The Branching Out project has assessed social and cultural values of urban treescapes, linking a state-of-the-art values framework based on the IPBES Values Assessment (2022) to a novel transdisciplinary methodology integrating storytelling, mapping, citizen and stakeholder deliberation, and citizen science. Branching Beyond intends to package up the Branching Out framework, approach, and results in a user friendly online values porting template aimed at local government planners, tree officers, voluntary organisations and community groups. Initially compiling results from the three Branching Out case cities (Milton Keynes, Cardiff and York), Branch Beyond will develop a rapid assessment approach to 'horizontally port' these results to two replicator cities: Edinburgh and Camden (London). Horizontal portability is a highly innovative concept emerging from the field of relational values that presents an alternative to generalisation (common in quantitative research) and benefits transfer (common in environmental economic valuation) to port and adapt policy relevant research results from qualitative, deliberative and mixed method approaches, without compromising the contextualised and place-based nature of qualitative data. We will achieve this by packaging up the qualitative associations between treescape characteristics and social and cultural values previously identified through storytelling, mapping, and deliberation, and validating and refining ported results through a rapid participatory porting assessment. Finally, Branching Beyond will work with its local authority partners and the Local Government Association to develop training in and disseminate the porting template and process to further local authorities and local third sector and community groups.

The project addresses the practical problems of how to undertake robust social cost benefit analysis (CBA) for Culture and heritage capital (CHC) and how to apply and adapt accounting principles for sustainable management of CHC. CHC and Natural capital (NC) are intermingled across the English landscape. Existing approaches for valuing natural capital from the environmental economics literature likely subsume the value of CHC service flows and may compromise policy efficiency by mischaracterizing trade-offs involved in managing natural or CHC. The underlying objective of the project is to 1) Develop CHC valuation methods to be readily applied across a range of assets, and 2) To disentangle assets and services produced and co-produced by CHC and other assets such as NC. The principal output will be an overarching framework for practitioners that will help articulate values and guide decision making. The framework will provide a basis that data and insights from future research can be added to. Our work will develop methodologies and guidance for CHC decision-making and outline the normative criteria for sustainability in terms of these methodologies. Addressing these research problems is essential to improving the joint management of CHC and NC by our partners, realising public benefit, and ensuring socially responsible and people-centred approaches to land management. We will reconcile methodologies currently deployed in existing accounts of CHC flows with those developed and deployed for natural capital (NC) (Bateman et al, 2013;2016). Further, we utilise the infrastructure and connections of National Trust (NT) and Forestry England (FE) to design and implement innovative experimental valuation techniques for separating values, for example for NC and CHC flows, and for physical verses digital CHC assets. This will provide a robust and novel expansion of monetary estimates for CHC value flows. In recognition of the urgent need for such approaches to support responses to increasing pressures for land use change, development, climate adaptation and other drivers this approach will ensure immediate impact on practice with findings reported to policy makers (DCMS, Defra and their public bodies) as the work unfolds. Early deliverables to support sector understanding and application of CHC will include publishing introductory guidance, valuation and accounting methodologies guidance and metrics for monitoring and demonstrating benefit flows and change. To support the sector wide adoption of metrics and enable CHC to be made visible and integrated into existing decision support tools, data layers for baseline CHC will be developed and made publicly available. Subsequent deliverables include new value estimates from our experiments, illustrative case study based CHC accounts, technical guidance, and the dissemination of outputs through conferences, webinars, briefing notes for practitioners and journal publications.

