A global demand for energy in parallel with concerns about global warming and energy security are motivating many nations to look for novel and sustainable sources of energy. At the same time the Oil ad Gas Industry is looking to decommission significant infrastructure as it comes to the end of its life cycle. There is a clear transition underway which brings challenges of infrastructure management. Among the issues raised by the offshore industries are those arising from the biological colonization of their structures. This project is aimed at describing the connectivity between structures and understanding the consequences for other sectors when structures are removed or added to the network in the norther North Sea. The project has been designed with several sectoral, governmental and industrial partners and there will be a strong emphasis on converting the scientific results into action at sea. The importance of colonization arises both from the need to make the developments efficient (to produce a reliable source of energy cost effectively) and to ensure the developments are environmentally acceptable. "Environmentally acceptable" covers a multitude of points, ranging from maintaining healthy sea life to avoiding conflicting with other sea users, including fishers who may have a prior claim on the development sites. The research in this project will be diverse to cover the many factors. A keystone of the project will be deployments of a Standard Monitoring System designed to facilitate data collection using practical and effective methods. That system centres on settling plates that will be progressively colonized by biofouling marine invertebrates. These organisms can impede the performance of the energy capturing devices, but can also be a foundation of thriving sea life. Structures including suitable niches can provide living space for larger organisms such as crabs and lobsters, adding to their "reef effect". The reef effect can be important to enhance marine life (biodiversity) but should also be beneficial to commercial fisheries, compensating fishers for some loss of access. However, there can also be dangers such as potentially adding to the spread of invasive species, and the research will also consider that. Ultimately, we want to find a way to ensure that offshore infrastructure is a positive addition to the marine environment and our research will be directed to that end.

Pirates are back on the agenda of world politics. How is the international community responding to piracy and what makes it so difficult to address the problem? This project analyses the international response to contemporary maritime piracy. Notably in response to Somali piracy a wide variety of actors has become engaged in counter-piracy since 2008. Actors include the UN Security Council, the NATO, the EU, the International Maritime Organization (IMO), but also various national and regional security and development actors. Together a complex set of new institutions and fora has been put in place, leading to unique web of relations that this project describes as a "global security governance arrangement under construction". In the project I want to understand how this arrangement works, why and when it succeeds and fails. To do so I conduct the first major systematic analysis of this arrangement from a political science perspective. To understand the arrangement illuminates and hopefully improves policy making in the domain of counter-piracy and maritime security. Yet, the type of analysis developed in the study has also implications that go beyond the immediate case of counter-piracy. I draw on and further develop theoretically and methodologically a perspective that is relatively recent to political science and international relations. It has been introduced as a "practice turn" or as "international practice theory". This perspective focuses on practice as the core unit of analysis. In the project I draw on practice theory and use praxiographic methodology centered on a strategy of zooming in and zooming out. In three research phases I investigate four counter-piracy governance processes in depth (zooming in) as well as the relations between actors and sites (zooming out). I conduct in-depth studies of counter-piracy governance on an international level by studying the UN Contact Group, and on a regional level by investigating initiatives in East Asia, Eastern and Western Africa. The analysis then is a major contribution to the research agendas of International Relations in at least three ways. 1) The project develops an innovative eclectic analytical framework to interrogate security governance arrangements. It is an eclectic framework since it aims "to demonstrate the practical relevance of, and substantive connections among theories and narratives constructed within seemingly discrete and irreconcilable approaches" (Sil and Katzenstein 2010:3). I combine different approaches to security often understood as mutually exclusive. I do so in relying on a practice-theoretical approach that has the capacity to combine these. The project develops an innovative framework and advances the debates about what can be achieved with practice theory. 2) The analysis is important for the debates in security studies on how contemporary threats are governed. A vibrant agenda around the framework of securitisation theory has approached the construction processes of threats, such as transnational organized crime or HIV/Aids. On the one side the project adds the securitisation of piracy to the discussion. But it also extends the discussions in two major ways. It fills a blind spot of a current agenda that concentrates on representations and constructions. A focus on practice helps to also pay attention to the practical consequences for actions such as the use of force. The focus on practice also widens the understanding of problem construction in situating securitisation among a range of other problematisations (such as an economic or a humanitarian one). 3) The project is of immediate relevance for the emerging inter-disciplinary field of piracy studies. Much of piracy studies are exclusively policy-oriented. Others focus on the behavior of pirates or on the "root causes" of piracy. The project intervenes in piracy studies in demonstrating that is important to also pay attention to the broader implications of piracy.

Our vision is to create an enduring, multidisciplinary and independent research community strongly linked to industry and capable of informing the policy making process by developing new knowledge and understanding on the subject of the shipping system, its energy efficiency and emissions, and its transition to a low carbon, more resilient future. Shipping in Changing Climates (SCC) is the embodiment of that vision: a multi-university, multi-disciplinary consortium of leading UK academic institutions focused on addressing the interconnected research questions that arise from considering shipping's possible response over the next few decades due to changes in: - climate (sea level rise, storm frequency) - regulatory climate (mitigation and adaptation policy) - macroeconomic climate (increased trade, differing trade patterns, higher energy prices) Building on RCUK Energy programme's substantial (~2.25m) investment in this area: Low Carbon Shipping and High Seas projects, this research will provide crucial input into long-term strategic planning (commercial and policy) for shipping, in order to enable the sector to transition the next few decades with minimum disruption of the essential global services (trade, transport, economic growth, food and fuel security) that it provides. The ambitious research programme can only be undertaken because of the project's excellent connection to shipping's stakeholders across the govt. non-govt and industry space. This is demonstrated by in excess of 35 organisations writing significant statements of support and including contributions to the project of 1.6m in-kind and 160k cash. The commitments of stakeholders with this breadth of knowledge and understanding is crucial both to: - Development of a relevant proposal (all Tier 1 partners of LCS and many Tier 2 and others were heavily involved in the development of the contents of this SCC proposal) - Ensuring that the research is undertaken using data and experience that can maximise its credibility, but importantly also - Guaranteeing a direct pathway to impact in all the key governance and commercial stakeholders of the sector. Shipping is a global industry and its challenges must therefore be considered in a global context. However, to provide focus for the research we will concentrate the application of our global modelling and analysis for understanding the impacts of changing climates on three key specific sub- global components of the system: UK, SIDS (Small Island Developing States) and BRICS shipping. The UK, for its importance to the funder and the UK stakeholders engaged in our project, the BRICS and SIDS because of their central role in the policy debate due to their high sensitivity to changing climates Research Excellence will be ensured through research across three interacting research themes: - ship as a system (understanding the scope for greater supply side energy efficiency) - trade and transport demand (understanding the trends and drivers for transport demand) - transitions and evolution (understanding transport supply/demand interactions) The research undertaken will be both quantitative and qualitative, apply for the first time new data and modelling techniques and be deployed to answer a series of cross cutting (themes) research questions. Shipping in Changing Climates will put the UK at the forefront internationally of research into the shipping system and inform the UK and EU debates around the control of its shipping GHG emissions.