VENTURA is a digital service based on interdisciplinary systems approaches to infrastructure that allows end-users to explore housing and water system planning options through a virtual participatory process supported by state-of-the-art process-driven models. The research involves co-creating a web-based and end-user led prototype called a virtual decision room (VDR) to help movements towards a sustainable digital society. The VDR will be co-created with local government, the local community, regulators and water utility companies ('end-users') to collaboratively plan and evaluate the environmental sustainability of urban growth planning scenarios using co-designed water neutrality indicators during the project. The VDR will use a whole-water system Digital Twin (FuturaWat) that supports evidence-led water neutral planning for place making. This will be achieved by integrating two state-of-art digital tools: GIS-based ground risk calculator (GRISC) and whole-water system model (CityWat) with a participatory process to facilitate end-user discussion and decision-making on housing and water system planning scenarios. The key novelty of the proposed research is in applying systems approaches to infrastructure planning, collaborative working and sustainability evaluation. The VDR will be tested by applying it to Greater Manchester and London Borough of Enfield case study examples to enable end-users to align their strategic planning and water management priorities. The VENTURA concept was co-developed with our project partners, who have helped us formulate Greater Manchester (GM) and London Borough of Enfield (LBE) case examples. In GM the work will directly support the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) 'levelling up' strategies and help them to holistically address 'challenges to delivery when considering wider issues such as flood risk, brownfield land remediation, environmental degradation and wider resilience to climate change'. The LBE case example will support Enfield Council in their transition to a digital platform that will enable correlation of infrastructure needs with investment opportunities and help them to more effectively engage with local communities and discuss local plans, which currently do not include water demand and water quality evaluation because of lack of evidence. Both case examples will explicitly account for community perspectives through collaborations with partner local NGOs: Thames21 (LBE) and The Mersey Rivers Trust (GM). VENTURA directly addresses the current UK Government's high-profile strategic initiatives including 'Planning for the future' White Paper and the National Digital Twin Programme. In particular, VENTURA provides a proof-of-concept for the White Paper's highly ambitious proposals that seek to reduce the duration of the planning cycle significantly, supporting net gains in the quality of the environment and front-loading public engagement in the planning system to the plan-making stage of place-making. The research will adapt traditional working practices to help the work become more sustainable. This will be formalised through the development of a sustainability policy for the research and will include initiatives such as monitoring and managing environmental performance by embedding into project management, reporting progress and sharing good practice with other EPSRC projects.

The RBOC (Resilience Beyond Observed Capabilities) Network Plus will create new knowledge, new capabilities and new opportunities for collaboration to help the UK prepare for security threats in the coming decades. The starting point is a scenario of a catastrophic attack on digital and energy networks in the year 2051. RBOC N+ will convene some of the UK's leading experts in engineering, physical sciences, mathematics, health sciences, social and behavioural sciences, arts and humanities, and cross-disciplinary topics such as AI, security studies and urban planning, together with government and industry, to refine, deepen and test this scenario and to use it to create immersive simulations. These simulations will support 'Reverse COBR' workshops, in which government, industry and academia will work back from the scenario's impacts to understand how they developed and what could have been done to prevent and mitigate them. This and other outputs - a flexible research fund, community events, an online platform developed and maintained by a project partner - will develop insights, innovate and create impact in response to possible and likely security threats and capabilities. Insights will come from the network's investigation into what capabilities, techniques and vulnerabilities could be exploited by adversaries to mount high-impact attacks against the UK, and what capabilities could be used by public authorities to prepare for and respond to them. Innovation will come from original research using novel combinations of disciplines and methods, from new relationships between researchers and policy makers and practitioners in government and industry, and from a prototype simulator for modelling the scenario with outputs addressing policy and practice implications, technology requirements and research gaps. Impact will come from the creation of new understanding and capabilities for government and industry to prepare for, respond to, and mitigate the impacts of major attacks from hostile actors through research, academic engagement, cross-sectoral partnerships and a host of technological, organisational, legal and behavioural capabilities ready for practitioner use. RBOC N+ will deliver a simulation toolkit with tools, concepts, definitions, problem spaces and a digital application designed specifically for policy-makers and practitioners. And RBOC's impact will be sustainable: RBOC's demonstrable return on investment will stimulate and support applications for continued funding, through grant applications and direct investment from industry, policy makers and practitioners. RBOC N+ will respond to eight challenge areas, each being an important theme of future security threats or responses. 'Adversary Capabilities' will investigate how the UK's enemies may be able to attack, while 'Our Capabilities' will address how the UK can prepare and respond, particularly through technology. The 'Physical Environment' challenge area will explore how cities will change by the 2050s, and 'Societal Challenges' will address potential developments in the social and political contexts. 'Responding and Decision-Making' will examine organisational and policy responses. 'Data, Information and Communications Infrastructure' will explore developments in enabling digital technologies, infrastructures and resources. To ensure that RBOC and its outputs manage security and ethical risks in ways that maintain trust, the final challenge area addresses 'Responsible Innovation and Trusted Research'.

