This project aims to co-create Nature-based Solutions (NBS) knowledge to empower communities, organisations, and individuals to innovate NBS as alternatives for healthcare and societal resilience following the COVID-19 pandemic. It will take a human-centred design approach to enable wider collaboration and to integrate otherwise 'siloed' knowledge and expertise. This project is a joint-effort between the Royal College of Art, the University of Sheffield, Walsall Housing Group, Bradford City Council, Shared Assets, HAS technology, National Association of Voluntary and Community Action, and Intelligent Health. NBS are actions, e.g. ecological restoration, that work with nature to help address societal challenges. In this proposal, it refers to social innovation actions utilising green space, parks and lakes, for the purpose of health and wellbeing. It is based on the evidence that regular contact with nature enhances physical health and mental wellbeing, and creates social benefits. It expands the concept of 'green prescription' to include wider communities and public beyond patients and GPs. The main deliverables of the project are: - An integrated method supported with training webinars enabling people to innovate and improve cost-effective NBS; - An open innovation platform facilitating NBS development using the integrated method, to link available resources and different stakeholders including commissioners, providers, agencies and voluntary community action groups and individuals; - The outcome of the pilots - NBS concepts - will be implemented by Walsall Housing Group and Bradford City Council to create immediate benefit to vulnerable people in these two areas, building upon existing approaches in the creation of service directories; - One journal paper, two conference papers to examine the role of design thinking in NBS innovation.

The Yorkshire Ouse basin, which encompasses the cities of Leeds, York and Sheffield as well as the rivers Aire, Calder, Derwent, Don, Swale, Wharfe, Ure and Nidd is home to 6.7% of the UK population, 30% of the Northern Powerhouse region and includes 10 metropolitan boroughs. The region includes a variety of different environments, from large urban areas to lowland agriculture and sparsely populated uplands including National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty. As such, it is a perfect location to instigate a programme of work which uses existing NERC-funded science to identify, develop, test and improve integrated solutions on a range of environmental impacts. This encompasses mitigation of drought and flood risk through improved connectivity between weather forecasting, land management and water resource management; improvements in water quality for both human water supply and rivers/other water bodies; and better management of soils for improved regional food security and carbon storage (in woodlands and peatland). By integrating these aspects of weather, land and water, it will enable better plans to be made for the region that allow for sustainable development as the population grows whilst protecting the valuable natural environment. Ultimately, by creating a region that is better able to deal with a more variable climate, it will become an area that attracts investment as people and their businesses opt to live and work in an area that has adapted to the severe effects of environmental change, with improved quality of life. Many major global companies already have their water headquarters or global environmental head offices in the region together with a range of SMEs and large businesses whose interests include catchment management. As such, there is considerable momentum behind the Yorkshire Integrated Catchment Solutions Programme - Yorkshire iCASP - which seeks to deliver economic and social impacts to the region. Yorkshire iCASP will capitalise on existing NERC-funded science to develop tools, strategies, plans and policies to promote hazard resilience, mitigation of extreme events (floods and droughts), develop flood forecasting capability, improve water quality, enhance soils and farm practice and develop a joined-up approach for land and water management. iCASP has been co-created by partners drawn from local authorities, government agencies, major infrastructure/utility owners, private sector service providers, academic institutions, and third sector organisations who will work together to produce and deliver a work programme that seeks to enhance the economic and societal status of the region. Outcomes from the collaboration will deliver tools and techniques with applicability outside the region, creating services and products which can be used around the world to further benefit the region and the UK economy more generally. Examples of the projects that have been discussed in the work programme include development of green financing enterprises; development of new tools to better link flood forecasting with impacts on rivers and different land management practices; decision-support tools that allow different area-specific flood/drought management scenarios to be evaluated; and raw water management approaches that reduce the cost of water treatment. All will have different, and often multifaceted, impacts on society and the wider environment so another important aspect of iCASP is the documentation and evaluation of the projects implemented as part of the work programme, measuring the changes that they contribute to the regional, and national, economy as well as the growth of iCASP partners through leveraged investment, job creation and wider societal benefits.

