The urgent issues of climate change, air quality concerns, resource and energy security, overexploitation, and pollution, mean that NERC environmental science research is integral to society and its future. Our Stage-1 Engaging Environments projects revealed: UK communities feel that they have a meaningful stake in tackling these issues; and researchers have a strong desire to integrate their work into society. The daunting scale of environmental issues and socio-economic conditions on the ground mean many feel powerless to act. This leads to apathy or anger, undermining appetite for debate and eroding trust in institutions. A Stage-1 Community Research Report notes that there is a mismatch between what the public want and how scientists work. It suggests that one-way engagement through traditional dissemination is prevalent. The report acknowledges that publics and scientists recognise the need for integrated engagement and co-creation. This follows work by ComRes (2017) that showed people's interest in environmental research increases when they are able to make a connection to their own lives. For us, public engagement with environmental research must be boldly re-imagined as a collective practice and joint endeavour. It needs to challenge the status quo. Our project enables new ways of understanding and supporting communities and researchers to bolster the emergence of collective responses to contemporary environmental change. In Stage-1, ENCOMPASS learnt how community organising develops power and agency through relationship building that emphasises how dependent we are on each other and devises action that results in positive change. OPENER established communities of practice that shared best practice and supported leadership in participatory citizen science. To enable communities to build agency and feel they have the power to act on environmental issues, we will develop and support relationship building between community leaders and environmental science researchers. This will give the UK public at large a voice and a stake in the environmental research that they pay for. We combine these strong elements in a coming of age of people-centred approaches that lower barriers to engagement and participation for both communities and researchers. We are integrating and learning from community organising in order to understand people's motivations, analyse power dynamics of institutions and build trust. Partnership and collaboration between diverse communities, the NERC research community, practitioners, public-facing organisations, and environmental NGOs are key to our ambition to advance open science in the UK. Through building relationships, we will make a national call to action, where people share their story of the environment - acknowledging and capturing people's diverse encounters with the places where they live, the species they care about and the landscapes that matter most to them. People thus contribute to the debate in meaningful ways. We will put into practice approaches and tools that enable researchers to share the environmental science agenda with the public and to respond together to environmental challenges. We will implement a set of co-developed actions, capturing a range of levels of engagement from passive consumption to deeply involved DIY science. Our Stage-2 project will position NERC at the leading edge of the UKRI's "vision of a society in which research is created, used, challenged, valued, and shared by all" and sets a new benchmark for future projects. The project team and wider partnership are leaders in: environmental science (climate, geology, ecology, soil, marine); public engagement; citizen science; social science; and public-facing organisations. We share a commitment to collective learning and the new ways of thinking and doing required to ensure the sustainability of a national community of practice that will become the NERC Community for Engaging Environments.

Bradford is one of the youngest cities in Europe, with more than a quarter under the age of 16. Since the industrial revolution the city has welcomed people from other parts of the globe. Bradford was one of the first places in the UK to be formally recognised as a 'City of Sanctuary'. The project will develop an exact 3D representation of Saltaire, a UNESCO World Heritage Site (WHS) and historic suburb of Bradford, linked to the City along the route of the former Bradford Branch of the Leeds-Liverpool Canal via a Greenway. This Digital Twin of Saltaire and its linking route will be used to explore placemaking and inform the management of heritage assets and engagement of public audiences, and will link up with the existing Virtual Bradford model. Expanding on the strong working relationship between the University and the Council, new partners from education, community groups and refugee action groups will provide tangible avenues for citizen engagement in strategic development and planning. The partners share a common vision that health and wellbeing of our young people is rooted in community, belonging and place. Bradford was the first UNESCO City of Film and is one of only five UK cities to have a UNESCO WHS within the district. Building on these rich and diverse heritage and cultural assets, the strong partnership between the University and the Council will focus on the value of place, and the potential for Saltaire. This will foster a strong sense of identity, belonging and civic pride across the wider Bradford District, as well as for those residents and stakeholders within the 19th Mill Village. Concepts of co-creation are at the project's core, where local residents, schools and community groups will collect, interpret, use and repurpose data, including for artistic outputs. To enable this, we will develop a co-production tool, used to create a 'dynamic' condition monitoring approach for Grade II Listed Properties on the National Heritage List for England to support fabric surveys and facilitate listed building consent for property owners towards the upkeep of the built heritage. It will inform strategic planning decisions, such as modelling air quality and the proposed creation of an Active Travel Neighbourhood for Saltaire, with the aim of reducing the volume of through-traffic for the WHS and adjacent residential areas. In recognising the potential recreational value of heritage for health and well-being, we will join the Virtual Bradford model to the proposed Saltaire model just 4 km distant from the City Centre. To aid site interpretation for learning and visitors, we will work with partners Bradford Council and Saltaire World Heritage Education Association (SWHEA) who have secured seed-funding to develop a tourism app for Saltaire. This is not simply a technical endeavour, since we recognise that the artistic aesthetics and immersive quality of our Digital Twin lends itself to a variety of uses suited to placing historic imagery, maps, plans, demolished buildings, objects and other 'intangible' narrative content in context. This will enrich understanding and discovery linked to place, both within the UNESCO WHS and its wider setting. Our project responds to aims and aspirations that are listed within the Saltaire WHS Management Plan. Engagement with the project will be facilitated via strong existing partnerships with Bradford Council's Department of Place and active community stakeholder groups, ensuring that impact is integral to project development, implementation and outputs. The project will leave a lasting legacy of freely available digital, artistic and educational resources, as well as informing strategic planning decisions and community involvement in Saltaire and Bradford.