There is a large and convincing body of epidemiological evidence linking short term exposure to outdoor air pollutants to adverse health effects. However, most of this evidence is derived from studies that have linked single pollutants to health in urban environments. There is increasing recognition that greater protection against the adverse health effects of air pollution could be achieved by focusing research and policy not on individual pollutants, but by a multi-pollutant approach. Furthermore, the spatial variation in pollutant concentrations and their health impacts, especially in rural areas and areas outside the larger cities where much of the UK population reside, are not-well established. Socio-economic impacts (and related issues of environmental justice) and other geographically-determined factors, including housing characteristics (indoor pollution), are also potential modifiers of exposure to outdoor air pollution. The increasing complexity of the scientific inquiry is matched by the difficulties of formulating, proving and implementing appropriate regulatory policy. This proposal builds upon an existing collaboration between researchers in the environmental and health disciplines, with the addition of investigators and practitioners from the policy and social science fields. Our proposal aims to provide new epidemiological evidence on the health impacts of exposure to multiple pollutants; to examine the implications of such evidence for regulation and control of air quality; and to assess how uncertainties in evidence affect its translation into actionable evidence-based policies and the evaluation of their costs and benefits. There are several unique innovations in our study: 1) the development of long series of high resolution (5 km) datasets for daily concentrations of a range of pollutants and weather data, linked to geo-referenced health data including daily mortality, hospital admissions and data on heart attacks; 2) an examination of the contribution of the indoor environment as a modifier of exposure to outdoor pollutants to provide an integrated assessment of the risks to health of short term exposure to air pollution; 3) an integrated assessment of the health effects of various near-term future air quality and climate policies in 2030 as well as selected emissions reduction policies for the UK; 4) the development of a 'decision analysis' tool that includes assessment of uncertainties and can be used to infer the likely outcomes of these various policy choices.

It is widely accepted that "suicide prevention is everybody's business," but most research has focused on the role of health professionals in identifying and managing suicide risk within clinical settings. Much less attention has been paid to the contribution that members of the public (with no healthcare training) can make, or the resources they need in order to do so. In a previous project funded by the MRC, we examined the role of family members and friends. We used qualitative methods to shed light on the difficulties they face in trying to interpret signs of a suicidal crisis and decide what action, if any, to take. We then formed a partnership with all the leading suicide prevention charities to develop and evaluate simple public education materials that address those difficulties. Those resources are designed for people who are concerned that someone close to them may be suicidal. We now wish to use the same approach to address a very different scenario, namely the 'Stranger on the Bridge'. This was the title of a highly-acclaimed Channel 4 documentary, broadcast in 2015, which told the story of Jonny Benjamin, who went to Waterloo bridge to take his own life and was prevented from jumping by the kindness of a passer-by. Of the 6,000 suicides that occur in the UK each year, around a third take place in a public location. Many of these involve jumping from bridges, cliffs and high buildings, or use of the railway network. Some of these deaths may be prevented by the installation of physical barriers, but human intervention will always play a vital role. This is most likely to come from a passing stranger, but few people know how to recognise someone at risk or are willing to get involved. We want to increase the number of people who are able to recognise and reach out to someone in a public place who may be contemplating suicide. First we need to gain an in-depth understanding of the Stranger on the Bridge scenario from the point of view of those who have been involved, both as 'rescuers' and 'rescued'. We will advertise for both through adverts in mainstream and social media, aiming to interview around 10 people with experience of being rescued and 20 people with experience of intervening, including some railway staff. We aim to discover: a) what signs and signals a person contemplating a suicidal act is likely to exhibit; b) how passers-by interpret those signals and understand what is happening; c) what fears people have about intervening and how they decide whether or not to do so; d) what are the core components (both verbal and non-verbal) of an effective intervention by a lay person. We will also interview some people who have no experience of this situation to find out about wider public attitudes and fears. Using the findings, we will work collaboratively with a range of non-academic partners to formulate key messages and develop a set of resources to be used in an educational campaign. We will start by developing a simple leaflet for distribution to members of the public, and an online version of the same. We will also develop a 90-minute face-to-face training session for staff at the sort of locations that are used for suicide, e.g. bridges, multi-storey car parks, rooftop restaurants, cliffs and coastal paths, and railways. We will evaluate these in a later study, and hope to go on to develop other materials using different media at a later date. Our strong project group includes academics from the University of Exeter, the documentary-maker Jonny Benjamin, who survived his own suicidal episode thanks to a stranger, together with representatives of the suicide prevention charities, Public Health England, Network Rail and the RNLI.