THE PROBLEM There is strong evidence that the social and economic conditions in which we grow, live, work and age determine our health to a much larger degree than lifestyle choices. These social determinants of health, such as income, good quality homes, education or work, are not distributed equally in society, which leads to health inequalities. However, we know very little about how specific policies influence the social conditions to prevent ill health and reduce health inequalities. Also, most social determinants of health are the responsibility of policy sectors other than "health", which means policymakers need to promote health in ALL their policies if they are to have a big impact on health. SIPHER will provide new scientific evidence and methods to support such a shift from "health policy" to "healthy public policy". OUR POLICY FOCUS We will work with three policy partners at local, regional and national level to tackle their above-average chronic disease burden and persistent health inequalities: Sheffield City Council, Greater Manchester Combined Authority and Scottish Government. We will focus on four jointly agreed policy priorities for good health: - Creating a fairer economy - Promoting mental wellbeing - Providing affordable, good quality housing - Preventing long-term effects of difficult childhoods. OUR COMPLEX SYSTEMS SCIENCE APPROACH Each of the above policy areas is a complex political system with many competing priorities, where policy choices in one sector (e.g. housing) can have large unintended effects in others (e.g. poverty). There is often no "correct" solution because compromises between different outcomes require value judgements. This means that to assess the true benefits and costs of a policy in relation to health, policy effects and their interdependencies need to be assessed across a wide range of possible outcomes. However, no policymaker has knowledge of the whole system and future economic and political developments are uncertain. Ongoing monitoring of expected and unexpected effects of policies and other system changes is crucial so failing policies can be revised or dropped. We propose to use complex systems modelling, which has been developed to understand and make projections of what might happen in complex systems given different plausible assumptions about future developments. Our models will be underpinned by the best available data and prior research in each policy area. Our new evidence about likely policy effects across a wide range of outcomes will help policy partners decide between alternative policies, depending on how important different outcomes are to them (e.g. improving health or economic growth). We will develop support tools that can visualise the forecasts, identify policies that achieve the desired balance between competing outcomes and update recommendations when new information emerges. Whilst new to public health policy, these methods are well-established in engineering and climate science. We will 1. Work with policy partners to understand the policy systems and evidence needs 2. Bring together existing data and evidence on each policy system (e.g. links between policies and outcomes, interdependencies between outcomes) 3. Explore citizens' preferences for prioritising when not all outcomes can be achieved 4. Link policies and their health and non-health effects in computer models to analyse benefits and costs over time 5. Build an interactive tool to help policy decision-making, inform advocacy action and support political debate. SIPHER's MAIN OUTCOME We will provide policymakers with a new methodology that allows them to estimate the health-related costs and benefits of policies that are implemented outside the health sector. This will be useful to our partners, and others, who want to assess how scarce public sector resources can be spent to maximise the health and wellbeing benefits from all their activities.

Innovation or doing things differently is often seen as a solution to the problems facing adult social care today and for the foreseeable future. Adult social care might seem to be an area where new approaches will naturally flourish (e.g. competition between providers, different people paying, choice over types of care and provider). Yet, while there are many innovations and good evidence that some benefit people using care services, they do not spread rapidly and are often do not become mainstream. Many get abandoned, despite seeming promising. There may be several reasons for this but we are not sure what really stops good things being taken up. Compared to other parts of society, we don't know lots about innovation in social care and why things do not spread. Many organisations and people offer to help with innovation but we do not know much about what they do and how they do it, or what works. Overall, there has not been much effort to draw together experiences of innovating or changing things in adult social care to let people know what might help and avoid 'reinventing the wheel'. This is the reason for our proposed research. We want to support the adult social care sector to start up, implement, spread and scale-up affordable innovations that work well. We will produce: 1) new evidence about the process of innovating (doing things differently), what influences the process (what helps and what hinders), what helps people and systems change, what support is available to help people, and the sector's experiences of and views about that support; 2) a theoretical framework (the 'big idea') for understanding social care innovation that will help to design, plan and learn about innovations; 3) an evidence-based discussion about innovation overall in the care sector and its prospects; 4) descriptions of types of social care innovations, including the people and organisations involved, and types of support for innovation. If our research is to support social care to do things differently and better, then our findings need to be translated into actions. We will build and foster strong relationships with stakeholders (e.g. users/carers, care providers, local authorities) and work with them to design and choose the focus of the study and develop recommendations. Doing this, we will swap ideas and share learning, which should encourage use of the research. We will also ask people who have helped us with the research to tell us what they learnt, if/how they have used the findings, and what we could do better. Innovation is a dynamic or changing process, involving many organisations and people. It needs to be understood in its particular context (e.g. support at home or a carers' group). So, we will develop illustrations or case studies of innovations around selected topics (e.g. integrating systems, making the most of human resources (people), promoting choice and control) to explore the process in-depth. We will explore how individuals, organisations and the wider context all influence innovation. We will focus on parts of adult social care where there is potential for a lot of learning (e.g. research evidence and capacity, stakeholder networks and knowledge leaders, organisational characteristics, 'misaligned' or 'perverse' incentives around costs and benefits). To develop more general claims about what influences innovation and what are the necessary conditions for it to flourish, we will study different types of innovations and conduct a national survey to test findings from the case studies. Informed and supported by strong and diverse user and carer involvement, our study should a) inform decision-making about how to foster the right conditions and policies for innovation to flourish in adult social care; b) inform the design and planning of innovations, work out what innovations are more likely to succeed, and gain learning from innovations; and c) provide evidence-based recommendations for policy, practice and research.

