Climate change will mean more people on the move as extreme weather threatens lives, destroys property and ruins livelihoods. Most people will move from the countryside to the city. However, some will change their local mobility patterns, or take up seasonal migration to find work elsewhere. Others may choose to stay and adapt to the changing conditions. Climate mobilities is a term used to describe these diverse migration responses to climate impacts. This project works to support city and municipal councils in preparing for diverse climate mobilities. City mayors are considering how to invest in infrastructure and city planning for climate-related migration. However, unless the actions they take are driven by the priorities of the most affected, they may end up making things worse for people. Therefore, this project focuses on what a desirable future home and neighbourhood would look like from the perspective of those on the move and the communities that host them. Traditionally, such information has been difficult for planners and policymakers to include in their existing decision making structures. Therefore a key part of the project is to understand how to weave the information we gain from the precariously housed into the metrics and indicators that governments would be more familiar with. In this way, the project provides entry points for policymakers to carry out more transformational projects that address underlying poverty and inequality. The research takes place in four locations, investigating different climate mobilities: 1) Highly climate change-exposed Inuit communities who do not want to leave; 2) Rural climate-related migrants moving to the Kathmandu in Nepal; 3) People displaced by flooding in Durban, South Africa; and 4) International migrants in London, UK who fall through the cracks in the city's adaptation actions. The project uses community-led and arts-based research methods that value and elevate the knowledge of people on the ground. The project also engages local municipalities and regional and national governments to ensure that such knowledge is incorporated into future adaptation planning.

Engineering Comes Home turns infrastructure design on its head. We start with household needs and look outward to design infrastructure, not the other way around. This new paradigm allows integrated thinking about water, energy, food and data at the domestic scale, and connects homes to technologies, infrastructures and communities in order to meet everyday needs and demands as efficiently and reliably as possible. The project puts people and their everyday needs and desires first, using technology and infrastructure to best meet those needs within resource and environmental constraints. It addresses the challenge of designing sustainable and resilient systems and technologies to deliver infrastructure services within environmental and social constraints. The project will develop and test a methodology for co-design of infrastructure and technologies starting from household scale and connecting to neighbourhood, city and regional scale, working with a case study community of social housing residents in London. This will involve: 1. Synthesis of existing data relating to the nexus in case study community (census, water and energy companies, Environment Agency, local authorities, public health). 2. Social research to identify needs, aspirations and daily practices that relate to food, energy and water production and consumption (interviews, diaries, focus groups, participatory mapping, sensors and monitors of resources use). 3. Developing a design support toolkit of potential technical options for meeting household needs and their lifecycle resource and environmental impacts. The toolkit will include technologies and systems that are currently in the market or are emerging and will allow for speculation about new technologies, systems and configurations. 4. Co-design workshops with the project team, SMEs, technical experts and local communities to identify options for meeting needs using alternative technologies and infrastructures. 5. Feedback to infrastructure providers, policy makers, designers and local government regarding options for new infrastructure and needs for new governance and other arrangements. Infrastructure development and resource efficiency are of high national importance and are vital to the future success of the British economy. This project will develop new methods for infrastructure design within resource constraints and social expectations. The project is novel in addressing connections between water, food, energy, waste and data within the home as the starting point for how to design technology and infrastructure that meets these needs while achieving resource efficiency and environmental sustainability. This project will provide new opportunities for innovation across infrastructure sectors and in domestic and neighbourhood level systems. Integrating infrastructure services across different scales of provision is a particular challenge for policy and engineering, which will be addressed through the methods devised in this project. A new design paradigm starting from domestic needs and expectations will also help deliver infrastructure that is socially acceptable and desirable to local communities.