In order to (1) estimate whether BE improves outcomes for babies when compared to a group of mothers and babies who receive regular services and (2) explore how BE is being implemented in GM, we will carry out the following phases of work: 1. Development phase This will include the following activities: -Workshop with relevant stakeholders to map out the mechanisms of BE that create a change in child outcomes. This will inform our final research design and development of questionnaires. -Accessing ward level data and testing feasibility of ward level randomisation. This will be used to confirm the final design. -Recruit Assistant Psychologists and Volunteer Psychologists to support the research team. -Stakeholder engagement event in GM. -Set up Advisory Board. -Develop questionnaires for collecting child outcomes from mothers at around 12 months and online survey of health visitors. -Securing ethical approval from the National Research Ethics Service and the NHS, and R&D in each site to carry out the study and ensure that all mothers of interest will have sufficient information about the study to sign informed consent to participate in our study. This will require final versions of questionnaires and materials. -Pilot questionnaire. 2. Baby Express evaluation Mothers-to-be who present for their 36-week midwife appointment will be identified and recruited into our study by midwives and the assistant psychologists. The outcome measures will be collected during a face-to-face interview when children are 12-14 months old by NatCen interviewers. If needed, we will also collect outcome data from a cohort of mothers in the BE wards and control wards whose infants were born before BE was introduced to enable us to adjust our analysis for any individual level differences between the BE and control wards. Their outcomes will be measured in much the same way as those in the trial. We will also seek access to information about mothers' 'antenatal pathway factors' during pregnancy from the data collected as part of the Maternity Pathway Maternity Tariff Payment by Results system. This would include mothers in the BE and control areas as well as in two pre-BE cohorts. Our approach to data analysis will be determined by whether it has been possible to randomise wards into BE and control groups. Ideally, we will compare the post-BE outcomes in BE wards with those in control wards while taking into account clustering at the ward level. 3. Health Visitor survey We propose to gather the views and experiences of those involved in the delivery of the BE activities such as health visitors. The specific questions to be addressed will be developed in the initial stages of the project but overall, we aim explore: -How practitioners adhered to, adapted, dropped, or altered BE delivery? -What are the key contextual or supporting enablers and constraints in delivering BE successfully? -What worked and didn't work in delivering BE? -What is their overall perception of the value of BE and how well implementation is going? -Whether/how initial delivery intentions are being realised in current operations? -What are the challenges they have faced? -How have these challenges been addressed? The survey will be analysed using descriptive statistics, reported in charts and tables, and used to interpret and contextualise the impact findings from the BE trial described above. 4. Dissemination Our dissemination plan will be agreed at the start of the project. The activities will include public engagement opportunities at various stages of our project and publications targeted at key practitioner audiences, peer-reviewed journals, seminars/conferences and other events and through media.