Policing is undergoing rapid transformation. As societies face new and more complex challenges, police workloads increasingly focus on managing risks of harm to vulnerable people. At the same time, public debate voicing concerns about police priorities is rising, driven by questions about what the police do and about legitimacy in the face of discriminatory practices. Dramatic increases in complex cases coupled with cuts to public services have resulted in the police frequently acting as 'the service of first resort', at the frontline of responding to urgent social problems such as mental illness, homelessness and exploitation. The presence of such vulnerabilities draw the police into responses alongside other service providers (such as health, social care and housing) often with little clarity of roles, boundaries or shared purpose. Simultaneously, the transformation of data and its use are beginning to reshape how public services operate. They raise new questions about how to work in ethical ways with data to understand and respond to vulnerability. These shifts in police-work are mirrored around the world and pose significant challenges to how policing is undertaken and how the police interact with other public services, as well as how policing affects vulnerable people who come into contact with services. The Vulnerability and Policing Futures Research Centre aims to understand how vulnerabilities shape demand for policing and how partner organisations can prevent future harm and vulnerability through integrated public service partnerships. Rooted in rich local data collection and deep dives into specific problems, the Centre will build a knowledge base with applications and implications across the UK and beyond. It will have significant reach through collaborative work with a range of regional, national and international partners, shaping policy and practice through networks, practitioner exchanges and comparative research, and through training the next generation of scholars to take forward new approaches to vulnerabilities research and co-production with service providers, service receivers and the public. The Centre will be an international focal point for research, policy, practice and public debate. Jointly led by York and Leeds, with expertise from Durham, Lancaster, Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, UCL, Monash and Temple universities and the Police Foundation, and working with a network of 38 partners, it will explore fundamental questions regarding the role police and their partners should play in modern society. While focusing policing effort on the most vulnerable holds promise for a fairer society, targeting specific groups raises questions about who counts as vulnerable and has the potential to stigmatise and increase intervention in the lives of marginalised citizens. At a critical time of change for policing, the Centre will ensure that research, including evidence drawing on public opinion and the voices of vulnerable people, is at the heart of these debates. The Centre will undertake three interconnected strands of research. The first focuses on how vulnerability develops in urban areas, drawing together diverse public sector datasets (police, health, social services and education) to understand interactions between agencies and the potential to prevent vulnerabilities. The second explores how police and partners can best collaborate in response to specific vulnerabilities, including exploitation by County Lines drug networks, online child sexual exploitation, domestic abuse, modern slavery, mental illness and homelessness. The third will combine research into public opinion with a programme to embed research evidence into policy, practice and public debate, creating a new understanding of vulnerability and transforming capability to prevent harm and future vulnerabilities through integrated partnership working, reshaping the future of policing as a public service.

In the past four decades there has been a considerable modal shift from walking to school to going by car for primary school children in England. This has led to increased congestion and air pollution and decreased traffic safety. Meanwhile, many studies have shown the health benefits to children of active travel to school. The UK Government set a target to increase the percentage of children aged 5 to 10 that usually walk to school in England from 49% in 2014 to 55% in 2025. However, despite recent initiatives, such as the national Walk to School Outreach programme, the National Travel Survey in 2019 recorded the lowest ever percentage of primary school children walking to school at 46%. Time constraints are often cited as the main barrier to parents accompanying children in walking to school with concerns about safety deterring parents from allowing children to travel independently. This highlights that if a system of providing adult supervision for walking to school can be set up then there is good scope to increase the numbers of children walking to school. A walking school bus (WSB) involves a group of children walking to school with one or more adults and following a set route. WSBs have increased walking to school in Australia, New Zealand and the United States but the UK has not widely adopted them. Taking up WSBs in significant numbers requires a degree of organisation to establish meeting points, safe routes, adult supervisors and timetables. The proposed research will develop a planning tool to enable schools to maximise the number of children walking to school using safe routes accompanied by adults. At the heart of the tool will be an Optimisation Model that identifies walking routes to school and meeting points, while addressing multiple objectives (travel time, safety and air pollution exposure). We will develop this based on our extensive experience