Nature writing in Britain is probably as popular as it has ever been, but it remains critically undervalued. It is also frequently misunderstood. One source of misunderstanding is the view that nature writing supports the myth of stable order --social, moral, ecological-- while another is that it performs a consolatory aesthetics designed primarily to restore its readers to the natural world. These views overlook the significant conflicts that have been embedded within British nature writing ever since it emerged as a modern form in the late eighteenth century. Many of these conflicts are coeval with modernity. How can we know 'nature', and is it really possible to describe it? To what extent is 'nature' a projection of our own individual and collective (national) imaginings? How much can we appreciate it when there is so little of it left? The product of a collaboration between four leading scholars in the field, this project will be the first full-length study of its kind of modern British nature writing, beginning in 1789 with Gilbert White's seminal study, The Natural History of Selborne, and ending in 2014 with Helen Macdonald's prize-winning memoir, H is for Hawk. Between the two lies the jagged history of a genre that emerges under the sign of a triple crisis: the crisis of the environment; the crisis of representation; and the crisis of modernity itself. Emphasis will be placed on non-fictional prose, not because it is the 'truest' form of nature writing, but because it brings out one of the genre's most fundamental tensions: between the desire to set up a mimetic relation to the natural world and the awareness of the impossibility of doing so, for 'nature' is always other to what we imagine it to be, even if we are a part of it ourselves. Methods will be drawn from environmental history and philosophy as well as literary criticism, working together in the spirit of the environmental humanities, which seek to show how text- and discourse-based perspectives on culture, ethics, and history can work together with more empirical forms of scientific research, e.g. those connected with ecology, to produce enhanced understandings of changing human interactions with the natural world. The project will offer fresh readings of some of the classic texts of British nature writing, interpreting these in the light of current understandings of fractured subjectivity, post-equilibrium ecology, and the tangled relationship between humans and other animals in what some recent critical theorists have taken to calling an increasingly 'post-human', even a definitively 'post-natural', world. These understandings are seen by some as underlying the so-called 'new nature writing' that has emerged in Britain over roughly the last three decades; but this writing is not as 'new' as it appears, and one of the tasks of the project will be to confirm the historical grounding of contemporary debates. Only by seeing nature writing historically, it will be argued, can it be defended against the peremptory view that it practises a naive realism, or the hasty conclusion that it adopts a largely devotional attitude to the natural world. On the contrary, nature writing is a highly self-reflexive form: well aware of its own limited understandings, finely attuned to the inadequacy of its own language, and keenly conscious of the illusory nature of its attempts to achieve a three-way reconciliation between self, text, and world. Whether nature writing has potential to transform the world it describes is moot, but nature writing is not an escapist form and the project -- which will combine academic work with a variety of public engagement activities involving co-participants of all backgrounds and ages -- will show how it engages productively with a modern world that is both inhabited by possibly irremediable crisis and haunted by possibly irretrievable loss.

There is considerable evidence that a healthy natural environment - particularly where people live - and regular access to it, can contribute positively to the health and wellbeing of the population, and that it has the most benefit on those with the highest levels of ill-health. As society looks for cost effective ways to boost mental and physical health and quality of life, it is clear that increased positive interaction between people and the natural environment could be a significant part of the UK's future health care arrangements. However, this potential is not yet being fulfilled - in part because we do not fully understand how and why people interact with the natural environment, and which aspects of the environment, and people's experience of it, lead to positive health and wellbeing outcomes. Does the biodiversity of a place affect people's health and wellbeing? Why are some sections of society, on whom natural environments could have the greatest positive impact, less likely than average to visit natural places? What part does experience of and connection to nature play? What role does access to a high quality natural environment have in the health and wellbeing of people at particularly significant stages in their lives (when they are most vulnerable to ill-health)? If we understood the physical, psychological and socio-economic reasons why members of black, asian and minority ethnic communities, the elderly, disadvantaged urban residents, and those from lower socio-economic groups (in particular) interact with the natural environment as they do - and how this changes through their lives - it would enable us to design and manage our urban spaces more effectively to generate health and wellbeing benefits, and to engage critically important sections of society more effectively, to great social and economic benefit. This project will study the interaction within one large city between people, their local natural environment and their health and wellbeing. It aims to: 1. Understand at a detailed level how the health and wellbeing of the people within different neighbourhoods relates to the quantity, quality and distribution of natural greenspaces where they live; 2. Investigate the role that culture, upbringing, social values and norms play in this; 3. Explore how people from different ethnic and socio-economic groups interact with greenspaces and how this affects their connectedness to nature, and mental health and wellbeing; 4. Discover how the biodiversity value of the places that people visit affects their mental health and wellbeing; 5. Develop a way to assess the economic implications of these insights; 6. Develop effective ways to feed this knowledge into the policy, delivery and investment decisions of politicians, planners, designers, developers, land managers, public health commissioners and other professionals, business leaders and relevant voluntary and community organisations. It will: 1. Explore the relationship between urban natural environments and health and wellbeing across the whole of Sheffield - focusing especially on mental health and using more detailed datasets than those used in previous research; 2. Explore how urban residents from diverse backgrounds (especially differentiated by age, gender, ethnicity and mental health service use) communicate their own stories and values relating to contact and connectedness with nature; 3. Use an innovative smartphone App to record the interactions of a large population sample with Sheffield's natural environment, and its relationship to their nature connectedness and personal wellbeing; 4. Quantify the biodiversity value of different parts of Sheffield's environment and identify the relationship between this and the nature connectedness and personal wellbeing of people experiencing them; 5. Identify the economic, practical and policy implications of these insights, and effective ways of applying them.

