Green infrastructure (GI) is recognised globally as an essential component of liveable and sustainable places. It is generally defined as encompassing most vegetated elements in the built environment, for example trees, shrubs, wetlands and other planting. It is widely acknowledged that GI provides numerous benefits to health and well-being and there is a substantial body of research demonstrating these benefits. Despite this there is still considerable uncertainty amongst the multiple stakeholders of 'what good GI is'. Currently, there is no overarching benchmark or standard for GI. This Innovation Fund will address this by developing a national benchmark for GI. The Centre for Sustainable Planning and Environments at the University of the West of England, Bristol are already developing a local benchmark for GI with the Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust through a Knowledge Transfer Partnership. This benchmark is, however, focussed on local priorities in Gloucestershire and the West of England. This Innovation Fund will expand the local benchmark to ensure it can be used across England in a wider range of GI initiatives. This benchmark will allow an assessment of the process of GI creation, from policy, through to planning, design, delivery and long-term management, ensuring that current good practice has been adopted at all stages. The stakeholders, or end-users, for the national benchmark include planners, property developers, ecologists, urban designers, landscape architects, engineers, public health professionals, urban foresters, community safety officers and maintenance contractors. The objectives are as follows: - To work with a range of end-users to expand the local benchmark into a national benchmark and ensure that it is fit-for-purpose and user-friendly. - To apply this national benchmark to a series of GI demonstration projects including new commercial and residential developments and retrofitting initiatives across England to demonstrate its effectiveness. The national benchmark will then be formally launched and made available online for anyone to use for free. User documentation and reports detailing the demonstration projects will be available on a website for the benchmark. The outcome of the Innovation Fund is ultimately the delivery of high quality GI. This will maximise the benefits provided by GI including to nature conservation, health and well-being, economic growth, climate change adaptation and resilience. The key impacts include: Allowing developers to demonstrate to planning authorities, stakeholders and customers that they are providing high quality GI, which will act as a selling point for their developments. Enabling local authorities to communicate their expectations for GI in new developments and retrofitting projects (e.g. of social housing) and its maintenance; easily identify those planning applications that are meeting their requirements for the GI elements of developments; and demonstrate the quality of their own GI assets. Allowing built environment consultants to demonstrate compliance with a respected and recognised benchmark to their clients. Enabling policy makers to develop more effective policies, by being able to specify their expectations for GI at a national and local level in a range of contexts. This will improve clarity on the requirements for GI. Benefit residents and communities in both new and existing neighbourhoods who will gain from the provision of high quality GI and the associated benefits. This will ultimately improve, for example, their quality of life, health and well-being, environmental quality, resilience to climate change and the local economy. Benefit broader society which will have more consistent access to high quality GI and the associated positive outcomes from this including, for example, improved population health and well-being, inward investment, biodiversity, climate change adaptation and environmental justice.

Urban areas are concentrations of vulnerability to climate change. Examples of impacts of climate change in urban areas include excessive heat, water scarcity and flooding. Whilst it is impossible to attribute individual extreme events to climate change, recent events including the 2003 heat wave that struck Paris and other European cities, and hurricane Katrina in New Orleans have illustrated the potential for large scale weather-related disruption of urban function, from which it may take months or years to recover. In recognition of the significance of climate change in urban areas, from the points of view of both adaptation and mitigation, in 2005 the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research launched a new research programme on Engineering Urban Systems . Building on the previous success of the Tyndall Centre in interdisciplinary integrated assessment, the Tyndall Centre Cities Programme brought together research expertise from seven universities (four of which are represented in the ARCADIA project) and a high profile stakeholder group to develop an Urban Integrated Assessment Facility (UIAF) that simulates long term changes in urban areas and can be used as a platform for testing the effectiveness of adaptation and mitigation strategies. The ARCADIA project will launch an ambitious new phase of development of the Tyndall Centre UIAF in order to understand better the vulnerability and resilience of urban areas. The ARCADIA project is highly interdisciplinary and involves input from an influential group of stakeholders from business and local and central government, with interests in planning, infrastructure, the built environment and climate change adaptation and mitigation. This group will work with the research team to ensure that the