Ageing in place is critical to the future of ageing societies in Europe. Older people's places are recognised as fundamental to longterm health and wellbeing outcomes - a fact that has been magnified during the Covid-19 pandemic. Yet, critically, almost a third of older people in Europe experience neighbourhood deprivation, a fifth encounter a lack of cohesion, a growing number are homeless, and approximately 3 million people continue to reside in institutional settings. There are significant concerns that efforts are failing to support ageing in place. With its development as a field fragmented across disciplines and sectors, and with few researchers equipped to tackle this fragmentation, innovation in research and policy risks stagnation. This is despite the renewed interest and urgency arising from the pandemic in de-institutionalizing later life residential experiences. HOMeAGE will institute an interdisciplinary, intersectoral and international programme of doctoral training and research that drives the development of new leaders in excellence for the advancement of evidence-based innovation on ageing in place. In tackling the three interconnected challenges of (1) needs and systems, (2) home and belonging and (3) rights and voice, HOMeAGE delivers a unique employability and skills development process for doctoral researchers (DRs) ensuring that they can lead the response to current research and policy deficits. HOMeAGE addresses significant demand for DRs who possess essential competencies to overcome challenges concerning Europe's demographic transition, and 'sticking points' in its developing Silver Economy. HOMeAGE directly addresses the critical priority of enabling 'older people to age in a place that is right for them' within the WHO's Global Strategy and Action Plan on Ageing. Crucially, it also addresses strategic themes in the EU Green Paper on Ageing, and key goals within the UN Sustainable Development Agenda concerning equity and sustainability.

The future of treescapes belongs to children and young people. Yet there is a lack of interdisciplinary research that explores their engagement with treescapes over time. This project aims to re-imagine future treescapes with children and young people, working with local and national partners including Natural England, Forest Research and the Community Forests and Scottish stakeholders. We will identify opportunities and barriers to treescape expansion and pilot innovative child and youth-focused pathways to realising this goal. We will create curricula material which will be disseminated with the support of our project partners, Early Childhood Outdoors and the Chartered College of Teachers. The aim of this project is to integrate children and young people's knowledge, experiences, and hopes with scientific knowledge of how trees adapt to and mitigate climate change in order to co-produce new approaches to creating and caring for resilient treescapes that benefit the environment and society. Drawing on interdisciplinary approaches and in collaboration with stakeholders, the team will produce a 'lexicon of experience' that captures the ecological identities of children and young people. An audit of existing activity in the field of activism and treescapes, with a particular focus on marginalised groups, will inform the project. In particular, the project will produce new material for use by practitioners, educators and policy makers that will inform future treescape planting and will be rolled out nationally, with the help of our project partners. Novel methods for assessing carbon storage in trees and soil will inform a 'tree-twinning' project to enable children and young people to recognise how they can relate to treescapes. Children and young people will draw on the scientific work together with their lived experience to balance their evolving carbon footprint with the changing treescapes they have partnered with. New treescapes will be planted with the help of Community Forests and local authorities. Learning will be enhanced by the scientific project on tree-twinning, embedded within the project, to advance knowledge about the relationship between climate science and urban trees. This research will be carried out with children and young people as co-researchers. The project will focus on hope as a vital ingredient of future planning and philosophically and practically create a set of actions to look to the future while addressing temporalities, including past archival work on trees. It will work with cohorts of young people across early years, primary, secondary and young people out of school, as well as families and communities, to think about and engage with treescapes, to plan as well as plant new treescapes and to engage in treescape thinking and curricula innovation. Working with Natural England as project partners, a toolkit will be developed to guide this work and a set of resources and outputs to be rolled out nationally that inspire and inform future generations of children and young people to become involved in treescapes, which will re-shape the disciplinary landscape of treescapes research and inform policy and practice. Community forest planners, policy-makers and practitioners will better understand how to engage children and young people in treescapes and how to work with their knowledges to inspire and inform future generations. Innovative approaches to arts and humanities, environmental science and social science will produce a new understanding of how combining disciplines can further treescape research with children and young people. The project will also advance methodological understandings of the relationship between children and young people and treescapes with a focus on co-production and attending to lived experience while conducting environmental scientific research. New knowledge in the fields of environmental and social science will create new disciplinary paradigms and concepts.