Environmental research has the power to connect with people's everyday lives and spark their imaginations. In 2016: a NERC scientist's graphic illustrating global temperatures spiralling upwards went viral on social media and was then used during the Opening Ceremony of the Rio Olympics, being seen by more than 1 billion people; 12.3 million people watched episodes of BBC's Planet Earth II programme making it the most-watched nature show; over 500,000 volunteers contributed 8 million sightings to the RSPB's Big Garden Birdwatch; 12,000 people donated the idle time of their computers to ClimatePrediction.net to run climate models; and 500 people were involved in Biohacking and DIY Science experimentation. Our ambition is for large-scale public involvement in participatory research practices, such as citizen science, in order to benefit research, researchers and members of the public. We want to progress from 'engagement' being solely passive consumption of media-channelled facts, or ad hoc one-off contribution to a single initiative, to an ongoing active and routine engagement with environmental research, participating, questioning and debating. Our vision is to leverage the power of the people and their involvement in environmental science at all stages of the research - from research design to explaining the evidence and impact - to address major environmental challenges, co-produce novel research and engage on their own terms. We want to create a generation of researchers who know how to utilise these techniques of successful public engagement and citizen science, and pay attention to the ethical and social implications of participation and the environmental issues in question. We want to establish the research commitment and NGO link that will enable successful co-production of environmental knowledge. Recent research by ComRes (2017) suggests that people's interest in environmental research increases when they are able to make a connection to their own lives. Yet, only a minority understand what constitutes or regularly engage with environmental research, although many want to hear more. In order to create genuine and sustainable change in public engagement with environmental research, OPENER combines the shared enthusiasm for the environment and the public's curiosity for the natural world with the expanding public engagement capacity of multidisciplinary researchers, practitioners, public-facing organisations and community groups. OPENER will scope out and build commitment for a national community of practice (CoP) for public engagement with environmental research. We believe that active public engagement and debate must: 1. be a multidisciplinary and partnership-building endeavour; 2. actively build on existing expertise in citizen science and participatory engagement; 3. acknowledge people have a complex identities, often with contradictory opinions; 4. respect and value all knowledge as meaningful and promote pluralism in expertise; 5. develop increased capacity, interest and skills of researchers and audiences; 6. enable avenues of engagement that acknowledge different needs, interests and availability; 7. facilitate public involvement in all stages of the scientific process and make explicit links to everyday life. Our Team who co-created OPENER is made up of national- and world-leaders in: environmental science (climate, ecology, soil, marine); public engagement and citizen science; cross-disciplinary social science; and public- and membership-facing organisations. We share a commitment to collective learning and embrace the new ways of thinking and doing required to ensure the sustainability of a national CoP. We will engage with a wide range of stakeholders to deliver an intergrated vision, mission, core values and joint activities for public engagement with environmental research in the UK.

The UK is leading the development and installation of offshore renewable energy technologies. With over 13GW of installed offshore wind capacity and another 3GW under construction, two operational and one awarded floating offshore demonstration projects as well as Contracts for Difference awards for four tidal energy projects, offshore renewable energy will provide the backbone of the Net Zero energy system, giving energy security, green growth and jobs in the UK. The revised UK targets that underpin the Energy Security Strategy seek to grow offshore wind capacity to 50 GW, with up to 5 GW floating offshore wind by 2030. Further acceleration is envisaged beyond 2030 with targets of around 150 GW anticipated for 2050. To achieve these levels of deployment, ORE developments need to move beyond current sites to more challenging locations in deeper water, further from shore, while the increasing pace of deployment introduces major challenges in consenting, manufacture and installation. These are ambitious targets that will require strategic innovation and research to achieve the necessary technology acceleration while ensuring environmental sustainability and societal acceptance. The role of the Supergen ORE Hub 2023 builds on the academic and scientific networks, traction with industry and policymakers and the reputation for research leadership established in the Supergen ORE Hub 2018. The new hub will utilise existing and planned research outcomes to accelerate the technology development, collaboration and industry uptake for commercial ORE developments. The Supergen ORE Hub strategy will focus on delivering impact and knowledge transfer, underpinned by excellent research, for the benefit of the wider sector, providing research and development for the economic and social benefit of the UK. Four mechanisms for leverage are envisaged to accelerate the ORE expansion: Streamlining ORE projects, by accelerating planning, consenting and build out timescales; upscaling the ORE workforce, increasing the scale and efficiency of ORE devices and system; enhanced competitiveness, maximising ORE local content and ORE economic viability in the energy portfolio; whilst ensuring sustainability, yielding positive environmental and social benefits from ORE. The research programme is built around five strategic workstreams, i) ORE expansion - policy and scenarios , ii) Data for ORE design and decision-making, iii) ORE modelling, iv) ORE design methods and v) Future ORE systems and concepts, which will be delivered through a combination of core research to tackle sector wide challenges in a holistic and synergistic manner, strategic projects to address emerging sector challenges and flexible funding to deliver targeted projects addressing focussed opportunities. Supergen Representative Systems will be established as a vehicle for academic and industry community engagement to provide comparative reference cases for assessing applicability of modelling tools and approaches, emerging technology and data processing techniques. The Supergen ORE Hub outputs, research findings and sector progress will be communicated through directed networking, engagement and dissemination activities for the range of academic, industry and policy and governmental stakeholders, as well as the wider public. Industry leverage will be achieved through new co-funding mechanisms, including industry-funded flexible funding calls, direct investment into research activities and the industry-funded secondment of researchers, with >53% industry plus >23% HEI leverage on the EPSRC investment at proposal stage. The Hub will continue and expand its role in developing and sustaining the pipeline of talent flowing into research and industry by integrating its ECR programme with Early Career Industrialists and by enhancing its programme of EDI activities to help deliver greater diversity within the sector and to promote ORE as a rewarding and accessible career for all.

