Floods are the most common and widely distributed natural risk to life and property worldwide, causing over £4.5B worth of damage to the UK since 2000. Managing flood risk therefore presents a substantial challenge to this and future governments. Arising from the requirements of the EU Floods Directive (2007/60/EC), flood hazard maps for the UK must be delivered by December 2013. Due to limitations in current methodologies these maps take a deterministic approach to mapping catchment scale flood hazard, and do not incorporate climate change projections. Climate projections are predicted to result in the increase of UK properties at risk from flooding and coastal erosion: understanding the uncertainty these bring to flood hazard is therefore of vital economic significance to the UK. Different methods to assess or determine flood hazards have evolved through research and practice. However, these do not allow for uncertainty estimates to be explicitly included within the process. While uncertainty analysis has been an area of research over a number of years, it has not yet achieved widespread implementation in flood modelling studies and decision making for a number of reasons. With developments in the field, such as improved computational power and newly available standardised climate datasets, incorporating uncertainty into assessments is becoming increasingly possible and indeed essential. It is clear that a gap currently exists in uncertainty estimation in flood hazard prediction, particularly in relation to climate change projections, and that this area of research is critical to current policy and operational drivers. This proposal has been developed to comprehensively address this gap. The project will develop a novel probabilistic modelling framework to assess the impact of uncertainty arising from climate change on flood hazard predictions, generate exemplar probabilistic flood hazard maps for selected case study catchments and attempt to quantify the change to flood hazard as a result of climate projections.

Along the well-to-wake value chain from upstream processes associated with fuels production and supply, components manufacture, and ships construction to the operation of ports and vessels, the UK domestic and international shipping produced 5.9 Mt CO2eq and 13.8 Mt CO2eq, respectively in 2017, totalling 3.4% of the UK's overall greenhouse gas emissions. The sector contributes significantly to air pollution challenges with emissions of nitrogen oxide, sulphur dioxide and particulate matters, harming human health and the environment particularly in coastal areas. The annual global market for maritime emission reduction technologies could reach $15 billion by 2050. This provides substantial economic opportunities for the UK. The Department for Transport's Clean Maritime Plan provides a route map for action on infrastructure, economics, regulation, and innovation that covers high technology readiness level (TRL 3-7). There is a genuine opportunity to explore fundamental research and go beyond conventional marine engineering and naval architecture and exploit the UK's world-leading cross-sectoral fundamental research expertise on hydrodynamics, fuels, combustion, electric machines and power electronics, batteries and fuel cells, energy systems, digitization, management, finance, logistics, safety engineering, etc. The proposed UK-MaRes Hub is a multidisciplinary research consortium and will conduct interdisciplinary research focussed on delivering disruptive solutions which have tangible potential to transform existing practice and reach a zero-carbon future by 2050. The challenges faced by UK maritime activity and their solutions are generally common but when deployed locally, they are bespoke due to the specifics of the port, the vessels they support, and the dependencies on their supply chains. Implementation will be heavily dependent on the local community, existing infrastructure, as well as opportunities and constraints related to the supply, distribution, storage and bunkering of alternative fuels, in decarbonising port handling facilities and cold-ironing, with the integration of renewable energy, reducing air pollution, to land-use and increased capacity and capability, and the local development of skills. The types of vessels and the cargoes handled through UK ports varies and are related to several factors, such as geographical location, regional industrial and business activity and wider transport links. Therefore, UK-MaRes Hub aims to feed into a clean maritime strategy that can adapt to place-based challenges and provide targeted technical and socio-economic interventions through a novel Co-innovation Methodology. This will bring together Research Exploration themes/work packages and Responsive Research Fund project activity into focus on port-centric scenarios and assess possibilities to innovate and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, 2040 and 2050 timeframes, sharing best practice across the whole maritime ecosystem. A diverse, and inclusive Clean Maritime Network+ will ensure wider dissemination and knowledge take-up to achieve greater impact across UK ports and other maritime activity. The Network+ will have coordinated regional activity in South-West, Southern, London, Yorkshire & Lincolnshire, Midlands, North-West, North-East, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. An already established Clean Maritime Research Partnership has vibrant academic, industrial, and civic stakeholder members from across the UK. UK-MaRes Hub will establish a Clean Maritime Policy Unit to provide expert advice and quantitative evidence to enable rapid decarbonisation of the maritime sector. It will ensure that the UK-MaRes Hub is engaging with policymakers at all stages of the hub activities.

