This project is concerned with socially integrated mitigation of multiple structural risks in the urban environment, with a focus on the linked risks of earthquake and fire. Fire is the largest contributor to building damage following earthquakes. To date, this research area has largely been ignored as it crosses the boundaries between the knowledge areas of earthquake and fire safety engineering. The combination of factors adds to the challenges in risk estimation already existing in each distinct area. There is currently no universally accepted method for accounting for the effect of strengthening practices on building vulnerability to earthquakes (let alone earthquakes followed by fire). In the case of fire safety engineering, few credible techniques for damage estimation or risk-based design currently exist due to a lack of requisite input data. This project will develop, through large scale structural testing and computational analysis, new technical engineering solutions to these problems. And, for the first time, these technical engineering solutions will be developed explicitly accounting for the social context within which they are to be enacted. 21st Century engineering must provide effective and practical multi-hazard risk mitigation solutions against a background of growing urbanisation, overstretched services and vulnerable infrastructure. Thus, Challenging RISK will develop and holistically optimise strategies for the mitigation of multi-hazard risks, leading to resilient physical infrastructure within local communities. It proposes fundamental engineering research leading to new understanding of the response of existing concrete structures to earthquake and fire, with a long-term view to extend the lessons learned to other hazards. Simultaneously, it will design and implement effective mitigation promotion campaigns by extending existing research on individual and societal risk perception to community level through adoption of participatory citizen science techniques. The interaction with communities, local authorities and construction industry, will also feed back into the experimental programme, such that only structural strengthening options that meet the requirements of these stakeholders will be investigated. Our ultimate goal is to increase the uptake of structural and non-structural mitigation measures, resulting in reduced life and economic losses. We will produce new knowledge on the performance of existing reinforced concrete structures subjected to earthquake and fire hazards (individually and in sequence), with the aim of developing an integrated framework for performance-based assessment and structural mitigation. We will engage with communities to define "acceptable" performances, inform the technical programme and the means for effective implementation. Large-scale experimental studies will be carried out on structural elements and sub-assemblages representing non-seismically designed buildings that have been strengthened for improved seismic response using fibre reinforced polymers (FRP). The elements will be subjected to seismic loads and then to fire (and vice-versa). They will provide information for the design of FRP strengthening to achieve multiple performance states under the fire and earthquake loads. In parallel, action-oriented research, where interventions are carried out at both the technical and social levels, will be used to develop an understanding of risk perception and representation of fire and seismic risk at the individual and community levels, with specific interventions carried out in London, Seattle, and Osaka. This will be done, for example, through seismic monitoring combined with perceptions surveys using smartphones, and recording fire risks and incidents using social media. The results of this part of the study will assist in the development of effective communication to raise awareness, leading to action.

A forward view of likely future changes in flood risk resulting from predicted climate change is critically required by the insurance industry in order to take long term strategic decisions on risk management, allow future financial planning and improve business resilience to any increased frequency of large events. Typically, flood insurance losses are regarded as attritional events that impact on profit margins but which are unlikely to result in company bankruptcies and an inability to meet both insurance and reinsurance policy obligations. However, changes to the frequency of large flood events and event clustering may alter this situation and increase the potential for severe disruption to insurance markets. The re-prioritization of insurance portfolios and negotiation of new re-insurance contracts to deal with such threats must proceed on the basis of available evidence and requires a long term view as such changes take considerable time to implement and may incur substantial additional costs. A robust scientific understanding of the impact of climate change on future flood risk is, however, currently lacking because the impact of uncertainty in Global and Regional Climate Model output variables (rainfall, temperature and evapotranspiration) has yet to be cascaded all the way through to flood inundation models. In particular, such analyses have yet to be attempted for urban settings where the majority of at-risk assets are located because of the computational cost of the fine scale hydraulic simulations that are here required. Moreover. whilst methods have been developed to assign likelihoods to uncertain RCM and GCM outputs (e.g. Rougier, 2007) these require extension to cascade likelihoods through to hydraulic predictions such that likelihood-weighted inundation maps can be produced. For this reason University of Bristol and King's College London were approached by Willis Re, a leading global re-insurance firm based in London, to consider ways to research this issue. Such work is ideally suited to CASE studentship funding as it builds on existing research which has confirmed feasibility. It also requires both the substantial period of focussed individual research and close collaboration between industry and academics that a CASE award facilitates. The next steps for such research are therefore to: 1. Undertake further analysis of GCM and RCM output to better understand the strengths and limitations of such models for simulating current and future extreme rainfalls and determine best possible methods to assign likelihoods to these. 2. To test whether bias correction can reduce systematic spatio-temporal errors in climate model predicted rainfalls and increase confidence in these outputs. 3. To cascade uncertain rainfall estimates through catchment hydrology and hydraulic models for urban settings and at regional scales, and test the use of likelihood weighted methods to produce uncertain future flood risk maps. 4. To work closely with the insurance industry to ensure that such complex analyses are communicated in the most appropriate form and analyse the potential impact of such maps on long term strategic decision making. The outputs from the studentship will be: (1) new tools for assessing future flood risk with applicability to a wide range of problems including, primarily, the insurance sector; (2) new scientific understanding of likely future changes in flood risk and their associated uncertainty; and (3) a focus on visualization and communication of complex model outputs to determine how the developed understanding can be most effectively transferred to industry users. This represents high quality science in its own right, with potentially significant impact for UK industry. The student will be supervised by Professor Paul Bates and Dr. Jim Freer of University of Bristol, Dr. Hannah Cloke of King's College London and Matt Foote of Willis Re.

