Many countries with a sea border need manmade defences to protect them from coastal hazards such as flooding. In the UK 3200 kilometres of coastline are defended, particularly in seaside towns and cities. This is to prevent flooding and to protect people, property and infrastructure from the harm caused by large waves that can occur when a severe storm happens at the same time as a high tide. Building strong coastal defences can be costly, often about £10,000 per meter, and needs careful planning. When planning coastal defences a lot of data are needed to understand the potential hazards that might occur in decades to come. To obtain this data for a particular site usually means monitoring the local tides, wave heights, and beach levels for a period of 5 to 10 years. These data are used in numerical tools (e.g. EurOtop) to test which seawall design is most suitable and how high it needs to be to provide protection for the next 100 years. The tools do this by estimating the "overtopping hazard" for each design, i.e. what volume of water might come over the wall during storm conditions. Accuracy of the tools is assessed by checking outputs against measurements of overtopping volumes during storms. Field experiments have previously used large tanks placed behind the seawall to catch the water that comes over. Such experiments are very costly and can be difficult to do, so only a few have been made - usually at sites with very different structures (e.g. dikes) and for only a few days. They also only provide a limited amount of data and none at all on the speed of the water that overtops: an important factor for public safety. This lack of measurements means there is large uncertainty in the numerical estimates of the hazards, so sea defences are overdesigned to have large safety margins and may therefore cost much more than they need to. This project aims to take a low-cost instrument that has previously been used to measure waves in the open ocean, and convert it into a system ("WireWall") that will measure coastal overtopping hazard. Recent improvements in technology now make it possible to measure at the very high frequencies required to record the fast moving overtopping water (a few hundred times a second for a jet of water travelling up to 100 mph). The system will employ a 3-dimensional grid of capacitance wires that sense contact with saltwater. This signal will be used to measure the volume and speed of overtopping at vulnerable locations on the 900-meter-long seawall at Crosby in the North West of England. This seawall is reaching the end of its design life and intense monitoring of the local conditions has begun to aid the design of a new wall. This project includes engineers, environmental hydraulics experts and oceanographers who have complementary field, laboratory and modelling expertise. Our project partners (Sefton Council, Environment Agency, Balfour Beatty, Marlan Maritime Technologies and Channel Coastal Observatory) are involved in commissioning, designing and constructing coastal defences, and include government authorities and private consultancies. They will provide existing monitoring data at Crosby, and will advise on the methods and tools routinely used in the design of a new seawall. We will use this information to optimise the configuration of the WireWall system and its deployment at Crosby. Data obtained by WireWall will improve the tools used when designing the new seawall by calibrating the numerical estimates of overtopping hazards to those observed. In the future WireWall could be incorporated into new seawall structures to enable long-term monitoring. The ability to observe trends and abrupt changes in hazardous conditions (due to defence degradation, climate change and sea level rise) would support shoreline management plans and provide data to validate operational flood forecasting systems. Keywords: Shoreline monitoring; Coastal defence; Wave overtopping hazard

Many countries with a sea border need manmade defences to protect them from coastal hazards such as flooding. In the UK 3200 kilometres of coastline are defended, particularly in seaside towns and cities. This is to prevent flooding and to protect people, property and infrastructure from the harm caused by large waves that can occur when a severe storm happens at the same time as a high tide. Building strong coastal defences can be costly, often about £10,000 per meter, and needs careful planning. When planning coastal defences a lot of data are needed to understand the potential hazards that might occur in decades to come. To obtain this data for a particular site usually means monitoring the local tides, wave heights, and beach levels for a period of 5 to 10 years. These data are used in numerical tools (e.g. EurOtop) to test which seawall design is most suitable and how high it needs to be to provide protection for the next 100 years. The tools do this by estimating the "overtopping hazard" for each design, i.e. what volume of water might come over the wall during storm conditions. Accuracy of the tools is assessed by checking outputs against measurements of overtopping volumes during storms. Field experiments have previously used large tanks placed behind the seawall to catch the water that comes over. Such experiments are very costly and can be difficult to do, so only a few have been made - usually at sites with very different structures (e.g. dikes) and for only a few days. They also only provide a limited amount of data and none at all on the speed of the water that overtops: an important factor for public safety. This lack of measurements means there is large uncertainty in the numerical estimates of the hazards, so sea defences are overdesigned to have large safety margins and may therefore