in developing multi-objective problem solutions for public transport scheduling and other transport and healthcare applications. The Optimisation Model will work in conjunction with a Modal Choice Model, which estimates student modal choices as input to the Optimisation Model, and with a Road Network Model, which estimates the consequences of a particular walk-to-school scenario on road network conditions. The Modal Choice Model will include a novel development recognising that decisions by parents on how their children get to school are based not only on individual considerations, such as minimising travel time, but on the opinions and choices made by other parents. This will build on the team's previous work exploring the role of social influence in travel choices. The Road Network Model will allow assessments to be made of traffic management measures that can be combined with WSBs to increase confidence in walking to school. We will design the tool so that it can be used repeatedly as circumstances change. It will be able to be used reactively for re-planning when there have been changes (e.g. children absent, new school years, etc.) or proactively to put in place 'ghost' routes/stops to attract new users where potential is identified (e.g. where there is a clustering of children or where WSBs can have maximum influence on reducing pollution near a school). Our aim is for the tool to support the work of organisations such as our Project Partner Living Streets delivering the Government's Walk to School Outreach programme. A Stakeholder Advisory Group will help steer the project. The academic team will partner with Living Streets to ensure the tool is well-grounded (for example, in terms of how parents perceive walking routes or how parents' willingness for their child to walk to school is affected by physical and social context) and is practically useful for real-world application. We will demonstrate the planning tool in Bradford where the local authority and schools have agreed to work with us in designing and applying our work.

In a circular economy value is created by keeping products and materials 'in flow' through effective recirculation and re-use to optimise their highest economic potential and minimise the use of virgin materials and external environmental costs. New construction and existing building stocks present the highest potential for circular economy innovation, value retention and creation opportunities, estimated to be worth approximately Euro 450 - 600M p.a. Innovation in the reclamation of currently hard to re-use building products - concrete, steel, brick, from end of service life (EOSL) buildings and their remanufacture into new modular products for new builds which would then be designed for future deconstruction, is therefore a major economic opportunity. REBUILD proposes that materials are directly reused and remanufactured into new builds with minimal re-processing. The project proposes a new circular economy system to address key barriers in the current linear approaches to demolition and new building construction, and build capabilities and tools to create significant new value by the early adoption of novel technologies, high value remanufacture, new system arrangements and the scaling up good practices. The magnitude of the opportunity is considerable. Existing buildings were not designed for adaptation, dis-assembly, or high value reuse. Therefore, the current option is to demolish them when they reach EOSL. In the UK approximately 50,000 buildings are demolished each year generating 45Mt of wastes, the majority of this is concrete and masonry, brick and steel. Of this 45Mt, only a small percentage is reclaimed, mostly for heritage products or easily demountable structures such as steel sections from portal frames. EOSL buildings are treated as costs to be minimised with speed of clearance commercially critical and a subsequent major loss of embedded carbon, energy, materials and potential value. For circularity to become mainstream in the building construction industry, it is imperative that barriers to reuse hard to deconstruct buildings, including using cement mortar based masonry, reinforced concrete, steel-concrete composite structures, which account for the vast majority of UK construction tonnage and cost, must be removed. REBUILD starts the process of converting all current building at the end of their first life and future buildings into material and product banks allowing the retention of high value materials and products for future repeat reuse. The cost of transport and storage means that repair, remanufacture and reuse of products to be commercially successful will need to be regional/local scale. To create demand acceptance for re-used products REBUILD testing processes are designed to demonstrate industry standards of quality assurance of technical performance. Creating demand requires a system re-design and co-ordination to integrate all the activities in the value chain including construction and manufacture, demolition and other key activities (financing, public procurement, planning), in new ways to collaborate to unlock and share value from product re-use. This integration is likely to be optimal at city scale within a circular economy regional hub. This system design will be created and modelled with our industrial stakeholders. The project will quantify, measure and evaluate the magnitude of value creation and product re-use for different system configurations and scenarios against a Business as Usual (BAU) reference case. Continual interactions with the industrial stakeholder group, and through their networks the wider construction industry, will make sure that the direction of our project stays close to industrial needs and the outcomes of our research are communicated to the industry in the most effective way.