The main aim of this collaborative project is to quantify the trends in extreme extratropical cyclones in Europe and the related impacts on the effective design of non-indemnity reinsurance contracts such as catastrophe bonds. The project combines ideas from atmospheric and climate science with statistical techniques and models to tackle a problem in finance and insurance in a new, exciting interdisciplinary approach. The studentship will be jointly managed by the University of Exeter and Willis Re, a leading global insurance and reinsurance broker. Climate change is expected to affect the behaviour of extra-tropical cyclones. Recent studies have used ensembles of coupled models or high resolution coupled models to look at changes in intensity. There remains, however, a large amount of uncertainty in the regional and local predictions of changes in storminess, partly due to the spatio-temporal variability (on multi-annual to multi-decadal scales) of the physical characteristics of extratropical cyclones. Moreover, many measures of storminess used in previously published scientific studies (such as band-pass filtered storm track) are not directly related to extremes in surface wind speeds, of relevance for assessment of insurance-related windstorm risk in Europe. The idea of this project is to use measures of storminess which are directly relevant for current practice in non-indemnity insurance. In non-indemnity insurance, a proxy measure of insured loss is used instead of the actual insured losses. The trigger for payment may be an index (e.g. based on wind speed), or parametric (e.g. based on earthquake magnitude), or even based on model output. Non indemnity insurance products include Industry Loss Warranties, Catastrophe Bonds, or simply an Index Product. There is growing interest in non-indemnity insurance, also because it opens up the potential investor base to the Capital Markets, where investors look for non-correlated assets. Our basic approach is to develop simplified versions of catastrophic windstorm models which allow us to study the effect of trends and spatio-temporal variability in extreme extratropical cyclones on insurance products of the above described nature. Data will be used from the ERA-40 and ACRE reanalyses and from an ensemble of runs of the Met Office global climate model (HadCM3). As a proxy for insurance exposures, we will use the LandScanTM database of worldwide population. This information will be fed into the simplified loss model, yielding modelled loss time series. These will be used to assess the robustness of various parametric trigger structures taking into account the trends in spatial and temporal variability of the storms. The student will be based mainly at the Exeter Climate Systems research centre at University of Exeter, which provides an inspiring research environment for doctoral students. He/she will receive training in the quantification of risk due meteorological hazards and in the mathematical and statistical modelling of complex weather and climate processes. The student will learn to manipulate large meteorological datasets and perform analysis using state-of-the-art statistical models. The student will also benefit from working under the supervision of the chief actuary at Willis Re (the CASE partner), gaining first-hand experience in modern insurance industry practices for modelling risk of large losses due to natural catastrophes. This combined training in academic and industry relevant skils will provide the student with a large range of employment opportunities. Benefits for the CASE partner include enhanced risk management through more appropriate quantification of basis risk in non-indemnity products, which is important in view of the capital and risk management requirements in the Solvency II Framework Directive that was adopted by the European Parliament's plenary session on 22 April 2009, with an implementation date of 31 October 2012.