cost much more than they need to. This project aims to take a low-cost instrument that has previously been used to measure waves in the open ocean, and convert it into a system ("WireWall") that will measure coastal overtopping hazard. Recent improvements in technology now make it possible to measure at the very high frequencies required to record the fast moving overtopping water (a few hundred times a second for a jet of water travelling up to 100 mph). The system will employ a 3-dimensional grid of capacitance wires that sense contact with saltwater. This signal will be used to measure the volume and speed of overtopping at vulnerable locations on the 900-meter-long seawall at Crosby in the North West of England. This seawall is reaching the end of its design life and intense monitoring of the local conditions has begun to aid the design of a new wall. This project includes engineers, environmental hydraulics experts and oceanographers who have complementary field, laboratory and modelling expertise. Our project partners (Sefton Council, Environment Agency, Balfour Beatty, Marlan Maritime Technologies and Channel Coastal Observatory) are involved in commissioning, designing and constructing coastal defences, and include government authorities and private consultancies. They will provide existing monitoring data at Crosby, and will advise on the methods and tools routinely used in the design of a new seawall. We will use this information to optimise the configuration of the WireWall system and its deployment at Crosby. Data obtained by WireWall will improve the tools used when designing the new seawall by calibrating the numerical estimates of overtopping hazards to those observed. In the future WireWall could be incorporated into new seawall structures to enable long-term monitoring. The ability to observe trends and abrupt changes in hazardous conditions (due to defence degradation, climate change and sea level rise) would support shoreline management plans and provide data to validate operational flood forecasting systems. Keywords: Shoreline monitoring; Coastal defence; Wave overtopping hazard

This project aims to help young people understand how climate change will shape the future of Morecambe Bay and the communities that inhabit it. By bringing together information on past and future coastal changes, and personal histories, this project will reflect on alternative futures and different ways to build community preparedness to environmental challenges. Current predictions show the significant impact that sea level rise and extreme weather events will have on coastal areas worldwide. However, what exactly will happen to individual coastal communities will vary greatly, and will largely depend on local geology, climate, infrastructures and community preparedness. Shoreline management plans presenting regional risk assessment and strategies are available, but the specialised formats and the language used in these documents make them effectively inaccessible to the public. In addition, these documents disregard the perspectives of coastal communities, and the tacit knowledge developed by people who have been affected by flooding and weather events in the past. Collecting localised knowledge and making it readable to the lay public is essential both to understand the impact of climate change in specific places and to inform local policies and public participation in decision making. In this project, students at Lancaster Our Lady's College, Morecambe Bay Academy, Carnforth High School, and Lancaster and Morecambe College will work with researchers in design, computing, and environmental science to create visualisations of place-specific coastal pasts and futures based on an innovative interdisciplinary methodology that brings together predictive models, citizen science, and ethnographic approaches. These visualisations will be presented as reels of stereographs accompanied by zines (also produced by the students) telling stories of coastal pasts and futures. They will reveal stories, questions, and images co-produced by researchers and young people, based on data collected in the first stage of the project. Each zine will feature a map indicating the coastal location of the stereoscope to use for bringing the visualisations to life. When looked at through the corresponding stereoscope, the images printed on the reel will appear as tri-dimensional visualisations. A sensor will also activate an audio track with sounds, stories, and critical questions for the audience. These audio-visual 'Timescapes' will be displayed during a Coastal Futures Festival as site-specific installations, which will enable members of the public to look at their surroundings through the lenses of costal change. This is an innovative approach, which enables students to design and produce the tools that are used to create immersive visualisations. The project appropriates the optical and mechanical tools of stereoscopy for a novel, creative purpose. No programming, proprietary software, or expensive equipment will be necessary, and young people will have full control over the whole process. As part of the Coastal Futures Festival, students will be engaged in a programme of talks and events in which they will share their visualisations with local councils, and environmental groups, including Environment Agency, North West Coastal Group & Forum, Heysham Heritage Centre, Lancashire Archives, and Lancaster City Council. The event will act as a catalyst for conversations on local futures and the role that public and professional bodies and members of the community can play in planning for response and adaptation to climate change, showing clear pathways for how young people can play an active role in these processes.

