We live in the critical decade for climate change. The world increasingly experiences the damages and losses from extreme weather events caused by human-made climate change. Crop losses, devastating floods, catastrophic wildfires and rising sea levels cannot be ignored. If we do not achieve a balance between our greenhouse gas emissions and removals from the air, these impacts will become considerably worse and more dangerous. The UK has legally committed to achieving a net zero greenhouse gas balance by 2050. However, it is currently hotly debated how this goal can be achieved. The Land Use for Net Zero (LUNZ) Hub brings together researchers, policy-makers, industry leaders, innovators and rural community representatives from all four nations of the UK. Our 33 member organisations include researchers and practitioners from green finance, agricultural advisory organisations, NGOs, and an arts collective. The goal of the LUNZ hub is to accelerate positive land use change that reduces harmful greenhouse gas emissions, increases food security and restores a healthy environment for plants, animals and people. The Hub will equip UK policy-makers, industry and stakeholders with the advice they need, in the format and timeframe they require, to take policy decisions to help avert dangerous climate change and lead to a better future. We will bring together scientific evidence and stakeholder perspectives to define shared, net zero scenarios (plausible alternative futures)and credible pathways (steps including policies and incentives) to achieve them by 2050. The Hub will establish an Agile Policy Centre, a Net Zero Futures Platform, and a Creative Methods Lab. Within the Hub, our four National Teams will work together with our Topic Expert Groups to build capacity for a Just Transition to net zero that benefits people and planet alike. The Hub will support the UK Government and the devolved administrations in achieving multiple environmental goals by understanding the impacts of policy decisions on all relevant aspects, including renewable energy, agriculture, planning frameworks, afforestation, water management, nature conservation, biodiversity, and rural economies. The Hub will work on several priority policy areas: 1. Land use change that benefits the environment and is socially just, leading to ecosystem co-benefits such as biodiversity, soil health, human health and wellbeing, and green growth at national, regional and local levels; 2. Future agricultural, environmental and food policies that deliver a net zero future, building on the Agriculture Act 2020, Environment Act 2021, Agriculture Bill 2022 (Wales) and 2023 (Scotland), including future sources of finance, payment schemes and measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase removals while strengthening food security, biodiversity and land-based businesses (e.g. farms, crofts, forestry); 3. Integrating policy with carbon and natural capital markets, to ensure that the drivers and mechanisms for on-the-ground transformation work together for optimal outcomes. Achieving net zero by 2050 will require new technologies and practices which lower greenhouse gas emissions. These will include soil improvement practices, peatland protection and restoration, removal of greenhouse gases from the air and decarbonising our economy, large-scale tree-planting to take up carbon from the air, creation and restoration of habitats, transitioning to a circular economy, and significantly reduce food waste and consumption of higher emitting foodstuffs. To cover these diverse areas the Hub is comprised of the primary players in the UKRI AgriFood for Net Zero Network+, Landscape Decisions Programme, and principal investigators from Greenhouse Gas Removals, Changing the Environment, Digital Environment, AI for Net Zero, and Treescapes Programmes. This team have the experience and expertise to bring together a single voice of authority for Net Zero transformation in the UK.

Sea and society interact most strongly at the coast where communities both benefit from and are threatened by the marine environment. Coastal flooding was the second highest risk after pandemic flu on the UK government's risk register in 2017. Over 1.8 million homes are at risk of coastal flooding and erosion in England alone. Extreme events already have very significant impacts at the coast, with the damage due to coastal flooding during the winter 2013/14 in excess of £500 million, and direct economic impacts exceeding £260 million per year on average. Coastal hazards will be increasing over the next century primarily driven by unavoidable sea level rise. At the same time, the UK is committed to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050. It is therefore essential to ensure that UK coasts are managed so that coastal protection is resilient to future climate and the net zero ambition is achieved. Protecting the coast by maintaining hard 'grey' defences in all locations currently planned is unlikely to be cost-effective. Sustainable coastal management and adaptation will therefore require a broader range of actions, and greater use of softer 'green' solutions that work with nature, are multifunctional, and can deliver additional benefits. Examples already exist and include managed realignment, restoration of coastal habitats, and sand mega-nourishments. However, the uptake of green solutions remains patchy. According to the Committee on Climate Change, the uptake of managed realignment is five times too slow to meet the stated 2030 target. Reasons are complex and span the whole human-environment system. Nature-based solutions often lack support from public opinion and meet social resistance. Despite removing long-term commitment to hard defences, the economic justification for green approaches remains uncertain due to high upfront costs, difficulty in valuing the