The vulnerability of extensive near-coastal habitation, infrastructure, and trade makes global sea-level rise a major global concern for society. The UK coastline, for example, has ~£150 billion of assets at risk from coastal flooding, of which with £75 billion in London alone. Consequently, most nations have developed/ implemented protection plans, which commonly use ranges of sea-level rise estimates from global warming scenarios such as those published by IPCC, supplemented by worst-case values from limited geological studies. UKCP09 provides the most up-to-date guidance on UK sea-level rise scenarios and includes a low probability, high impact range for maximum UK sea level rise for use in contingency planning and in considerations regarding the limits to potential adaptation (the H++ scenario). UKCP09 emphasises that the H++ scenario is unlikely for the next century, but it does introduce significant concerns when planning for longer-term future sea-level rise. Currently, the range for H++ is set to 0.9-1.9 m of rise by the end of the 21st century. This range of uncertainty is large (with vast planning and financial implications), and - more critically - it has no robust statistical basis. It is important, therefore, to better understand the processes controlling the maximum sea-level rise estimate for the future on these time-scales. This forms the overarching motivation for the consortium project proposed here. iGlass is a broad-ranging interdisciplinary project that will integrate field data and modelling, in order to study the response of ice volume/sea level to different climate states during the last five interglacials, which include times with significantly higher sea level than the present. This will identify the likelihood of reduced ice cover over Greenland and West Antarctica, an important constraint on future sea-level projections. A key outcome will be to place sound limits on the likely ice-volume contribution to maximum sea-level rise estimates for the future. Our project is guided by three key questions: Q1. What do palaeo-sea level positions reveal about the global ice-volume/sea-level changes during a range of different interglacial climate states? Q2. What were the rates of sea-level rise in past interglacials, and to what extent are these relevant for future change, given the different climate forcing? Q3. Under a range of given (IPCC) climate projection scenarios, what are the projected limits to maximum sea-level rise over the next few centuries when accounting for ice-sheet contributions? The research will directly inform decision-making processes regarding flood risk management in the UK and abroad. In this respect, the project benefits from the close co-operation with scientists and practitioners in the UK Environment Agency, UKCIP, the UK insurance industry, as well as the wider global academic and user communities.

Submarine landslides can be far larger than terrestrial landslides, and many generate destructive tsunamis. The Storegga Slide offshore Norway covers an area larger than Scotland and contains enough sediment to cover all of Scotland to a depth of 80 m. This huge slide occurred 8,200 years ago and extends for 800 km down slope. It produced a tsunami with a run up >20 m around the Norwegian Sea and 3-8 m on the Scottish mainland. The UK faces few other natural hazards that could cause damage on the scale of a repeat of the Storegga Slide tsunami. The Storegga Slide is not the only huge submarine slide in the Norwegian Sea. Published data suggest that there have been at least six such slides in the last 20,000 years. For instance, the Traenadjupet Slide occurred 4,000 years ago and involved ~900 km3 of sediment. Based on a recurrence interval of 4,000 years (2 events in the last 8,000 years, or 6 events in 20,000 years), there is a 5% probability of a major submarine slide, and possible tsunami, occurring in the next 200 years. Sedimentary deposits in Shetland dated at 1500 and 5500 years, in addition to the 8200 year Storegga deposit, are thought to indicate tsunami impacts and provide evidence that the Arctic tsunami hazard is still poorly understood. Given the potential impact of tsunamis generated by Arctic landslides, we need a rigorous assessment of the hazard they pose to the UK over the next 100-200 years, their potential cost to society, degree to which existing sea defences protect the UK, and how tsunami hazards could be incorporated into multi-hazard flood risk management. This project is timely because rapid climatic change in the Arctic could increase the risk posed by landslide-tsunamis. Crustal rebound associated with future ice melting may produce larger and more frequent earthquakes, such as probably triggered the Storegga Slide 8200 years ago. The Arctic is also predicted to undergo particularly rapid warming in the next few decades that could lead to dissociation of gas hydrates (ice-like compounds of methane and water) in marine sediments, weakening the sediment and potentially increasing the landsliding risk. Our objectives will be achieved through an integrated series of work blocks that examine the frequency of landslides in the Norwegian Sea preserved in the recent geological record, associated tsunami deposits in Shetland, future trends in frequency and size of earthquakes due to ice melting, slope stability and tsunami generation by landslides, tsunami inundation of the UK and potential societal costs. This forms a work flow that starts with observations of past landslides and evolves through modelling of their consequences to predicting and costing the consequences of potential future landslides and associated tsunamis. Particular attention will be paid to societal impacts and mitigation strategies, including examination of the effectiveness of current sea defences. This will be achieved through engagement of stakeholders from the start of the project, including government agencies that manage UK flood risk, international bodies responsible for tsunami warning systems, and the re-insurance sector. The main deliverables will be: (i) better understanding of frequency of past Arctic landslides and resulting tsunami impact on the UK (ii) improved models for submarine landslides and associated tsunamis that help to understand why certain landslides cause tsunamis, and others don't. (iii) a single modelling strategy that starts with a coupled landslide-tsunami source, tracks propagation of the tsunami across the Norwegian Sea, and ends with inundation of the UK coast. Tsunami sources of various sizes and origins will be tested (iv) a detailed evaluation of the consequences and societal cost to the UK of tsunami flooding , including the effectiveness of existing flood defences (v) an assessment of how climate change may alter landslide frequency and thus tsunami risk to the UK.