We are faced with meeting the agricultural demands of a growing population estimated to reach 9.8 billion people by 2050 on soils depleted of essential nutrients, with declining yields and a projected reduction in future rainfall in key agricultural regions. A circular economy between agriculture and organic waste streams can recycle essential resources for farming through the recovery of water, biomass, and nutrients from sanitation waste solids, effluents, and livestock manure at scale. This offers benefits to agroecological practices in farming by reducing the reliance on chemical fertiliser inputs with multiple benefits that improve soil health, reduce greenhouse gas emissions from farming, and reduce water pollution in drainage from fields. However, there are potential risks and challenges associated with this solution and these need to be fully understood to enable resource recovery to operate in a safe and sustainable manner in the long term. Firstly, the gastrointestinal tracts of humans and animals are a source of pathogens to the environment and agriculture food chain. So, reusing these wastes could potentially spread these pathogens to the food crops we consume. Secondly, manure and sewage are sources of veterinary and medical chemicals to the environment; these compounds can enhance a microbe's ability to resist treatment drugs, such as antibiotics. This ability to resist treatment drugs can spread to other microbes important for plant, animal, and human diseases. Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a global public health crisis that is predicted to cause 10 million deaths per year by 2050. Currently, livestock and the environment are recognised as reservoirs of antimicrobial resistant microbes and implicated in the dissemination of these AMR microbes. Science-based methods to assess the environmental, livestock and human health risks of combined exposure to antimicrobial selective compounds and AMR microbes are therefore central to fully realising the potential benefits of a sanitation-agriculture circular economy. Models, analytical tools, and quantitative assessment methods to understand, measure and assess the impacts of agricultural exposure routes urgently warrant scientific attention. Through understanding the safety risks recycling waste streams pose, new interventions can be devised to minimise these risks, making resource recycling a viable mechanism to increase soil and farm productivity. Working with water utility companies and the National Pig Centre, we will investigate how water and farm waste can be recycled to be used in agriculture. Using laboratory models, we will identify where pathogens and chemicals aggregate along the different waste streams, thus identify where interventions need to be made. Using this information, we will define a risk assessment analysis to tackle pathogen and chemical buildup. We propose to build on the 'one-health, one environment' approach to AMR by acknowledging the connectivity between humans, animals and the environment. This project will support the development of a UK sanitation-circular economy and build a UK-led innovation network with global reach. The overall aim of the project is to build a community of educational, industry, farming, and government colleagues to increase the capacity of the UK to address global pollution challenges associated with adopting a circular economy to support agricultural production. A circular economy approach is essential in meeting global agricultural needs, especially enhancing the role that farming can play in climate control and our need to move towards Net Zero greenhouse gas emissions. This proposal will pave the way in achieving this goal whilst minimising the impact of utilising waste materials on the environment and animal and human health.

Network partners The project is a cross sector partnership between universities and the theatre area of the cultural industries. The core institutions will be represented on the steering committee: the Universities of Leeds, Newcastle, Zhejiang, Nanjing, California Davis, British Columbia, and Queensland with the Royal Shakespeare Company, West Yorkshire Playhouse and Sichuan Peoples' Art Theatre. These institutions are leaders in their fields with international profiles which will be further enhanced by this proposed network. The RSC's first production of a Chinese play 'The Orphan of Zhao' (a 13th century classical play based on historical events during 600-500BC yet with period transcending themes) provides a good topic for the network to examine how China and Chinese culture are presented in intracultural, intercultural and transcultural theatre productions, and how languages and translations play a key role in stage productions to form or to alter people's perception of others' cultures. Academic outputs in the funding period (01/2013 - 08/2014) We will carry out conventional and practice-led research (University of Leeds is an international leader for both), workshops for the future plan of the repository of stage productions, development of curricula on translating Chinese drama, and practical work involving professionals and general public. Through these activities, the network attempts to seek answers to the following research questions and related issues, allowing for further definition, clarification or alteration during the course of the project. Primary question and related issues How is China constructed and projected through intra/inter/trans-cultural stage productions in Chinese (including different dialects) and in English, and how can research into languages and translations contribute to understanding of the perceptions of China? To answer the overarching question, the following will be addressed through proposed activities: 1. Why has the ancient play 'The Orphan' (first written in the 13th century based on historical events during 600-500BC) fascinated so many artists? What images do various Chinese productions (in the styles of indigenous song-dance theatre, Western-inspired spoken drama and Western opera) and now that of the RSC's attempt to create? How can a classical Chinese play be made relevant to today's British/ Chinese youth and how do we tackle language, culture and generation barriers? 