multiple co-benefits offered, and uncertainties inherent to future environmental and socio-economic projections. The frameworks used to support present day coastal management and policy making (e.g. Shoreline Management Plans) do not provide comprehensive and consistent approaches to resolve these issues. Consequences are that the effectiveness of these policy approaches is reduced. Delivering sustainable management of UK coasts will therefore require new frameworks that embrace the whole complex human-environment system and provide thorough scientific underpinning to determine how different value systems interact with decision making, how climate change will impact coastal ecosystem services, and how decision support tools can combine multiple uncertainties. Co-Opt will deliver a new integrated and interdisciplinary system-based framework that will effectively support the required transition from hard 'grey' defences to softer 'green' solutions in coastal and shoreline management. This framework will combine for the first time a conceptual representation of the complex coastal socio-ecological system, quantitative valuation of coastal ecosystem services under a changing climate, and the characterisation of how social perceptions and values influence both previous elements. Our new framework will be demonstrated for four case studies in the UK in collaboration with national, regional, and local stakeholders. This will provide a scalable and adaptive solution to support coastal management and policy development. Co-Opt has been co-designed with project partners essential to the implementation and delivery of coastal and shoreline management (e.g. Environment Agency, Natural Resources Wales, NatureScot, coastal groups) and will address their specific needs including development of thorough cost-benefit analyses and recommendations for action plans when preferred policy changes. Co-Opt will further benefit the broad coastal science base by supporting more integrated and interdisciplinary characterisation of the complex coastal human-environment system.

By 2050 it's estimated >400 GW of energy will be gathered by offshore wind across the whole North Sea. For scale, Hinkley Point C nuclear reactor is projected to produce 3.2 GW. How will this increased anthropogenic use of our coastal seas impact already stressed marine ecosystems? And how will that same production of renewable energy offset risks of extreme climate change that, left unchecked, will increase the risk of biodiversity declines. There are many complex changes to ecosystems linked to Offshore Wind Farms (OWFs) that we need to understand now, so that the extent of increasing wind energy extraction further offshore is managed in the most sustainable way. An important effect of large wind energy extraction will be to reduce the amount of energy that would normally go into local ocean currents via surface stress, altering sea state and mixing. Conversely, there will be local increases in turbulence around turbine structures and seabed scouring near fixed foundations. Any change in ocean mixing may change the timing, distribution and diversity of phytoplankton primary production, the base of the food chain for marine ecosystems, to some degree. This has knock-on-effects on the diversity, health and locations of pelagic fish that are critical prey species of commercial fish, seabirds and marine mammals. Observed changes caused by operational OWFs in the southern North Sea include local surface temperature rise and the displacement of seabirds and fishing fleets from the OWF footprint, whereas seals often appear to be feeding near turbines. All of these changes have a linked component - important prey fish species - which are likely to aggregate near structures (as seen at other offshore platforms). Seabirds and fishing fleets subsequently have less space to hunt, with potentially increased competition for fish. However, if OWFs are also de facto marine protected areas and so positively affect local primary production, they may provide good habitat for fish population growth. So, what are the cumulative effects of current OWF developments and the thousands of additional planned structures? Do the physical, biogeochemical and ecosystem changes exacerbate or mitigate those resulting from climate change? As OWFs migrate further offshore as floating structures, how can current knowledge based on shallow, coastal fixed turbines be suitably extrapolated to understand the impacts on ecosystems dependent on seasonal cycles that are typical of deeper waters? PELAgIO will address all of these questions through an interdisciplinary, multi-scale observation and modelling framework that spans physical mixing through to plankton production, on to the response of fish and whole ecosystems. We will collect fine-scale data using the latest multi-instrumented acoustic platforms set beside and away from OWFs, complemented by autonomous surface and submarine robots to capture continuous and coincident data from physics to fish, over multiple scales and seasons to fully understand what is 'different' inside an OWF and how big its footprint is. These new data will test the effects on seabirds and marine mammals to build an OWF ecosystem parameterization that accounts for changes to mixing and wind deficit impacts, and is scalable to next-generation OWFs. This bottom-up, comprehensive approach will enable true calibration and validation of 3D ocean-biogeochemical-sediment modelling systems, from the scale of turbine foundations up to the regional and even cross-shelf scales. Identified changes will be integrated into Bayesian ecosystem models that enable the cumulative effects of ecological, social and economic trade-offs of different policy approaches for OWFs to be quantifiably assessed for present day conditions, during extreme events and under climate change.