Agriculture is a major cause of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, pollution and biodiversity loss globally and in the UK. Achieving sustainable ('green') growth of agricultural production to feed 10 billion people by 2050 whilst reducing environmental impacts is one of the greatest challenges facing humanity. Changing our diets and reducing food waste are part of the solution. However, as recognised in the UK government's Clean Growth Grand Challenge, significant green growth in the agri-food sector is also necessary to meet this demand without compromising other targets, in particular that of neutrality in carbon emissions by 2050. The GREEN AG programme will build a long-term, strategic research and innovation infrastructure to develop new UK farming systems which will produce sufficient food whilst reducing emissions and pollution, protecting biodiversity, and enhancing soil health. We call this 'net zero+' as it will balance net zero emissions aims with wider environmental concerns. These solutions will be required at scale if the UK is to meet emission reduction targets, and avoid the unintended consequences of emissions being offshored by increased food imports, or causing damage to valuable ecosystems in the UK. GREEN AG will engage and unite the science community with industry, policy, farmer and NGO stakeholders. We will identify farm management practices with potential to reduce emissions and/or capture carbon without major impacts on food production or other environmental outcomes. We will undertake detailed, integrated measurements of these practices on both experiments and on a network of instrumented study farms (Living Farm Labs). We will use models to define pathways to achieving net zero+ arable and livestock farm systems that minimise trade-offs with production and the environment. Finally, we will use cutting edge data science to provide data, models and tools to enable the transition to net zero+ agriculture. Achieving the ambition of clean, green and net-zero agriculture will require strategic, cross-disciplinary and long-term research - a so-called national capability. This will bring together directed teams from NERC and BBSRC centres - UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, Rothamsted Research, National Centre for Earth Observation, British Geological Survey and Plymouth Marine Laboratory. This partnership will bring together complementary expertise in ground and earth observation, sensor networks, measurement of GHG emissions from soils, groundwater and estuaries, pollution, biodiversity, crop and livestock production, data science and modelling from field to national scales, covering terrestrial, freshwater and coastal zones. Our environmental research will complement work on other aspects of the farming system that might support net zero+, including crop breeding, animal husbandry and diet, soil science, and crop nutrition and protection. The GREEN AG national capability will provide the following outcomes for the UK science community and other stakeholders: - New knowledge underpinning effective agri-environmental policies to achieve net zero emissions by 2050; - New funding opportunities levered from the GREEN AG research and innovation infrastructure which comprise a national digital farmland observatory, instrumented study farms, experiments, data and models; - More effective implementation of net zero+ polices and practice through stakeholder engagement and co-design, and through the provision of new decision support tools; - Opportunities for UK researchers and agri-businesses to export this green growth knowledge, technology and innovations to overseas markets.