As shown by the Chief Medical Officer's 2021 report, coastal communities suffer some of the worst health outcomes in the country, and significant inequalities(1). In coastal towns, poverty, poor housing, limited opportunities and a low-wage economy(2) result in lower life expectancy and higher rates of major diseases compared to inland neighbours. Meanwhile, health services are overstretched(1). Creative community assets such as arts and culture organisations have the potential to improve lives(3), and Integrated Care Systems (ICSs) aim to integrate community assets with preventive interventions and health and social care. However, collaboration between NHS, local authorities, universities, voluntary and community sector and residents is challenging because of differences in organisational objectives, structure, and culture. We need to understand how these stakeholders can come together to improve people's health. Our approach Building on our work in Phase 2 of this funding call, we will focus on three coastal areas with poor health in different regions of England: Blackpool, Weston-Super-Mare, and Hastings. We will work together, uniting these different stakeholders, to generate an evidence-based plan to support collaboration across sectors and with the community to tackle health inequalities. We will focus on key problem areas in mental health identified by our communities: young people's mental health and wellbeing; drug and alcohol (substance) misuse; and life-limiting illness and bereavement.

The Government's commitment to increasing offshore and marine renewable energy generation presents significant technological challenges in designing, commissioning and building the infrastructure, connecting offshore generation to onshore usage, and considering where these new developments are best placed, whilst balancing the impact they have upon the environment. In tandem, this commitment presents opportunities to advance UK capabilities in cutting-edge engineering and technologies in pursuit of net zero. Liverpool is home to one of the largest concentrations of offshore wind turbines globally in Liverpool Bay, the second largest tidal range in the UK, some of the largest names of maritime engineering alongside numerous SMEs, and the Port of Liverpool, a Freeport and Investment Zone status. The latest Science and Innovation Audit (2022) highlights Net Zero and Maritime as an emerging regional capability, and is an area in which the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority has stated its ambition to grow an innovation cluster. The University of Liverpool and Liverpool John Moores University each host world-class research expertise, environments and facilities relevant to addressing these maritime energy challenges, and have an established, shared track record in collaboration with industrial and civic partners. The Centre for Doctoral Training in Net Zero Maritime Energy Solutions (N0MES CDT) will play a vital role in filling critical skills gaps by delivering 52 highly trained researchers (PGRs), skilled in the identification, understanding, assessment, and solutions-delivery of pressing challenges in maritime energy. N0MES PGRs will pursue new, engineering-centred, interdisciplinary research to address four vital net zero challenges currently facing the North West, the UK and beyond: (a) Energy generation using maritime-based renewable energy (e.g. offshore wind, tidal, wave, floating solar, hydrogen, CCS) (b) Distributing energy from offshore to onshore, including port- and hinterland-side impacts and opportunities (c) Addressing the short- and long-term environmental impacts of offshore and maritime environment renewable energy generation, distribution and storage (d) Decommissioning and lifetime extension of existing energy and facilities The N0MES CDT will empower its graduates to communicate, research and innovate across disciplines, and will develop flexible leaders who can move between projects and disciplines as employer priorities and scientific imperatives evolve.