The Aim
The ECRs will be charged with leading a programme developing activities and workshops here at Cranfield and with partners beyond Cranfield. We seek to develop enduring capacity, a legacy that will grow and sustain beyond the funding period and provide new insights that will help develop innovative, interdisciplinary environmental solutions for a changing world; collaborating with staff across SWEE and other Schools here at Cranfield, other UKRI facing research organisations and their broad national and international partnership network.
The challenges
Dr Daniel Evans
Enhancing the Resilience of Manufactured Soils for Urban Green Infrastructure
We face a grand challenge to ensure that Urban Green Infrastructure (UGI) is resilient for a changing world. The long-term capability of UGI to deliver on the UN Sustainable Development Goals is, to a large degree, dependent on the resilience of the natural capital used in their infrastructure. One of the most important forms of natural capital used in UGI is manufactured soil: a blended mix of organic and inorganic materials which are sourced and combined off-site, and subsequently transported for placement in an UGI design.
Manufactured soils deliver core UGI functions such as filtering water, supporting plant growth, hosting urban biodiversity, cycling nutrients, and sequestering carbon. However, the long-term capability of manufactured soils to respond and recover to a changing world is unknown. Principles of resilience do not feature in the British compliance standards (e.g., BS3882) used to assess the suitability of manufactured soils. In addition, the performance of manufactured soils and their resilience to change over the long-term is seldom, if ever, monitored.
This project will establish a new research and innovation programme which aims to enhance the environmental resilience of manufactured soils. Interdisciplinary thought-leadership across research and industry will be assembled to examine the extent to which the principles of resilience are embedded in decisions about how soils are manufactured for UGI.
Dr Pablo Campo Moreno
Protecting the Rivers: promoting resilience-thinking for pollution management in rivers
Balancing current uses against rivers’ capacity to maintain or supply resources into the future poses management challenges, as the amount of change that rivers can accommodate seems to be rapidly diminishing. This loss of capacity becomes more apparent when it comes to processing chemical pollution. Pressures affecting rivers include pollution (chemicals, nutrients, and sediments), physical modifications (hydromorphology), climate change, and abstraction. Research needs to elucidate whether synergies between multiple pressures worsen impacts on freshwater environments. Investigations should also consider the influence of climate change on the hydrological cycle, particularly on water quantity, along with increasing abstraction demands. Such pressures also overlap with diffuse pollution and point source discharges to cause a cascade of impacts on freshwater quality and ecosystems. Hence, the aim of this project is to establish Protecting the Rivers, a community of practice (CoP) aiming to promote resilience-thinking for pollution management in rivers.