Achieving a high level of vaccine coverage and immunity among university students is urgent and critical for the long-term control of COVID-19 infections. Mixed methodologies will be used to survey university students' attitudes to COVID-19 vaccination as part of a strategy to develop informed recommendations on university involvement in vaccine programmes. Multiple studies indicate that students are high-risk spreaders of COVID-19 with students' arrival on campus in the autumn of 2020 likely to have contributed to the second wave of the pandemic in the UK. With universities being a major industry, effective delivery of vaccines to students is essential for the inter-twined goals of economic recovery and breaking COVID-19 transmission cycles. University student cohorts are ethnically, economically and geographically diverse with international students being a major, economically-important sub-set of the student population. Delivery of effective student-centred COVID-19 vaccine campaigns will require a clear understanding of how these different student groups perceive the vaccines and whether differing experiences during the pandemic will negatively or positively impact on decisions relating to vaccine uptake. The University of Leicester (UoL) provides an ideal case study. One reason is because UoL is located in one of the cities worst affected by COVID-19. But more importantly, UoL has an exceptionally diverse student population with ~50% having BAME backgrounds and boasts a vibrant international student community. We aim to deliver a vaccine-focussed questionnaire to a large-proportion of the current UoL student cohort whilst making sure of representative coverage of a range of home and international students. We will then conduct 40-80 follow-up semi-structured interviews with specific sub-groups. One set of survey questions will focus on knowledge of the effectiveness and accessibility of COVID-19 vaccines and, as comparators, vaccines that are critical for protection against meningitis, measles and mumps. Another set of questions will focus on vaccine complacency and hesitancy. As a younger age group, students may be less inclined to take up vaccines because of perceptions of a lower risk of falling seriously ill with COVID-19. Moreover, as digital natives, students are comparatively more likely to be exposed to disinformation about COVID-19 vaccines circulating on social media, such as the myth that vaccination leads to female infertility. A final question set and the interviews will examine pandemic experiences. These aspects will focus on COVID-19-related discrimination based on race and ethnicity or prejudice encountered purely on the basis of being a student in a university town, along with the detrimental impact of prolonged lockdowns on wellbeing and individual freedom. There will also be interview questions about students' exposure to media coverage of the pandemic. These factors may all shape students' evaluation of COVID-19 vaccination as a way of returning to 'normal', pre-pandemic life. As an inherently mobile and transient population, university students may be among the hard-to-reach groups for COVID-19 vaccination programmes. In consultation with Public Health England and other stakeholders, we will utilise evidence from our questionnaires and interviews to develop COVID-19 vaccine-delivery recommendations that will be applicable across the entire university sector. The applicability of our ideas will be further explored in a follow-on ESRC application for a multi-partner, multi-institutional project to evaluate COVID-19 vaccine uptake and delivery mechanisms among different student groups and a range of institutions (i.e. universities of differing sizes, types and parts of the country). This application will also address the important long-term goal of developing effective policies on vaccine delivery to undergraduate students that are achievable by all higher educational institutions.

