Dr Kevin Collins

The Defra Flood and Water Evidence team and both the Environment Agency Chief Scientists Group and the Social Science Research Team, are proposing new research into the physical and social science of drought in a changing climate. This project aims to support improved management by exploring how decisions are made in the current drought warning system in England. It is a desk-based study involving UKCEH researchers and OU researcher. The Open University will lead semi-structured interviews (Task 2) with national and regional Environment Agency teams and key stakeholders in the two case study regions (East Anglia and South West England).Open University will also contribute to task 4, in the final write up and provision of recommendations for the EAdrought alerting system for England.

The 1976 drought, considered one of the most severe events on record, exposed vulnerabilities in water resource management and highlighted the societal challenges of coping with water scarcity. Marking its 50th anniversary provides an opportunity to assess how drought planning and resilience have evolved. It also allows us to consider how a drought of similar or greater severity would affect water supply today, given changes in infrastructure, population, societal expectations, regulatory frameworks, and demand pressures.

ClimateSmartAdvisors is a pan-European multi-actor network covering 27 countries. Its aim is to boost the EU agricultural advisory community, leading to an acceleration of the adoption of climate smart (CS) farming practices by the wider farming community within and across EU AKISs. To reach this objective, ClimateSmartAdvisors focuses on the crucial role of advisors in the development and dissemination of CS innovations and practices. The project will organize activities focusing on strengthening the advisors’ capacity in providing CS advice and boosting the advisors’ role in the transition towards CS farming through their involvement in innovation projects, CS-AKIS, and EU projects and initiatives. A number of complementary activities are developed to strengthen the CS advisory capacity of the EU advisory community: 1) an EU-wide network of 260 advisory Communities of Practice (CoP) to support the development of 1500 advisors will form the core of CS knowledge exchange; 2) 140 advisors will receive expert training on selected topics, relevant for their context and for facilitating a CoP; 3) CoPs will internationally exchange knowledge on 12 thematic areas; 4) a knowledge repository will provide advisors with CS tools, practices and approaches developed in the ClimateFarmDemo project and further expanded in ClimateSmartAdvisors, 5) monitoring, evaluation and learning activities will capitalize lessons learned in and outside the project. Activities to boost the advisors role in the CS transition include: 1) connecting to local and EU (multi-actor innovation) projects, initiatives, AKIS actors, and policy makers to clarify and address joint needs, challenges and lessons learned, 2) the set-up of Co-Design Innovation Experiments to learn on how to strengthen the advisors’ role in innovation processes. Finally, to accelerate the wide spread of results, an ambitious dissemination, exploitation and communication strategy will be deployed at EU and national levels.

None

Developing knowledge exchange approaches to secure sustained behaviour changes to deliver multiple environmental benefits through sustainable agricultural land management

The broad aim of the project is thus to improve the collective understanding of chalk streams with intermittent flow reaches in the south-east of England. Activities will be focussed at catchment scale, and in the pilot year, four study streams in the south east of England will be used: the Ver, Beane, Cam and Granta. The project will: i) capture the social understanding of intermittent chalk streams in the study areas; ii) explore emerging techniques for capturing the dynamic hydrological and morphological behaviour of chalk streams and impacts of human interventions; and iii) visually synthesise the behaviour using observed and modelled data. The long-term focus of this project is to co-develop a shared social and scientific understanding of these dynamics. UKCEH will work with the Open University and Hydro-Ecology Consulting Ltd as subcontractors and with local interest groups using innovative methods, with a view to co creating an understanding of selected streams within the areas covered by participating water companies.

H2020 project to stimulate sustainability transitions in European agriculture through better understanding the roles played by farm advice in farmer decision-making. OU participation in monitoring and supporting learning within ‘Living Labs’, including a web engagement strategy and development of some distance learning material

Working with CEH to explore drought communication strategies in the UK. Involving national organisations and regional groups. OU will be subcontractor to main applicant CEH advising on design of workshops and co-facilitation of workshops.