelling framework that will be used to create a web-based planning tool to determine how planning scenarios affect urban ecosystem multifunctionality. Our findings will contribute to the development of enabling mechanisms, with a focus on urban land use and green infrastructure planning, to enhance the contribution made by local scale green infrastructure interventions to wider landscape scale processes and the resilience of urban ecosystems.