The Climate Change Committee's third Risk Assessment (CCRA3) set out a comprehensive analysis of climate-related risks. In response, UK Government published the Third National Adaptation Programme (NAP3). However, there is a large gap between what we need to be doing to protect the wellbeing of the environment, people and the economy in the UK and what we are doing. Further, we should be looking to leverage the co-benefits of action to improve wellbeing outcomes through adaptation. The Maximising UK adaptation to climate change hub (the Hub) will help catalyse existing knowledge, especially that existing in the Devolved Administrations, to advance progress in the UK towards the Government's adaptation programme. The Hub links UK national and regional adaptation networks and knowledge exchange organisations with multidisciplinary researcher expertise across eight HEIs, to produce a UK-wide research network on adaptation, and to deliver rapid policy- and practitioner-responsive research. This powerful new science-policy mechanism will be a new national capability for an effective and transformational programme of adaptation. Key to the Hub is leveraging the activities, networks and knowledge of existing adaptation partnerships and knowledge exchange organisations who are already doing the work. These organisations identified five priorities, based on their current bottlenecks and frustrations: Assess and address barriers to awareness and engagement with adaptation; Explore the efficacy of Welsh and Scottish approaches to wellbeing and future generations for adaptation for UK wide justice-oriented approaches; Increase understanding of system complexity by establishing an inter-sectoral community of practice; Address aspects of policy, legislation and regulation that hold back the adaptation vision proposed in the NAP; Enhance the accessibility and understanding of climate model results for decision-makers. Working in teams of universities and knowledge exchange organisations throughout the UK will carry out activities that can help increase levels of capacity and knowledge to address these challenges. We will: Carry out training and capacity building on adaptation as the means to network and bring different communities of practice together; Generate more useful data by integrating different risk and exposure models together, and working with end users to provide the data they need; Funding collaborations of researchers and practitioners to trial transformational adaptation in order to collect data on what works; Address policy challenges in real-time, supporting UK governments to accelerate adaptation; Bring together adaptation researchers who will be funded under the same research programme to improve how we do, and communicate, adaptation research. Research related activities will involve: i) place-based research in each of the Hub's spokes (England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales); ii) the delivery of a programme of grants, across the sector, through a Flexible Fund, encouraging academic and practitioner collaboration on climate adaptation at local and national scale, and focusing on implementation projects to generate insight into what works, and projects that analyse, so as to overcome, institutional and policy barriers to action; and iii) coordination with UKRI's wider transformative adaptation programme, to synthesise findings from research and maximise their translation into actionable insights. At the end of the three years, we will have produced integrated sectoral pathways to a well-adapted UK, a better understanding of the policy landscape and new advisory mechanisms to support policymakers, accelerated action on adaptation by starting projects that were in the pipeline, and better ways of embedding vulnerability and justice-oriented approaches into adaptation priorities.

