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.

We are building a Digital Solutions Hub (Hub) as a gateway to a broad set of inter-connected toolkits that facilitate improved access and better use of NERC data. The digital platform will have especially broad impacts on the environment, society and the economy by facilitating easier access and use of NERC data in business, government and society. Working with our partners, who are the users of what we build, will help grow its use and dissemination. The Hub will be integrated with wider social, economic, health and environmental datasets, to support decision making across a range of sectors. For stakeholders, the Hub will be the user-facing entry point that allows them to explore what NERC offers, ensuring that data and toolkits are findable and accessible. Data science, and the integration it requires, are highly complex and constantly evolving. Our approach recognises that computational tools need to 'sit' in the appropriate place in the technical ecosystem, and that users, particularly those who are new, must be supported in using and accessing them. We will be working with a range of partners in local and national government, the private sector, technology sector, infrastructure providers, health sector, transportation, urban and regional planning, environmental science and a whole range of local and national agencies we will facilitate improved decision making in a wide range of sectors. The Hub will benefit society by improving decision makers' ability to make informed decisions through the integration of data that have potential benefits for the future prosperity of the UK. This ranges from local to national government, the NHS, utility sector, transport infrastructure, insurance industry, housing developers as well as individual members of society. Providing easier access to NERC's environmental data offers opportunities to improving peoples' health and better understanding the impacts of climate change on people, land and property across the UK.

This research project involves a partnership between two networks from the 2010/11 AHRC ‘Researching Environmental change’ programme. The ‘Performance Footprint’ network brings expertise in using site-specific performance to promote awareness of environmental change in diverse settings. The ‘Living Flood Histories’ network has explored how situated flood narrative and memorialisation practices can bring new insights in how to engage public groups, at changing flood risk. This proposed 12 month project responds to an invitation from the Environment Agency (EA) to explore how situated performance and flood narratives might be used to engage ‘hard to reach’ urban floodplain groups, at risk from flooding but without recent flood experience. Such groups may be disconnected in both physical and human terms (e.g. divided by urban planning, lacking in community cohesion), proving unresponsive to recent policy initiatives emphasising the importance of community-led adaptation planning in dealing with flood risk. This project aims to stimulate awareness of these issues, and encourage local resilience-building, by researching and facilitating two inter-related, site-specific performance events, in direct collaboration with local volunteers. The chosen sites in Bristol (Eastville) and Bradford (Shipley) have been identified by the EA, and feature heavily canalised watercourses partly hidden from public view. The research process will begin by reviewing the findings of the contributing research networks, and considering their application in the project context. How might situated narratives and performances best be framed to encourage local engagement with flood risk? Can the ‘after the flood’ memorialisation practices of other communities be used as a creative means to inform ‘before the flood’ resilience-building in the chosen site contexts? Can creative participation be employed as a means for: developing and enhancing ‘a watery sense of place’; exploring uncertainty around future climate scenarios; understanding issues around ‘distributed responsibility’ for flood risk response. Local engagement strategies will be developed in collaboration with facilitation experts. Volunteer participants will be involved in a project development period, with regular creative workshops and discussions extrapolating the research concerns. A key objective will be to use the process of working towards creative outcomes to help generate a context in which expert and local knowledges are equally valued. Dialogues will be facilitated between local participants, flood scientists and other experts, EA and local council representatives. The development period will lead towards participatory public performance events, presented in the context of festive community gatherings (e.g. street parties). A model of ‘distributed performance’ will be pioneered, involving a range of interconnected presentations offered by various groups and individuals in different microsites within the floodplain vicinity. This will maximise potential for local involvement, and emphasise the ecological theme of connectivity between people and places. Responses to these events among residents will be sought, and the outcomes of the two projects cross-referred, in order to develop research findings. Project outcomes will be captured and disseminated through: a guidance/action pack for potential future users; interdisciplinary research articles and presentations; documentation presented on collaborating networks’ websites. The research results will be of interest to a wide range of disciplines and professions: researchers in theatre/performance studies, physical and cultural geography, social history; professionals in flood risk management (EA, local authorities); social engagement professionals. Attention will be given to how the research can generate sustainable follow-through in the case study settings, and how the research outcomes are cascaded to other urban flood risk groups.