Considerable effort and money has been devoted to determining the ecological consequences of a wide range of interventions, which has resulted in an extensive literature. However, research shows that practitioners only rarely use this literature when making decisions as to which intervention to implement. Furthermore, many accepted beliefs in conservation practice are actually incorrect. Scientific results are traditionally published in academic journals. However, it is often difficult for practitioners to extract the pertinent information from these. The major problems are that most practitioners do not have access to the Web of Science or equivalent scientific search engines, it is often difficult to target the search for conservation interventions without producing vast numbers of irrelevent titles and many practitioners do not have the training to extract the conservation message from academic papers. Evidence-based medicine has revolutionised medical practice in that the collection, review, and dissemination of the evidence now underpins most medical practice. We suggest that conservation would benefit from a similar revolution and propose that evidence-based conservation should become a standard approach. In this model we envisage practitioners having easy access to summaries of the literature, that they would monitor the effectiveness of some interventions for which the evidence is weak or ambiguous, that there would be reviews and meta analyses where there are numerous studies relating to one issue, and there would be synopses summarising the evidence for the major interventions. This proposal seeks to provide an open access database of the majority of the papers relating to the consequences for birds of conservation interventions. Syntheses of the consequences of a wide range of interventions will be a key output. Full use of the output will also require a change in approaches to conservation. The involvement of all the major organisations involved in bird conservation (BirdLife International - a partnership of over 100 national global bird conservation organisations, British Trust for Ornithology, Joint Nature Conservation Committee, Natural England, Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, Scottish Natural Heritage and World Conservation Monitoring Centre) will both ensure that the project is as required by practitioners but will also ensure that the results will be widely used both in the UK and internationally. Training in the use of evidence-based conservation will be provided through workshops in the UK, Africa and Asia and this work will also be promoted through stands at UK and international meetings. The longer term objective is to change global conservation practice so that the decisions effecting biodiversity are routinely based upon the scientific literature. The expectation is that we can build upon the work and experience of this project to expand it to incorporate all the major aspect of conservation in collaboration with a wide range of other organisation so that the use of evidence in decision making becomes standard practice This proposal would allow us to make a substantial step forward in achieving our objective of reforming global conservation practice.

We live in the critical decade for climate change. The world increasingly experiences the damages and losses from extreme weather events caused by human-made climate change. Crop losses, devastating floods, catastrophic wildfires and rising sea levels cannot be ignored. If we do not achieve a balance between our greenhouse gas emissions and removals from the air, these impacts will become considerably worse and more dangerous. The UK has legally committed to achieving a net zero greenhouse gas balance by 2050. However, it is currently hotly debated how this goal can be achieved. The Land Use for Net Zero (LUNZ) Hub brings together researchers, policy-makers, industry leaders, innovators and rural community representatives from all four nations of the UK. Our 33 member organisations include researchers and practitioners from green finance, agricultural advisory organisations, NGOs, and an arts collective. The goal of the LUNZ hub is to accelerate positive land use change that reduces harmful greenhouse gas emissions, increases food security and restores a healthy environment for plants, animals and people. The Hub will equip UK policy-makers, industry and stakeholders with the advice they need, in the format and timeframe they require, to take policy decisions to help avert dangerous climate change and lead to a better future. We will bring together scientific evidence and stakeholder perspectives to define shared, net zero scenarios (plausible alternative futures)and credible pathways (steps including policies and incentives) to achieve them by 2050. The Hub will establish an Agile Policy Centre, a Net Zero Futures Platform, and a Creative Methods Lab. Within the Hub, our four National Teams will work together with our Topic Expert Groups to build capacity for a Just Transition to net zero that benefits people and planet alike. The Hub will support the UK Government and the devolved administrations in achieving multiple environmental goals by understanding the impacts of policy decisions on all relevant aspects, including renewable energy, agriculture, planning frameworks, afforestation, water management, nature conservation, biodiversity, and rural economies. The Hub will work on several priority policy areas: 1. Land use change that benefits the environment and is socially just, leading to ecosystem co-benefits such as biodiversity, soil health, human health and wellbeing, and green growth at national, regional and local levels; 2. Future agricultural, environmental and food policies that deliver a net zero future, building on the Agriculture Act 2020, Environment Act 2021, Agriculture Bill 2022 (Wales) and 2023 (Scotland), including future sources of finance, payment schemes and measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase removals while strengthening food security, biodiversity and land-based businesses (e.g. farms, crofts, forestry); 3. Integrating policy with carbon and natural capital markets, to ensure that the drivers and mechanisms for on-the-ground transformation work together for optimal outcomes. Achieving net zero by 2050 will require new technologies and practices which lower greenhouse gas emissions. These will include soil improvement practices, peatland protection and restoration, removal of greenhouse gases from the air and decarbonising our economy, large-scale tree-planting to take up carbon from the air, creation and restoration of habitats, transitioning to a circular economy, and significantly reduce food waste and consumption of higher emitting foodstuffs. To cover these diverse areas the Hub is comprised of the primary players in the UKRI AgriFood for Net Zero Network+, Landscape Decisions Programme, and principal investigators from Greenhouse Gas Removals, Changing the Environment, Digital Environment, AI for Net Zero, and Treescapes Programmes. This team have the experience and expertise to bring together a single voice of authority for Net Zero transformation in the UK.