There is growing interest in understanding how natural environments may support good health and wellbeing. Researchers have investigated effects of natural spaces on health behaviours, physical and mental health, and socio-economic health inequalities. Generally, positive relationships are demonstrated, and some explanatory theories for positive effects have been proposed. These include provision of locations and motivation for physical activity and opportunities for 'restoration' from the stresses of daily life. However, the evidence is mixed and occasionally contradictory. One reason for this variation may be related to the crude definitions of the natural environment or 'greenspace'. Researchers often consider all natural areas together regardless of type, variety or quality. Natural areas, whether urban or rural, actually encompass a wide range of environmental characteristics which may have differing impacts on people's behaviours, health and wellbeing. The lack of a nuanced consideration of nature with regard to its human health and wellbeing impacts has been highlighted as a gap in the evidence in several systematic reviews of existing research. The aim of this project is to improve our understanding of relationships between natural environments and health by addressing the question: Do different types and qualities of natural environment have varying relationships with human health and wellbeing, and do these relationships differ according to rural/urban context and socio-economic status? This will be achieved by using some of the UK's extremely valuable existing (secondary) datasets. Secondary datasets are very useful for this research because a) they have already been funded, collected and processed, so are very cost-effective and b) they tend to be very large, allowing us to address complex research questions. Our project will integrate two types of secondary data: 1) health and socio-economic status data (such as from the census and household surveys) and 2) indicators of ecological type (e.g. grassland, woodland, coast) and character (e.g. biodiversity, ecosystem quality, designated status). These relationships will initially be explored at a national level. This will be complemented by a case study using detailed local environmental data, which is only available at a smaller scale. The dual approach will allow for the cross-validation of findings. The analyses will mainly take an epidemiological approach, but the interdisciplinary nature of the team, research question and data means that a mix of social and natural science methods will be used. The project will be led by a cross-disciplinary research team and advisory board incorporating experienced researchers in epidemiology, ecology, geography, sociology and psychology. It will benefit from collaboration with public and third sector bodies - Natural England, Forest Research and Cornwall Wildlife Trust. Expected outcomes include advances in knowledge of direct environment/health policy relevance, developments in methodology and theory, increased research capacity, and (dependant on permissions) an ecological indicator dataset suitable for further linkage with population data. The outcomes will be of interest to academic and other public/private research end users. The evidence produced will allow Natural England, the Forestry Commission, Local Authorities and other organisations who manage the natural environment for human benefit to develop appropriate national and locally context relevant responses to policies such as those set out in the new DEFRA white paper 'The Natural Choice'. This research will facilitate the effective allocation of resources and the development of targeted interventions and programmes resulting in maximised benefit to the environment, society and individual. The project findings will be shared through various means including academic publication, international conference presentations, websites and networking events.

This project will provide a novel citizen science approach to collecting and interpreting data about domestic gardens in order to co-develop an action plan with project partners to prioritise greening solutions within and beyond domestic gardens. Domestic gardens offer a valuable source of green infrastructure (GI) within an urban environment. They are important patches of greenspace that can provide connectivity between larger areas of GI (parks, recreation grounds etc), therefore improving the functioning of ecosystems and the services they provide, such as reducing surface water runoff thereby reducing flood risk, and lowering urban temperatures. While individually, a domestic garden may appear insignificant, collectively domestic gardens contribute up to 30% of greenspace within the urban matrix, which becomes especially important at the city scale. In spite of this, the quantity and quality of green infrastructure provision by domestic gardens is not well-evidenced. This has implications for the future resilience of an urban environment and the health and well-being of its citizens. Current data over-estimates the amount of vegetation within private gardens, which leads to subsequent inaccuracies in environmental model outputs (e.g. surface water runoff in an extreme rainfall event), and in the identification and prioritisation of areas of GI need, inhibiting effective action on-the-ground. Furthermore, the general public are often unaware of the environmental value of their own private garden and how they can improve it. This project will address these issues directly by: 1. Inviting city residents to complete an online survey about their own garden, the results of which will be amalgamated to create maps of domestic garden greenspace both in terms of quantity and quality. Survey respondents will be given a score for the environmental quality of their garden based on their responses to the survey, together with some information as to how their garden could be improved in relation to biodiversity, climate regulation and improving air quality. 2. Validating the survey responses using high resolution satellite data. The combination of the satellite data with the survey responses will be used to establish a classification scheme for different garden types, which can then be extrapolated to the wider city area. 3. Modelling how the vegetation within a domestic garden impacts surface runoff, temperature reduction and air quality. This will be done across multiple scales, from an individual garden to the neighbourhood-level and eventually at the city-scale. 4. Developing an action plan for GI solutions within the city based on the findings from the previous objectives and existing, larger-scale, green infrastructure datasets. Manchester is the test city for this project; the proposal has been developed in partnership with Manchester City Council, Red Rose Forest, Southway Housing, Lancashire Wildlife Trust and additional members of the Manchester a Certain Future Green Infrastructure Strategy Group (Environment Agency, BDP, Groundwork, National Trust). The project outputs will allow these end-users to develop a more robust plan for GI under current and future climate scenarios. Consequently, project outputs will contribute to enhancing the quality of life for the local population and to improving the resilience of the Manchester City environment. Further impact will occur at the individual level (improving individual gardens based on the survey feedback, strengthening community cohesion), neighbourhood-level (the evidence created can be used for biodiversity/GI/ES offsetting for new housing developments, housing associations will use the project outputs for improving neighbourhoods and access to green space) and stakeholder-level (private developers can use the outputs to add value to residential areas and development, third sector organisations can use the maps for developing policy recommendations and actions).