project is orientated towards user needs. Indeed the first research task will involve close work with stakeholders to understand how the advance modelling tools being developed in the Tyndall Centre can best inform decision making. Task 2 will identify the various direct and indirect modes in which climate impacts disrupt urban function and will go on to examine potential adaptation mechanisms and barriers to adaptation. In Task 3 the Tyndall Centre will team up with the Climatic Research Unit at UEA and the Met Office Hadley Centre to develop new probabilistic scenarios for urban areas that are consistent with UKCIP08. Task 4 will model the relationship between climate impacts and the urban economy, in order to identify how the economy may be disrupted by climate change. By analysing change in the economy through time and interactions between economic sectors, we will understand better how the urban economy can be made more resilient. Task 5 will combine the economic model developed in Task 4 with a new model of the spatial planning of buildings and infrastructure in urban areas. As well as identifying concentrations of vulnerability, this will enable the simulation of potential redesign of the built environment under different scenarios of climate and other drivers such as employment and changes to the transport system.The final research task will, working with stakeholders, use the new understanding of the vulnerability of urban systems to analyse how adaptation of urban areas can enhance resilience over a range of timescales. The objective will be to make practical proposals for 'adaptation pathways' for cities over the 21st Century to respond strategically to the challenges of flooding, water scarcity and extremes of heat.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

National infrastructure (NI) systems (energy, transport, water, waste and ICT) in the UK and in advanced economies globally face serious challenges. The 2009 Council for Science and Technology (CST) report on NI in the UK identified significant vulnerabilities, capacity limitations and a number of NI components nearing the end of their useful life. It also highlighted serious fragmentation in the arrangements for infrastructure provision in the UK. There is an urgent need to reduce carbon emissions from infrastructure, to respond to future demographic, social and lifestyle changes and to build resilience to intensifying impacts of climate change. If this process of transforming NI is to take place efficiently, whilst also minimising the associated risks, it will need to be underpinned by a long-term, cross-sectoral approach to understanding NI performance under a range of possible futures. The 'systems of systems' analysis that must form the basis for such a strategic approach does not yet exist - this inter-disciplinary research programme will provide it.The aim of the UK Infrastructure Transitions Research Consortium is to develop and demonstrate a new generation of system simulation models and tools to inform analysis, planning and design of NI. The research will deal with energy, transport, water, waste and ICT systems at a national scale, developing new methods for analysing their performance, risks and interdependencies. It will provide a virtual environment in which we will test strategies for long term investment in NI and understand how alternative strategies perform with respect to policy constraints such as reliability and security of supply, cost, carbon emissions, and adaptability to demographic and climate change.The research programme is structured around four major challenges:1. How can infrastructure capacity and demand be balanced in an uncertain future? We will develop methods for modelling capacity, demand and interdependence in NI systems in a compatible way under a wide range of technological, socio-economic and climate futures. We will thereby provide the tools needed to identify robust strategies for sustainably balancing capacity and demand.2. What are the risks of infrastructure failure and how can we adapt NI to make it more resilient?We will analyse the risks of interdependent infrastructure failure by establishing network models of NI and analysing the consequences of failure for people and the economy. Information on key vulnerabilities and risks will be used to identify ways of adapting infrastructure systems to reduce risks in future.3. How do infrastructure systems evolve and interact with society and the economy? Starting with idealised simulations and working up to the national scale, we will develop new models of how infrastructure, society and the economy evolve in the long term. We will use the simulation models to demonstrate alternative long term futures for infrastructure provision and how they might be reached.4. What should the UK's strategy be for integrated provision of NI in the long term? Working with a remarkable group of project partners in government and industry, we will use our new methods to develop and test alternative strategies for Britain's NI, building an evidence-based case for a transition to sustainability. We will analyse the governance arrangements necessary to ensure that this transition is realisable in practice.A Programme Grant provides the opportunity to work flexibly with key partners in government and industry to address research challenges of national importance in a sustained way over five years. Our ambition is that through development of a new generation of tools, in concert with our government and industry partners, we will enable a revolution in the strategic analysis of NI provision in the UK, whilst at the same time becoming an international landmark programme recognised for novelty, research excellence and impact.