Microplastics (MPs) have been found in virtually all environments: soil, living things, water and air. The past five years have included a small number of investigations over long time scales (up to a year for some) and across wide ranging locations. One common finding is that MP numbers and types vary greatly in different environments. There is now concern regarding the possible impacts of MPs in terms of public and other organism health. MPs are of the size range range of 1 micron to 5 mm, which ranges from the size of a small bacterium to a sesame seed at most, inhalable, and common in food chains/diet. They come in different shapes and polymer types, depending on the plastics that are derived from eg. polyester or polypropylene, which are common in textiles or packaging. Recently, they have been identified inside people's lungs, blood and bowels, and questions arise as to whether they cause or exacerbate lung or bowel conditions like chronic cough or irritable bowel disease. In marine organisms they are also associated with growth and inflammation type impacts. Current air quality measures and monitoring completely overlook this contaminant type, which is likely to become a public health issue. Current measurements of the types of particles and gases in routine air monitoring also fail to completely explain high levels of specific cough and inflammation type disease incidences in many cities. This study firstly aims to establish a means to measure MPs in the air, which would represent a new air quality measure methodology. The approach we suggest 'slip streams' the current pollen monitoring methods available worldwide, making it accessible for those who do not have access to specialist and expensive equipment. The method proposed does however have certain robust elements included and these are to ensure that the agencies who conduct air quality measurements can use the data produced. The second aspect of this work is to develop an automated identification and counting technology approach so that the monitoring can be completed in future using low cost, non-specialist equipment and expertise. Ideally, the method will be available for reliable and reproducible use around the world. This will be achieved by a combination of manipulation of existing available datasets on MPs found in the air (from our past three years of studies), and trials with colleagues located across four continents who work with different pollen sampling approaches. One novel approach we will use will be to make a set of MP 'reference strips' that can be posted to users and used an as internal calibration when taking images for analysis. There are parallels between established pollen monitoring and trying to set up something similar for MPs, that we can exploit. Pollen come in a comparable range of shapes and sizes (ranging from 5-100+ microns) to MPs. They are a trigger for health impacts and, as such, are routinely and robustly monitored such that datasets can be shared and compared internationally as well as communicated to the public. The same parameters can apply for MPs. The second aspect, the auto-identification and counting would represent a significant step forward for both pollen and MP monitoring, that could see wider benefits still. The trials we conduct will run in parallel with the current practice for MP sampling, to add further cross comparison but also to anchor any new approach to what is currently deemed as acceptable in the wider community of research scientists working in this area.

UK cities regularly exceed air quality (AQ) compliance limits. On-going improvements in AQ will be offset by planned growth in some regions. More detailed observations during a period of quickly changing pollutant emissions would expand our understanding of the complex interactions between human activities, pollutant emissions and AQ control measures. A focus will be the differing responses of particulate matter (PM) and gaseous pollutants. The COVID-19 period provides an unprecedented opportunity for additional measurement to illuminate factors which influencing UK air quality and health. Cranfield University (CU) is a controlled mixed (urban and rural) site in the ARCs heart. It has a self- contained campus with a unique combination of infrastructure, site types and facilities. The Cranfield Urban Observatory reference station is operating, and multi-species sensor units are available for immediate use. In this project, these units would be deployed as soon as possible at identified sites across the Oxford-Milton Keynes-Cambridge Arc (ARC) in order to provide a detailed observational record during a period of low traffic and industrial activity while COVID-19 restrictions are in place and being eased. Real-time information can be provided on the interaction between air quality and the easing of social distancing measures. These measurements made during a period of known intervention measures will inform infrastructure planning for the ARC and the design of Low Emission Zones and air quality policy more generally. The data will be available for use by researchers looking at before/during/after effects of these measures.