About 12.6% of Indian land mass is prone to landslides, with the Himalaya and Western Ghats regions particularly prone due to climate, geomorphology & geology. Rainfall and earthquakes are the main triggers of these landslides. Poor land management practices (e.g., deforestation, slash & burn cultivation, haphazard mining and heavy tilling in agriculture), coupled with increased development and poor settlement location have increased vulnerability of communities in these areas to landslides. The impact of landslides on people, business, culture and heritage can be considerable and wide-ranging, including fatalities, loss of agricultural land and infrastructure, and damage to ecosystems. To build resilience to landslides in these vulnerable communities (a key aim of SHEAR), a root and branch evaluation of human interactions with landslide prone environments, and improved knowledge of the 'physical' processes is required. Developing approaches to integrate weather, landscape and social-dynamic models is fundamental to building an effective hydrologically-controlled landslide early warning system (EWS). LANDSLIP will develop new insights by building on existing scientific research in India, the UK and Italy and using interdisciplinary methodologies and perspectives. Due to complex environmental conditions and triggering processes that cause landslides, the extent and variability of spatial & temporal scales means that landslides are inherently difficult to forecast and manage at site, slope, catchment and regional spatial scales and hourly to decadal temporal scales. LANDSLIP will address this by doing research to understand weather regimes (previously not done in S Asia) and rainfall characteristics that trigger landslides and geomorphological/geological control factors that can enhance landslide susceptibility. Knowledge of where and when historic landslides have occurred and under what environmental conditions, will also be collated and analysed, drawing on extensive consortium experience of developing and managing landslide inventories and impact libraries. An innovative challenge we address in LANDSLIP is how slope and site specific EWS inform wider catchment to national landslide EWS and how early warning information from medium-range forecasts supplement and enhance short-term (day to a week) forecasting approaches. A further innovative aspect of LANDSLIP is improving EWS effectiveness through integrating social dynamics information gathered from both 'Human' (i.e. social media) and physical sensors (remote sensing and pre-existing site-specific wireless networks deployed by AMRITA). LANDSLIP will develop ways of utilising these sources of information to supplement existing inventories and enhance EW information for decision makers. Our programme will operate in partnership with decision makers, in public and private sectors, academics and non-for profit agencies to achieve an overarching aim of contributing to better landslide risk assessment and early warning, in a multi-hazard framework in India, aiming to increase resilience and reduce loss. Tools and services, focussed on a web map interface, will be developed in conjunction with local scientists, decision makers and communities to improve resilience to hydrologically-controlled landslides in India, specifically using two pilot study areas; Darjeeling-East Sikkim in the Himalaya and Nilgiris in the Western Ghats. We will ensure knowledge transfer to other vulnerable communities by assessing how they can be applied, remotely, in Afghanistan. Through advances in interdisciplinary science and application in practise, the collective ambition of this consortium is to contribute to better landslide risk assessment and early warning in a multi-hazard framework, and, by working with communities, better preparedness for hydrologically controlled landslides and related hazards on a slope to regional spatial scale and daily to seasonal temporal scale.

The aim of this network is to bring together interdisciplinary expertise to address the problem of air quality in schools. The future health of our nation and indeed all human society depends on educating children in healthy environments. The Tackling Air Pollution at School (TAPAS) network focuses on that vulnerable section of every society - school children and their environment. Our vision is to create and develop a menu of options that can be introduced into schools to provide an environment free of pollutants and in harmony with nature, so that children have a fulfilling and healthy educational experience. These products need to be effective, inexpensive and, where possible, educational: i.e. they should involve the children in an understanding of their environment and provide them with an opportunity to engage with it in social, scientific and behavioural terms. We have chosen to focus on schools and school children for the following reasons. Children are a particularly vulnerable section of society. They are physiologically less able to regulate their temperature and are more susceptible to exposure to air pollution than adults. Among the vulnerable groups in society school pupils will experience the impact of poor air quality for the longest period into the future. Recently, over 2000 schools in the UK were identified as being in 'pollution hotspots' where air pollution exceeds WHO limits. From a practical viewpoint, working in schools has many advantages. School keep records on student attendance and pupils which provide information on absences related to health. They also have data on room occupancy, pupil activities (e.g. PE, meals) and movement through the school. This information is essential to determine personal exposure. Additionally, schools offer a wide variety of spaces including labs, meeting halls, dining areas as well as classrooms, each with different ventilation and indoor sources of pollution. The ability of schools to mitigate exposure to pollution is hampered by lack of knowledge. For example, the impact of idling vehicle engines near school while dropping off and collecting children on exposure in the playground or on indoor levels of NOx and particulate matter (PM) is unclear, making it impossible for schools to decide whether to ban idling or not. Our interdisciplinary team consists of experts in indoor and outdoor pollution, air pollution modelling, data science, building design and ventilation, education, social behaviour and health impacts. This will allow this network to address the critical issues associated with pollution in schools by offering a menu of solutions. We also propose to include a significant educational component so that pupils will learn about the impacts of poor air quality and take this knowledge with them as they grow up, thereby producing a lasting change in society. Schools also accommodate children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) who are even more vulnerable and who often require special environmental conditions. Furthermore, there are currently a wide range related activities concerning indoor environmental quality in schools that this network will bring together for the first time in a coordinated fashion.