Addressing theme 1 and to a lesser extent theme 2. A climate emergency has been declared by 74% of UK local authorities. As they respond to this via increased tree planting targets for carbon sequestration, it is imperative that they also realise the multiple public benefits - health and wellbeing, green infrastructure, social amenity, the green economy - that treescapes can provide. Local authorities need a vision of future societal needs and the forms of future treescapes that might meet them; we will deliver the evidence and decision making processes to realise such a vision. Most studies on the biophysical and amenity aspects of urban treescapes neglect wider social and cultural values that cannot easily be quantified. Consequently, the symbolic, heritage, spiritual and social and cultural (S&C) values of treescapes are not meaningfully accounted for. This problem is becoming increasingly acute, as protests arise around individual trees (Sheffield street trees) or woods (proposed sale of the public forest estate), exacerbated by pressure from business and housing development. 'Branching Out' will evaluate the S&C values of urban trees across three cities, and develop new ways of mapping, predicting and communicating those values to support robust, evidence-based decision making and management. The three selected focus cities purposefully have different planning histories, supporting subsequent widespread adoption of our novel approach. York (historical) and Cardiff (post-industrial) are county towns, while Milton Keynes is a post-1960s new town. Each city has particular, yet not uncommon, challenges relating to their treescapes, has declared a climate emergency, and expects trees to play a role in mitigation and adaptation. Our central tenet comprises three broad approaches: 1) co-production, using deliberative methods with citizens and stakeholders, to develop a holistic value framework; 2) storytelling, creating narrative accounts of meaning and value of the past, present and future; 3) mapping, to link biophysical features and S&C values. Our approach will map both values that are generalisable and those that are particular and highly situated. Our mapping approaches encompass the past, present and future, using historical sources to map the impact of past values on current treescape form and function. We will use our established tree citizen science platform, Treezilla, to collect biophysical data from new Urban Tree Observatories. Remote sensing will characterise tree condition and canopy properties, and scale the biophysical data across the focal cities. This project will address local authorities' need for high-resolution mapping of tree characteristics, resulting in Europe's largest, most robust urban tree dataset, accompanied by descriptors of S&C value that can be used to recreate such datasets across other urban areas using freely available satellite data. The tools we co-create will provide local authorities with useable evidence for decision making to predict the impacts of developments or changes on S&C value, and enable them to calculate more accurately the impacts of changes on ecosystem services. Such multidimensional mapping can reveal inequalities in current and future provision of benefits as treescapes change through time, providing a better understanding of how and where those inequalities can be addressed. A series of design workshops will experiment with ways of mapping S&C values in relation to the remote-sensed biophysical characteristics of our urban treescapes, producing techniques and tools for sensing and mapping values. Using these tools as provocations, we will speculate on possible futures for our urban treescapes, built around an appreciation and understanding of S&C values. Through these methods this project will embed S&C values in planning and decision-making for urban trees at local and national scales, thereby meeting society's and planning needs now and in the future.

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.