THE PROBLEM There is strong evidence that the social and economic conditions in which we grow, live, work and age determine our health to a much larger degree than lifestyle choices. These social determinants of health, such as income, good quality homes, education or work, are not distributed equally in society, which leads to health inequalities. However, we know very little about how specific policies influence the social conditions to prevent ill health and reduce health inequalities. Also, most social determinants of health are the responsibility of policy sectors other than "health", which means policymakers need to promote health in ALL their policies if they are to have a big impact on health. SIPHER will provide new scientific evidence and methods to support such a shift from "health policy" to "healthy public policy". OUR POLICY FOCUS We will work with three policy partners at local, regional and national level to tackle their above-average chronic disease burden and persistent health inequalities: Sheffield City Council, Greater Manchester Combined Authority and Scottish Government. We will focus on four jointly agreed policy priorities for good health: - Creating a fairer economy - Promoting mental wellbeing - Providing affordable, good quality housing - Preventing long-term effects of difficult childhoods. OUR COMPLEX SYSTEMS SCIENCE APPROACH Each of the above policy areas is a complex political system with many competing priorities, where policy choices in one sector (e.g. housing) can have large unintended effects in others (e.g. poverty). There is often no "correct" solution because compromises between different outcomes require value judgements. This means that to assess the true benefits and costs of a policy in relation to health, policy effects and their interdependencies need to be assessed across a wide range of possible outcomes. However, no policymaker has knowledge of the whole system and future economic and political developments are uncertain. Ongoing monitoring of expected and unexpected effects of policies and other system changes is crucial so failing policies can be revised or dropped. We propose to use complex systems modelling, which has been developed to understand and make projections of what might happen in complex systems given different plausible assumptions about future developments. Our models will be underpinned by the best available data and prior research in each policy area. Our new evidence about likely policy effects across a wide range of outcomes will help policy partners decide between alternative policies, depending on how important different outcomes are to them (e.g. improving health or economic growth). We will develop support tools that can visualise the forecasts, identify policies that achieve the desired balance between competing outcomes and update recommendations when new information emerges. Whilst new to public health policy, these methods are well-established in engineering and climate science. We will 1. Work with policy partners to understand the policy systems and evidence needs 2. Bring together existing data and evidence on each policy system (e.g. links between policies and outcomes, interdependencies between outcomes) 3. Explore citizens' preferences for prioritising when not all outcomes can be achieved 4. Link policies and their health and non-health effects in computer models to analyse benefits and costs over time 5. Build an interactive tool to help policy decision-making, inform advocacy action and support political debate. SIPHER's MAIN OUTCOME We will provide policymakers with a new methodology that allows them to estimate the health-related costs and benefits of policies that are implemented outside the health sector. This will be useful to our partners, and others, who want to assess how scarce public sector resources can be spent to maximise the health and wellbeing benefits from all their activities.