2. Is 'translation' involved in theatre even within China's own territories? Does 'translation' only mean 'verbal rendition' and what happens when a written text transfers to performance and travels from one regional genre to another in different dialects and stage vocabulary? What levels of translation are involved when an English poet adapts 'The Orphan' to be directed and performed by British artists? How does the intracultural encounter contribute to the intercultural work? 3. How does theatre shape perception of China and Chinese culture through the languages and translations it involves? 4. What skills gaps exist in the UK, and what strategies exist to fill those gaps i.e. to help students build the capacity to tackle complicated language and culture issues in translations? The introduction of a new module 'Translating Chinese Drama' at Newcastle University will serve as a case study. 5. How can intercultural theatres develop, based on a genuine dialogue in the highly complex global cultural landscape, engaging issues from broader perspectives involved in languages and translations? 6. How can digital technology be used to share knowledge and expertise on Chinese theatre and to enrich international and intercultural engagement?

This project will focus on the central theme of Urban Narrative Environment, seeking to introduce recent research findings on narrative environment into the field of urban studies and to establish an international research network on this subject.\n\nToday we live in a world of cities: almost 50% of world population inhabits cities (89.7% in UK). 'It is vital that we understand the impact of this urban growth on people and the environment, as the links between architecture and society become both more complex and more fragile.' An understanding of urban conditions, including the conflicts, values and memory as well as human experience of them, necessitates multidisciplinary approaches and offers a challenge to the arts and humanities.\n\nNarrative is integral to human experience: on the one hand, we live in a world abounding with stories of various forms; on the other hand, narrative is one of the fundamental ways we organize and understand the world. Narrative is one of the prior schemes that are 'actively used to organize and interpret a person's encounter with the environment, both internal and external.' Narrative offers a distinctive approach to understand how our knowledge and experience of the environment is constructed and in return, how to organize the environment that conforms to human experience and memory and facilitates human interactions with the environment. \n\nThis project will examine urban environments through investigations into the interaction between temporally structured narratives and their spatial configurations, in other words, to investigate how 'space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history.' This project aims at revealing the hidden 'narrative landscape' in urban environments as a collage of narrative strata corresponding to the natural ways of experiencing an environment, namely gaze, route and survey modes. This 'narrascape' provides a particular layer to analyze and assess the values, organizations and representations of urban space. The concept and methodology of 'narrascape' will be developed through four multidisciplinary workshops with separate but correlated case studies. Digital media, especially moving images and virtual reality, with their extraordinary power in representing (and creating) human experience, will be employed and explored as the primary tools in presenting and developing urban 'narrascape'.\n\nThe Digital Studio is part of the Martin Centre for Architectural and Urban Studies, Department of Architecture, University of Cambridge. It is directed by Dr. François Penz and has for years successfully led EPSRC, AHRC and EU funded researches into narrative organization of space, non-linear narrative forms and the expressive use of digital media to facilitate design and communications on architectural and urban issues. This project seeks to extend Digital Studio's investigation into urban studies and to examine previous research outputs in the urban contexts of UK and China.\n\nThere is growing interest for UK and China to carry out research collaborations on the global issues of urban environments and urban conditions. The Martin Centre has strong track record of collaborative projects with Chinese universities on architectural and urban studies. This project will initiate a new network to bring together researchers and professionals from both countries to discuss and explore the narrative values, organizations and representations of urban environment. This project will consist of workshops, conference, translation and publication works, and dissemination activities. The foci are the workshops on the case studies of three historic cities: Cambridge in the UK, Nanjing and Changsha in China. Each case study addresses a sub-theme of 'narrascape'. Through these workshops, this project seeks to advance our understanding of urban narrative environment and to establish a network that will foster future research and practice opportunities.

