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The government expects local councils to play a vital role in making sure the UK is prepared for climate change. Birmingham City Council, the largest local authority in the UK, has worked in partnership with University of Birmingham (UoB) researchers in the BUCCANEER project (Birmingham Urban Climate Change Adaptation with Neighbourhood Estimates of Environmental Risk). The city has drawn extensively on the tool developed from BUCCANEER to inform their approach to adapting city systems to the increased likelihood of extreme temperatures in the future. This is a particular risk to cities like Birmingham where the projected higher overall temperatures in the UK as a result of climate change would exacerbate the existing urban heat island effect and produce potentially-damaging consequences for inner city areas. The project has had public policy impact by informing the approach taken by the City's influential Green Commission and by direct inclusion in the City Council's new development guidance. Temperature change and the urban heat island have now become mandatory factors to be considered for all developments requiring permission and guidance explicitly points developers towards BUCCANEER as the tool with which to consider this factor. A second public policy impact derives from the value of the tool for health planning: a significant proportion of the inner-city population is particularly vulnerable to extreme temperatures through age or ill-health and live where the heat island effect is shown to be largest. This aspect is now being increasingly employed by Public Health analysts and managers in the City.
University of Manchester (UoM) research has made a key contribution to adaptation planning strategy for urban climate change, at a range of scales. Impact was achieved via the generation of data, and the creation and refinement of tools and frameworks that offer a distinct geographical perspective and a means of generating local evidence on urban climate risks, vulnerabilities and adaptation potential. Proof of principle was established within Greater Manchester, with extensive and ongoing use of research findings to support urban adaptation. Subsequently, the research has guided additional localities, and contributed to national policy formulation. More recently, a number of cities — including on mainland Europe and the African continent — have used the research within local adaptation planning, and related green infrastructure policy and practice.
Research undertaken at the University of Manchester (UoM) has enhanced capacity for assessing and responding to climate change impacts and risks in urban areas, by moving from basic research around user requirements to the development of scaleable decision support tools. The needs of end users have been considered from the outset, with a co-production model of research — academics working in joint enterprise with stakeholders from the public, private and third sectors — leading to enhanced take-up of the resulting ideas, tools and techniques. Impacts are based upon supporting climate change adaptation responses within planning authorities, at local, regional, national and international scales, with the web-based climate change adaptation tools, developed at UoM, now freely available to municipalities worldwide.
Urban greenspace cools cities and reduces rainfall runoff but these effects have been difficult to quantify. Ennos's research is the first to give realistic figures for the contribution of greenspace and assess its potential to climate-proof cities. Key research findings have furthered the concept of green infrastructure, influenced local and national planning policy [text removed for publication]. Novel mapping tools developed by Ennos have had international impact, including use in the city master plan for Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Community forests have altered their planting practises as a result of Ennos's research findings.
Research work into the development and transference of methods for climate readiness and resilience by Allen et al has created impacts at every stage of the planning process. In major cities of the Global South, such as Dhaka and Maputo, this research has made visible the material practices adopted by ordinary citizens to cope with climate variability, and has provided a systematic evaluation for policymakers and funders of strategies for proofing cities at scale. In turn it has facilitated new approaches to risk and vulnerability assessment — for instance, by integrating new perspectives into Maputo city planning, supporting methodological approaches to projects by Oxfam, and helping to shape policy tools and funding with organisations such as the Department for International Development (DFID).
Bristol ChemLabS (part of the School of Chemistry) has used School of Chemistry research on the atmosphere (air quality, atmospheric chemistry and the history of greenhouse gases on Earth) to enhance dramatically the quality and uptake of chemistry education in the UK and approximately 20 other nations. This radical advance has been achieved through ChemLabS' outreach activity, which has involved running more than 1,200 events for over 250,000 students over the past six years (and over 1,000 events since 2008). ChemLabS' atmospheric chemistry education packages are now being delivered in other countries, its textbooks/articles have been taken up across Europe, and it has trained more than 500 teachers directly. As a result of its activities, which are grounded in rigorous research, Bristol ChemLabS has been able to document increased interest in science and higher uptake at post-16 level.
Prof Kolokotroni's research confirming unusually high night-time temperatures in London due to the urban heat island effect, and her recommendations to mitigate this effect, have both industrial and political impacts. As 80% of current buildings are expected to be standing in 2050, her assessment of the environmental benefits of cool roof technologies (highly reflective, well-insulated roofs) have provided affordable and practical solutions for politicians and building engineers: in 2009, the European Cool Roofs Council was launched at Brunel, committing to advocating cool roof products for their impacts on mitigating climate change, reducing the urban heat island effect. In 2010, the Greater London Authority, in the `Climate Change Adaptation Strategy for London', committed to assessing and promoting cool roof technologies in London.
Exeter's Centre for Energy and the Environment has created novel probabilistic weather files for 50 locations across the UK, consisting of hourly weather conditions over a year, which have been used by the construction industry to test resilience of building designs to climate change. They have already had significant economic impact through their use in more than £3bn worth of infrastructure projects, for example, Great Ormond Street Hospital, Leeds Arena, and the Zero Carbon Passivhaus School. The weather files are widely available to professionals and endorsed by internationally leading building simulation software providers such as Integrated Environmental Solutions.
A novel approach to climate science has resulted in over 260,000 members of the public worldwide choosing to engage in a climate modelling project. By contributing resources that require their time and attention, they have become `citizen scientists'. The project has resulted in greater interest, understanding and engagement with climate science by participants; wider public discussion of climate science; and influence on policy and practice. Over 3000 people, including professionals in developing countries, have benefitted through education and training. The project has also advanced the development and awareness of `volunteer computing'.
Knowledge of the changing global temperature has contributed to an international political agreement being reached about the over-arching objective of climate change mitigation policies. The School's scientists have made a crucial contribution to one of only three datasets that reveal changes to the world's average temperature over the last 150 years. These data have been central to each of the five Assessment Reports of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), upon which successive rounds of international climate change negotiations relied and which led, in 2009, to the adoption of limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius as an agreed international policy goal.