Material innovations focussing on delivery and sustainability are key as our global efforts intensify in the development of a secure and sustainable future energy landscape. Many infrastructure-related material challenges have emerged as a result of the need (i) to explore offshore marine environments for wind power generation, (ii) for deeper and more complex underground wellbore systems for new oil & gas explorations, (iii) for robust containment and shielding structures for new nuclear power plants and (iv) for larger dam structures for future hydropower generation. Our vision for this proposal is to build a world leading and long lasting partnership between academics in the UK and China, integrated with industrial partners and other world leading academic groups around the world, to collectively address some of those construction material challenges with a focus on sustainability. The commonality in the assembled group is our interest and expertise in exploring potentials for magnesia-bearing construction materials in solving some of those new challenges, by either providing completely new solutions or enhanced solutions to existing material systems. This is a unique area to China and the UK where there is significant complementary expertise in the different grades of and applications for magnesia. The project consortium from the University of Cambridge, University College London, Chongqing University and Nanjing Tech University has the required interdisciplinary mix of materials, structural and geotechnical engineers, with world leading unique expertise in magnesia-based construction materials. The intention is to share and advance our global understanding of the performance of those proposed materials, road map future research and commercial needs and identify the ideal applications in our future energy infrastructures where most performance impact and sustainability benefits can be achieved. The proposed focusses two main areas of research. The first is the technical advantages and benefits that magnesia can provide to existing cement systems. This includes (i) its use as an expansive additive for large mass concrete constructions e.g. dams and nuclear installations, (ii) its role in magnesium phosphate cements for the developing of low pH cements suitable for nuclear waste applications and (iii) its role in advancing the development of alkali activated cements by providing low shrinkage and corrosion resistance. The second is the delivery of sustainable MgO production processes that focus on the use of both mineral and reject brine resources. An integral part of this project will be the knowledge transfer activities and collaboration with industry and other relevant research centres around the world. An overarching aspect of the proposed research is the mapping out of the team's capabilities and the integration of expertise and personnel exchange to ensure maximum impact. This will ensure that the research is at the forefront of the global pursuit for a sustainable future energy infrastructure and will ensure that maximum impact is achieved. The consortium plans to act as a global hub to provide a national and international platform for facilitating dialogue and collaboration to enhance the global knowledge economy.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

This international network brings together different global perspectives to critically respond to the current smart city agenda. It is timely and innovative in approach and networks together a key set of academics working in different global contexts. It addresses a gap in current knowledge exchange and seeks to redress the balance of focus from the existing highly urbanised, first-world contexts to concentrate on more marginalised urban communities and people-centred urban change in relation to ICTs. The network activities delivered through a series of workshops will address the topic of the impact of digital marginalisation in the 'Smart City' context and its effect on urban space. It will explore models and tools for urban change within marginalised communities, by investigating and analysing positive and negative initiatives developed through the smart city approach. Within this context of what can be considered sustainable urban development in marginalised communities it aims to question how ICTs contribute to this process. The network will investigate a series of Smart city projects in a series of global contexts to study and understand how marginalised communities can appropriate and benefit from impacts of ICTs within the city. The network works with the framework of Henri Lefebvre's seminal work The Right to the City to consider the role of everyday and people centred agency in urban change. Taking the right to the city, the network questions 'Whose right to the "Smart" City". The current Smart City agenda, championed and promoted by ICT companies such as IBM and global city leaders is problematic, since it adopts a technologically deterministic approach that homogenises urban problems across different economic, political, social and cultural contexts. It tends to focus on ICT solutions to be applied top-down, and therefore, fails to address particular issues related to different types of marginalised communities. The network seeks to counter this approach by exchanging and mapping examples of knowledge of ICTs and marginalised urban contexts to understand how such communities might benefit from ICT driven change and how this might support a 'right to the city'. The network workshops will adopt a case study method and will have an open and discursive ethos. Each workshop will comprise contributions from selected invited guest speakers to represent local areas of expertise and knowledge, activities with early stage and doctoral researchers as well as a field visit with selected local community stakeholders. Early stage researchers will be invited to participate in an open forum session and to contribute to forming the outcomes of the workshop meetings. The concluding symposium event will take place in Plymouth; comprised of a series of focused sessions with presentation of the investigators of all partner universities and of other related work. Guest speakers will also be invited from a range of disciplinary and sectorial backgrounds. This will close with an open forum session to determine crosscutting similarities and differences between the different forms of marginalisation discussed along the partnership, possible guidelines for further research and case studies. Knowledge exchange and the outcomes of the workshops will be documented and shared through a website mapping platform. This will act as a live and open platform to disseminate the work of the network as well as providing a tangible outcome as a mapping of knowledge. This will make the work of the network available to the wider community, and will be supported by an ongoing use of social media (e.g. Twitter) to share work in progress. The network will produce an edited book with contributions from all network partners, as well as a co-authored journal paper. The network website will also be developed from the outset of the project and act as a mode of dissemination of the academic outcomes to a broader audience.