THE PROBLEM: Offshore windfarms will be developed at an accelerated schedule under fast-track plans to switch away from fossil fuels. With ever larger offshore windfarms, and the cumulative effects of climate change, we thus urgently need to understand the way the seabed is modified in response and how such changes affect the wider marine ecosystem. When natural currents in the sea deviate around the wind turbines or anchors, the forces acting on the bed enhance, making sediments move and stay in suspension. This reduces the clarity of the water and changes the shape and sediment composition of the seabed, with impacts stretching far beyond the object. The seabed supports ecosystems that deliver a wide range of services incl. fishing, carbon storage, aggregates and coastal protection. The climate crisis will stretch impacts even further and into coastal zones, as future storm waves and rising sea levels will alter the ways energy from the sea is transferred to the seabed. All these changes combined can have wide-reaching impacts for organisms that live on or in the seabed, potentially changing biodiversity (species richness) and the delivery of some of these ecosystem services. The impacts at the seabed extend through the food chain to the water column and beyond as seabed dwelling fish are consumed by seabirds and cetaceans. Aggregations of fish can be strongly associated to particular seabed properties. If displacement or mortality occurs amongst these important prey species, this has knock-on effects for the deep-diving predators that cannot afford to be less efficient in foraging for food, like the seabirds that are protected by legislation. During this pivotal time of energy transition and national security, it is of crucial importance to better understand and unlock the potential of the marine environment for a renewable energy transition with added benefits to the ecosystem. AIM: This proposal sets out a strategy to assess the seabed response to the combination of accelerated windfarm expansion and accelerated climate change, and to quantify the implications for (1) biodiversity, (2) ecosystem services, (3) habitats, and (4) interactions between seabird populations and their food. We ultimately seek to help identify opportunities that benefit the conservation of species and increase biodiversity around windfarms. We will help windfarm developers design their monitoring strategies long beyond the life-span of our project. SUMMARY OF METHODS AND OUTPUTS: Via a multi-proxy study using observations, laboratory experiments and models, we will assess and map, under different climate predictions, how the stresses on the bed will be modified by 2050, how the distribution of seabed habitats and biodiversity will change, and how that drives changes to ecosystem services and the foraging success of deep-diving seabirds. We will design relevant scenarios, where we consider offshore windfarm size, scour mitigation strategies, predator behaviour and the ecosystem's vulnerability to change due to the combined effect of accelerated windfarm expansion and climate change. We will use the Eastern Irish Sea area as case study, as it is the home of a variety of seabird species with specific predator-prey relationships, of diverse seabed types and of considerable windfarm expansion nearby existing windfarms. To help all developers of windfarms in the UK, UK-scale maps will be made of the vulnerability of the seabed to change, and a new seabird vulnerability index will be developed. Our quantification of how these processes from seabed to seabirds interact can directly inform/feed into existing and future decision support tools. We will provide a tool where stakeholders can run their own simulations anywhere around the UK and for any given model/data resolution to quantify uncertainty levels of bed stress caused by windfarms, with cascading effects of uncertainty in habitat and biodiversity distribution and ecosystem services.

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.

The UK faces serious strategic challenges with the future supply of aggregates, critical minerals and elements. At the same time, the UK must sustainably manage multimillion tonne annual arisings of industrial, mining and mineral wastes (IMMWs). The amount of these wastes generated is projected to increase over the coming years, particularly (i) ash from the combustion of biomass and municipal solid waste, and (ii) contaminated dredgings. These wastes will continue to be landfilled despite often containing valuable resources such as high concentrations of critical metals, soil macronutrients and useful mineral components, some of which actively drawdown atmospheric CO2. The fundamental aim of the ASPIRE (Accelerated Supergene Processes In Repository Engineering) research project is to develop a sustainable method by which ashes, contaminated dredgings and other IMMWs can be stripped of any valuable elements. These stripped elements would then be concentrated in an ore zone for later retrieval and the cleaned residues also returned to use, for example as aggregates, cement additives, or agricultural amendments (including those for carbon sequestration through enhanced mineral weathering). It is a very challenging problem to devise a truly sustainable method to achieve this is an economically viable way, and almost all processes suggested so far in the literature for leaching wastes are themselves carbon and chemical intensive and thus non-sustainable. We are proposing research that comprises the first steps in developing the "ASPIRE waste repository" concept with accelerated analogues of ore-forming "supergene" processes engineered in, such that the dormant waste undergoes processes to (i) concentrate valuable components (e.g. critical metals, phosphate) as an anthropogenic ore to facilitate their future recovery, and (ii) concurrently decontaminate residual mineral material so as to make it available as a bank of material to drawdown for "soft" uses in agriculture, silviculture, greenspace, landscaping in new developments, habitat creation and/or as a cement/concrete additive or replacement aggregate. The processes investigated rely on rainwater passing through a vegetated surface layer which releases naturally occurring compounds from the plant roots and/or other natural organic matter which then pass through and strip valuable elements from the IMMW. The mobilised elements will then pass into a capture zone where they will be stripped from solution and concentrated to form an artificial ore. The research project will seek to engineer the internal processes of the temporary storage waste repository to optimise this. At the same time the upper vegetated surface of the waste repository will serve as greenspace with commensurate ecological and amenity value for local populations. Among the key research challenges is in how to engineer the internal ASPIRE waste repository processes which rely on complex biogeochemical interactions and flow behaviour. Another critical research challenge is to develop an understanding of stakeholder and wider acceptability of this concept which does not fit with current legislation on waste management. With this project we seek to provide a circular technology solution for how we can sustainably manage the future multimillion tonne arisings of IMMW at a critical time as the UK government develops strategies and supporting regulation for the transition to a circular economy.