Our vision is to create an enduring, multidisciplinary and independent research community strongly linked to industry and capable of informing the policy making process by developing new knowledge and understanding on the subject of the shipping system, its energy efficiency and emissions, and its transition to a low carbon, more resilient future. Shipping in Changing Climates (SCC) is the embodiment of that vision: a multi-university, multi-disciplinary consortium of leading UK academic institutions focused on addressing the interconnected research questions that arise from considering shipping's possible response over the next few decades due to changes in: - climate (sea level rise, storm frequency) - regulatory climate (mitigation and adaptation policy) - macroeconomic climate (increased trade, differing trade patterns, higher energy prices) Building on RCUK Energy programme's substantial (~2.25m) investment in this area: Low Carbon Shipping and High Seas projects, this research will provide crucial input into long-term strategic planning (commercial and policy) for shipping, in order to enable the sector to transition the next few decades with minimum disruption of the essential global services (trade, transport, economic growth, food and fuel security) that it provides. The ambitious research programme can only be undertaken because of the project's excellent connection to shipping's stakeholders across the govt. non-govt and industry space. This is demonstrated by in excess of 35 organisations writing significant statements of support and including contributions to the project of 1.6m in-kind and 160k cash. The commitments of stakeholders with this breadth of knowledge and understanding is crucial both to: - Development of a relevant proposal (all Tier 1 partners of LCS and many Tier 2 and others were heavily involved in the development of the contents of this SCC proposal) - Ensuring that the research is undertaken using data and experience that can maximise its credibility, but importantly also - Guaranteeing a direct pathway to impact in all the key governance and commercial stakeholders of the sector. Shipping is a global industry and its challenges must therefore be considered in a global context. However, to provide focus for the research we will concentrate the application of our global modelling and analysis for understanding the impacts of changing climates on three key specific sub- global components of the system: UK, SIDS (Small Island Developing States) and BRICS shipping. The UK, for its importance to the funder and the UK stakeholders engaged in our project, the BRICS and SIDS because of their central role in the policy debate due to their high sensitivity to changing climates Research Excellence will be ensured through research across three interacting research themes: - ship as a system (understanding the scope for greater supply side energy efficiency) - trade and transport demand (understanding the trends and drivers for transport demand) - transitions and evolution (understanding transport supply/demand interactions) The research undertaken will be both quantitative and qualitative, apply for the first time new data and modelling techniques and be deployed to answer a series of cross cutting (themes) research questions. Shipping in Changing Climates will put the UK at the forefront internationally of research into the shipping system and inform the UK and EU debates around the control of its shipping GHG emissions.

Reliable and comprehensive flood forecasting is crucial to ensure resilient cities and sustainable socio-economic development in a future faced with an unprecedented increase in atmospheric temperature and intensified precipitation. Floodwaters from the areas surrounding a city can heavily affect flood cycle behaviour across urban areas, introducing uncertainties into the forecast that are often non-negligible. However, currently the extent to which we can predict flood hazards is limited, and existing methods cannot for example deal with inter-regional dependencies (e.g. as was seen when floods affected nine different countries across Central and Eastern Europe). Presently in the UK approx. 25% of yearly flood insurance claims are from areas outside the zones forecast to be at flood risk, and annual flood damage costs are already high (approx. £1.5 billion). Also more than 20,000 houses per year continue to be built on floodplains. The need to transform flood forecasting for a range of applications and scales has already been recognised by various parties. The UK Climate Change Risk Assessment 2017 Evidence Report prioritises flooding as the greatest direct climate change related threat for UK cities now and in the future, and urges urgent action to be taken, including the development of new solutions over the next 5 years. The hydraulic software industry and consultancy firms have expressed a desire for more reliable and sophisticated flood forecasting approaches, which can also reduce the manual labour required. In addition, mathematics and engineering research communities are still searching for forecasting models that are joined-up, reliable and efficient, as well as versatile and adaptable. To address this need, 'Multi-Wavelets' technology will be employed in this fellowship with a view to transforming flood forecasting routines from a disparate set of activities into a unified automatic framework. The applicant's vision is to exploit the innate capability of Multi-Wavelets technology to reformulate flood forecasting methods by providing a smart modelling foundation for the delivery of timely and accurate flood maps, alongside statistically quantified uncertainties. This research presents a unique opportunity for the applicant, UK academia and UK industry, to establish a world leading capability in a nascent field while addressing Living With Environmental Change (LWEC) priorities for improved forecasting of environmental change. The fellowship research will stimulate the creation of new software infrastructure capable of significantly improving our flood forecasting ability across length scales and under multiple uncertainties, helping us to better design infrastructure against flood risk and to plan for the consequences.

The internal combustion engine will remain dominant across high power marine, distributed power generation and off-road vehicles for several decades to come, requiring intensified fundamental research around greener fuels and clean, high efficiency operating modes. The UK has an internationally leading reputation for excellence in fundamental engine research for lighter duty cars, vans and trucks, with clear opportunities now apparent to transfer fundamental knowledge and skills to large engines. At present, the UK academic community is totally lacking large single cylinder engine facilities, with researchers restricted to automotive scale experiments and simulations extrapolated up to larger scale (with significant errors in fundamental predictions). This is a major omission in accelerating Net Zero fuels, disruptive large engine technologies and policies from within the UK. The vision is therefore to establish a world-leading, megawatt scale decarbonised engine experimental facility, with two unique research engines strategically co-located as a new collaborative centre of excellence and nationally accessible asset leveraging existing infrastructure and expertise.