The UN Convention on Biological Diversity promotes using an ecosystems approach (EA) to support the delivery of ecosystem services and benefits (ESB) as a dynamic conceptualisation of environmental quality. It is promoted as enabling an easier integration of environmental goods and services into economic processes and policies. However, many researchers suggest that an EA is 'science in the making' and emerging policy initiatives overlook complexities that stem from both uncertain scientific underpinnings and socio-economic divisions. These include gender divisions and inequalities, yet these topics are largely absent from ESB discussions. While feminist writers (and others) suggest caution with adopting an EA, ADEPT seeks to explore if and how the approach could be useful for promoting wellbeing for women and men. While environmental justice scholars have long suggested that socio-economic hardship and the distribution of environmental goods and bads are correlated, recent applications of intersectional theory suggest that practical experiences of exclusion from opportunity always intermesh with other divisions such as those based on race, social class, disability status, sexuality, age and geographical location. There is then a need to address environmental and socio-economic vulnerability in an integrated manner. To do so an EA needs to first address a binary exclusion; firstly, there is a need to highlight ways in which ESB frame environmental quality, often affording stronger representation to expert interpretation of how environmental quality is experienced. Secondly, there is need to understand how intersecting vulnerabilities influence access to a range of ESB (with a focus on those linked to urban blue-green space e.g. clean water, flood mitigation and recreational opportunities). The focus of the current research will be a major urban zoning project in Belo Horizonte (BH), which covers a range of land-use types from dense low-income urban districts to rich gated neighbourhoods, protected areas, commercial and industrial districts. This provides an ideal case study area in which to trial and extend understandings of gendered vulnerability to environmental change within local urban contexts. Research to be undertaken will involve identifying socio-economic and environmental vulnerabilities and zones of interaction, exploration of differential experiences of urban ESB and scoping the potential of these as a means to support poverty alleviation in urban transformations. Results from BH will also be discussed within a Sao Paulo (SP) context, through the involvement of field researchers from SP currently involved in a local community engagement project involving the redevelopment of urban water management policies. The research collaboration is organised around a series of four international research workshops. An online research community will support the combination and interrogation of both new and existing data sets and development of new evidence of the processes which underpin urban vulnerability, forming the context within which any resilience solutions would need to be derived.

Random motions in random media have been intensively studied for over forty years and many interesting features of these models have been discovered. The aim is to understand the motion of a particle in a turbulent media. Most of the work has been focused on the case where the particle evolves in a static random environment, for which slow-downs and trapping phenomena have been proved. More recently, mathematicians and physicists have been interested in the case of dynamic random environments, where the media can fluctuate with time. Random walks on the exclusion process is probably the canonical model for the field. Much less is known on this model, but exciting conjectures and questions have been made. Some of the most challenging questions concern the possibility of super-diffusive regimes, and the existence of effective traps along the trajectory of the walk. In this project, we aim at, on one hand, adapt the techniques recently developped in one dimension to the multi-dimensional model and, on the other hand, understand the presence or absence of atypical behaviors for this model.