Proposed project: The risks to UK forests from pests, disease and droughts are poorly understood as historical data is of limited use. This brings risk management and mitigation challenges for forest carbon projects, timber production and insurance. The original PURE project developed a model to assess the future risk from pests and diseases (P&D) for forest carbon projects under the UK's Woodland Carbon Code. In this project, we build this PURE work (NERC/PA 13-021), NERC research (NE/I022183/1, NE-J019720-1, NE/I019405/1), and well-established collaborations (see e.g. Forest-Risk Network) to: (a) embed our PURE P&D risk work within operational-decision making under the Woodland Carbon Code (WCC) (b) expand the operational use of this work from forest carbon to forest timber and (c) develop new insurance products. This process will then be replicated to adapt and operationalise a drought risk assessment model (Petr et al. 2014), which produces information inadequate for WCC and insurance purposes. The science from both models will then inform the development of best practice/guidance and decision support tools to meet the needs of the WCC, timber industry, insurance sector as well as the wider private and public forest sectors. The PURE Associate's risk management expertise (originally acquired in investment banking and developed and applied to natural hazard risks to forest finance projects through the NERC and PURE projects listed above) will be partnered with that of stakeholders from the Forestry Commission, Forest Research and ForestRe (an insurance organisation designing insurance and reinsurance products) to deliver these outcomes. The work is needed due to the critical importance of forests to the UK and the urgent need to reduce the threat from P&D and drought. Action is needed now due to the long timescales inherent in forest management. Woodland and forest cover about 13% of the total land area of Great Britain (Forestry Commission, 2013). The primary wood processing and forestry sectors contribute £1.92bn in Gross Value Added to the economy and generate employment for over 39,000 (Forestry Commission, 2013). The wider social and environmental benefits of woodlands are worth around £1.5bn annually (Willis et al., 2003). Forests provide important wildlife habitat and host 130 of the 400 species in the UK's 1994 Biodiversity Action Plan. They also play an important role in mitigation of, and adaptation to, climate change e.g. carbon sequestration (Read et al., 2009). However, UK forests face significant threats from natural hazards such as wind, fire, pests, diseases (P&D) and drought. Whilst the risks from wind and fire are relatively well-understood - the future risks from P&D and drought are poorly understood and insurance is rarely provided primarily due to a lack of appropriate information. Historical data can provide some indication of the future risks to forests from fire and wind, but are less useful for predicting losses from P&D as new P&D can arise; existing ones can jump species; and vectors, such as shipping and imported saplings, can bring new P&D to a country at any time. Similarly, historical data are of little use to determine the risk of planting tree species in regions at the limit of the trees' climatic tolerances. This increases their vulnerability to drought. This lack of adequate risk measurement constrains risk management for forest carbon projects and mitigation by insurance. The project outputs will include a revised P&D model and a revised drought risk assessment, which will produce this missing information. The results will be used to support operationalisation into better risk management procedures under the WCC; development of new insurance products; and the revision of decision support tools for forest managers to support adaptive management against these risks. The results will be communicated and disseminated to the wider forest sector.

Many current or projected future land-based renewable energy schemes are highly dependent on very localised climatic conditions, especially in regions of complex terrain. For example, mean wind speed, which is the determining factor in assessing the viability of wind farms, varies considerably over distances no greater than the size of a typical farm. Variations in the productivity of bio-energy crops also occur on similar spatial scales. This localised climatic variation will lead to significant differences in response of the landscape in hosting land-based renewables (LBR) and without better understanding could compromise our ability to deploy LBR to maximise environmental and energy gains. Currently climate prediction models operate at much coarser scales than are required for renewable energy applications. The required downscaling of climate data is achieved using a variety of empirical techniques, the reliability of which decreases as the complexity of the terrain increases. In this project, we will use newly emerging techniques of very high resolution nested numerical modelling, taken from the field of numerical weather prediction, to develop a micro-climate model, which will be able to make climate predictions locally down to scales of less than one kilometre. We will conduct validation experiments for the new model at wind farm and bio-energy crop sites. The model will be applied to the problems of (i) predicting the effect of a wind farm on soil carbon sequestration on an upland site, thus addressing the question of carbon payback time for wind farm schemes and (ii) for predicting local yield variations of bio-energy crops. Extremely high resolution numerical modelling of the effect of wind turbines on each other and on the air-land exchanges will be undertaken using a computational fluid dynamics model (CFD). The project will provide a new tool for climate impact prediction at the local scale and will provide new insight into the detailed physical, bio-physical and geochemical processes affecting the resilience and adaptation of sensitive (often upland) environments when hosting LBR.

Mankind faces great challenges in providing sufficient supplies of renewable energy, in protecting our environment, and in developing benign processes for the chemical and pharmaceutical industries. These urgent problems can only be solved by applying the best available technology, but this requires a solid foundation of fundamental knowledge created through a multidisciplinary yet focussed approach. Catalysis is an essential enabling technology because it holds the key to solving many of these problems. CASTech aims to build on the science and engineering advances developed in previous collaborative programmes involving the main participants. Specifically, new core competencies for the investigation of reactions in multiphase systems will be developed. These will include MR imaging techniques (University of Cambridge, UCam); computational fluid dynamics (UCam); spectroscopic methods (QUB); SSITKA (QUB); flow visualisation and particle tracking (PEPT) (University of Birmingham, UBir); theoretical calculations (University of Virginia, UVa; QUB) for liquid phase processes. An enhanced time resolution fast transient and operando spectroscopy capability will be developed for investigating the mechanisms and the nature of the active sites in heterogeneous catalytic gas phase reactions (QUB). These core competencies will be applied to investigate the activation of saturated alkanes, initially building on our recent success in oxidative cracking of longer chain alkanes.We propose to develop our experimental and modelling capabilities with the objective of providing quantitative data on how to enhance the performance of a catalytic system by understanding and controlling the interaction between the solvent(s), the substrates and the catalyst surface. We aim to be able to describe the structure of liquids in catalytic systems at multiscale from the external (bulk) liquid phase to inside the porous structure of the catalyst and at the catalyst surface. The research will integrate new experimental probes and complementary theoretical approaches to help us understand liquid structures and we will use this information in collaboration with our industrial partners to address specific technical challenges.Bio-polymeric materials, e.g. cellulose and lignin, have the potential to provide functionalised building blocks for both existing and novel chemical products. Our ultimate aim is to provide novel and economically viable processes for the conversion of lignin into high value-added products. However, by starting with the conversion of lignosulphonates into vanillin and other higher value chemicals we will develop not only new processes but also the core competencies required to work with more complex fluids.Biogas (CH4 + CO2) can be produced from many different renewable sources but capturing and storing the energy is difficult on a small distributed scale. We propose to investigate a new, economic, down-sized engineering approach to the conversion of methane to dimethylether. This will be achieved by reducing the number of unit operations and developing new catalysts capable of performing under the more extreme temperature conditions that will be required to make the process economic.The drive to use catalysts for cleaner more sustainable chemistry needs also to address the inherently polluting and unsustainable process of catalyst manufacture itself. We will investigate the sustainable production of supported catalysts using electrochemical deposition of the metal. This method bypasses several conventional steps and would generate very little waste. In all these Grand Challenges there will be close collaboration between all the academic and industrial groups.