Conservation organisations are concerned with the protection of natural habitats and species, for their intrinsic value, the services they provide humanity and for their amenity value. Under international and local statutes, conservation organisations are obliged to prevent wild habitats from becoming degraded and halt or reverse the decline of species of conservation concern. This job is increasingly difficult given the extent of degradation and fragmentation of habitats and the threat of global changes, such as climate change. Until now, conservationists have been mainly concerned with habitats and species, and have neglected to consider a third strand of biodiversity called 'genetic diversity'. Genetic diversity can be found in all species. It is variation among individuals in DNA sequences that cause differences in their physical attributes, and is responsible for the familial resemblance among relatives. Genetic diversity is relevant to conservation in a number of ways. Firstly, many populations of endangered species are isolated and consist of small numbers of individuals. These populations often have little genetic variation, and this can hamper their ability to adapt to changing environmental conditions through natural selection. Adaptation is key to success in conservation, because without it, species will be prone to extinction under environmental changes such as climate change. Secondly, small or isolated populations often consist of closely related individuals, and mating among these close-relatives can lead to inbred offspring that suffer immediate health problems. This can act as an additional burden on endangered species, making their populations more difficult to conserve. Thirdly, similar problems can occur due to inter-mating between very divergent populations. This may occur if human-aided movement of species brings previously separated populations into contact. Although these types of genetic problems are relatively well understood, there is no generic framework for assessing which species are at risk of which genetic problems, or decision-making tools to guide management actions. In addition, conservationists may be disinclined to incorporate these genetics problems into their action plans, because jargon and terminology in genetics can make the field inaccessible to conservationists without a genetics background. Our aim in this project is to enhance dialogue and the exchange of knowledge between researchers interested in genetic biodiversity, and wildlife conservationists. In doing this we will facilitate improved strategies to conserve species and enable the best use of genetic data in conservation programmes. Firstly we will develop a working group consisting of geneticists and conservationists to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas, ensuring that geneticists are aware of the key conservation challenges, and conservationists are aware of when genetic information is likely to be useful. Secondly, we will evaluate previously published genetic information to fill gaps in understanding, and to determine when genetic problems are most likely. Thirdly we will develop a mechanism to assess the risk of genetic problems faced by any individual species, and link this to a framework recommending the best course to alleviate these problems. We will then test and refine this approach using species of conservation importance in the UK. Our fourth objective will provide standard protocols for choosing the sources of individuals for human-aided movement of plants or animals from one place to another. We will develop a system for recording the success and failure of these translocations to better inform future guidelines. Finally, our key goal is to make all of this information accessible. We will produce user-friendly handbooks aimed at explaining genetic issues in conservation, and will produce web-pages to assist conservation managers develop management strategies that incorporate genetic approaches.

TRACC is a highly ambitious, innovative project delivering transdisciplinary approaches for coastal resilience governance co-designed and implemented across all four UK nations. We have an outstanding project team, drawn from across academia, government agencies, NGOs and local communities, that will create a step change in our understanding and management of coastal community resilience in the UK. Specific objectives are: Build transdisciplinary theory and practices for coastal resilience across diverse stakeholders and within the project team (WP0). Co-design and test novel transdisciplinary research-governance approaches and tools across four RCs, through co-creation of transdisciplinary actions plans and learning cycles between researchers, citizens, stakeholders, policymakers, and the coastal environment itself, to address policy challenges around coastal resilience and a just transition (WP1, WP6). Co-develop narratives of resilience and sustainability with diverse social and cultural groups, stakeholders, and policy makers across multiple coastal communities, and consider to what degree different narratives are reflected in current policy, management, and institutions, with particular attention to questions of power, values, and justice (WP2, WP3); Assess the multiple broad and specific values of natural capital, nature more broadly, and community resilience, and their relation to wellbeing, by linking ecological modelling and economic, creative, interpretative, and deliberative approaches (WP2, WP3); Develop a multiple evidence-based approach to underpin values-based transformative coastal governance, including through developing effective methodologies for increasing ocean-climate literacy, integrating local knowledge and transdisciplinary and cross-sectoral knowledge exchange (WP4, WP5); Appraise the potential of key leverage points and barriers for place- and values-based transformative coastal governance, and effectively build capacity to address them, including through an innovative Resilience Assembly connecting different locations (WP5); Upscale learning and amplify impacts through effective networking and deliberative social learning between coastal and estuary partnerships, other coastal groupings and national stakeholders and agencies (WP6).