Different numbers of species are found in different regions of the globe and in different environments. The tropics house incredible numbers of species, whereas polar environments house far fewer. This pattern of decreasing number of species from the equator to the poles is referred to as the latitudinal biodiversity gradient. The spatial distribution of life on Earth is well characterised today, but we know relatively little about how spatial patterns of biodiversity have varied over millions of years, during times in which Earth's climate and continents were dramatically different to today. This knowledge gap prevents us from understanding the causes of variation in richness among regions and environments, leaving a fundamental and unanswered question at the heart of biodiversity studies. We will characterise how latitudinal biodiversity gradients in the oceans have varied during the past 545 million years, using the rich fossil record of skeletonising marine invertebrates. This will allow us to ask what environmental factors control the distribution of biodiversity among regions and environments. These deep time patterns will provide important historical context for understanding the distribution of life on Earth, yielding unprecedented insight into the generation and maintenance of marine biodiversity. It will also help us to understand the long-term effects of major shifts in climate state, such as those occurring today, on biodiversity.

This research project focuses on sustainable intensification of agriculture in highly productive peri-urban farming areas in China. This agricultural base is essential to meet China's increasing food production demands but is under pressure from urban pollution inputs, soil and water pollution from farming practices - particularly extensive use of mineral fertilisers and pesticides, and urbanisation. We will quantify the benefits and risks of a substantial step-increase in organic fertiliser application as a means to reduce the use of mineral fertiliser. Our approach is to study the role of soil as a central control point in Earth's Critical Zone (CZ), the thin outer layer of our planet that determines most life-sustaining resources. Our Critical Zone Observatory (CZO) site is the Zhangxi catchment within Ningbo city, a pilot city of rapid urbanization in the Yangtze delta. We will combine controlled manipulation experiments of increased organic fertiliser loading with determination of soil process rates and flux determinations for water, nutrients, contaminants, and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions across the flux boundaries where the soil profile interfaces with and influences the wider CZ; surface waters and aquifers, vegetation, and the atmosphere. To guide the research design we have identified 3 detailed scientific hypotheses. 1. Replacement of mineral fertiliser use by organic fertiliser will shift the soil food web for N/C cycling from one dominated by bacterial heterotrophic decomposition of soil organic matter (SOM) and bacterial nitrification to produce plant available N and loss of soluble nitrate to drainage waters, to one dominated by heterotrophic fungal decomposition of complex, more persistent forms of OM to low molecular weight organic N forms that are plant available. This change in N source will increase SOM content and improve soil structure through soil aggregate formation. 2. Increased use of organic fertiliser from pig slurry (PS), and wastewater sludge (WS) will lead to increased environmental occurrence of emerging contaminants, particularly antibiotics and growth hormones. Environmental transport, fate and exposure must be determined to quantify development of microbial antibiotic resistance and other environmental and food safety risk, and develop soil and water management practices for risk mitigation. 3. Decreased use of mineral fertilisers and increased use of organic fertilisers will reduce environmental and food safety risks from metals contamination; this is due to lower metal mobility and bioavailability from redox transformations, reduced soil acidification and increased metal complexation on soil organic matter. Our programme of research will conduct the manipulation experiments across nested scales of observation with idealised laboratory microcosm systems, controlled manipulation experiments in field mesocosms, pilot testing of grass buffer strips to reduce the transport of emerging contaminants from the soil to surface waters, and field (~1ha) manipulation experiments. Mechanistic soil process models will be tested, further developed to test the specific hypotheses, and applied to quantify process rates that mediate the landscape scale CZ fluxes as a measure of ecosystem service flows. GIS modelling methods include data from characterisation of a subset of soil properties and process rates at a wider set of locations in the catchment, together with catchment surface water and groundwater monitoring for water and solute flux balances. The GIS model that is developed will identify the geospatial variation in nutrient, contaminant, and GHG sources and sinks and will be used to quantify fluxes at the catchment scale. These results will determine the current baseline of ecosystem service flows and will evaluate scenarios for how these measures of ecosystem services will change with a transition to widespread of organic fertilisers through the farming area of the catchment.