This project is driven by two substantial considerations. Methods for conducting inference, i.e. estimating the parameters of an indirectly observed system, in large complex systems are urgently needed. Existing technology does not generally scale well to the very large data sets which arise in many modern data-rich contexts. Most of the recent developments in computational statistics which aim at improving the scalability of existing algorithms have focused on data which has very particular forms and in particular can be viewed as very large numbers of replicates of measurements which are independent of one another. Such methods are not suitable for data sets which have strong spatial and temporal structures as, for example, many data sets obtained in urban analytic settings do. This project aims to develop a suite of methodological tools for conducting inference in models of this sort in a computationally efficient way, by exploiting the structure of the models in order to provide simultaneously efficient computational tools and good estimation. Furthermore, leveraging recent developments in the field of robust statistics, these methods will be adapted to deal with settings in which the modelling is imperfect and the data generating process is not exactly characterized by the mathematical model. This robustness is essential to obtain good performance in real, complex scenarios. Air quality monitoring is a tremendously important and tremendously challenging area. Diverse sensor networks exist on different scales and provide measurements with quite different characteristics to one another. Fusing this information as observations become available is a large scale statistical inference problem. Indeed, problems of this type motivate the methodological development of this project and will serve as an extensive test-bed for the developed methodology. An extended application of those methods to air quality monitoring in the Greater London area with the support of the Greater London Authority provides the second major aspect of this proposal.

There is growing recognition that ambient temperature and other climate factors can affect the health of the UK population via multiple pathways, ranging from direct impacts such as increased deaths and hospital admissions during a heat-wave, to indirect processes such as the role of climate factors in driving the spread of ticks and other vectors that can cause diseases. Understanding such impacts and developing solutions therefore requires multi-disciplinary expertise which the NIHR Health Protection Research Unit (HPRU) on Environmental Change and Health is uniquely placed to deliver since its long-standing programme of research and training is already contributing to improved understanding of the health impacts of climate change and other environmental challenges, the actions needed to protect UK public health, and the opportunities for improving health of policies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This partnership between LSHTM, UKHSA, UCL, and the Met Office consists of members who have long been at the forefront of research into climate change and health, with expertise in health, environmental science, behavioural and social science, building science, climate change, health economics, insect biology, and mathematical modelling: https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/research/centres-projects-groups/hpru-ech#welcome The aims of this new project led by the HPRU consortium plus additional climate scientists are to foster strong and enduring links between the climate and health science communities and to generate policy-relevant evidence on the full range of health impacts associated with climate factors that can inform adaptation and mitigation measures and enhance climate resilience of the UK population. The project objectives are: To develop and apply methods for improved detection of weather-related health impacts and to identify high-risk groups and health inequalities associated with climate exposures. To undertake a dedicated programme of work in the home, built and natural environments that will improve understanding of climate-related health impacts and the gains and risks associated with interventions in these settings. To develop a national synthetic population model incorporating environmental, demographic and socio-economic data with detailed spatial information that can be used to quantify the impacts of different environmental interventions on population health and health inequalities, which can inform local and national policies. The project responds to the call by assessing the impacts of climate variability on a range of health outcomes, including novel use of the UK Renal Registry's automated alert system which enables assessment of whether the timing of Acute Kidney Injury episodes coincide with temperature extremes. We will estimate future mortality and morbidity impacts under different global warming scenarios. We will evaluate the health benefits and economic costs associated with a range of adaptation strategies, including building design and retrofit measures in the housing sector, the impacts of future urbanisation trends on urban heat islands, and natural environment interventions such as the cooling potential of urban trees in enhancing population adaptation to climate change. We will quantify the health benefits of mitigation policies needed to achieve the Government's net zero targets. This ambitious project will also enhance research capacity between climate and health scientists by developing a programme of training courses and placement visits of health researchers to the Met Office. The HPRU's extensive stakeholder engagement and other knowledge mobilisation activities will ensure that research has maximum policy impact. The HPRU's dedicated public involvement and engagement group will inform research planning and dissemination of results.

The resilience of water systems in the context of climate change, weather extremes, planning and operational decisions is crucial for water infrastructure service delivery and environmental management. In the UK, water systems are under extreme pressure from exceptional droughts like in the summer of 2022, or challenges to manage sewage spills. At the same time, the latest report on river water quality shows that only 14% of rivers in England meet good ecological status. Thus, there is a need to develop resilience assessments to address interlinked challenges of water systems and the environment. This project addresses a critical knowledge gap: What are resilience scenarios for integrated water systems (RIWS) that can be used to evaluate resilience metrics for various stressors, across system components and to inform adaptive planning? The development of RIWS will be supported by the novel Water System Integration Modelling Framework (WSIMOD) developed at the Imperial College London that will be integrated with the DAFNI platform. WSIMOD's flexibility in integrating numerous water system interactions (rural-urban, water supply-wastewater and flow-water quality) and representing a range of water management options with fast simulations times using primarily publicly available data outstand it as an ideal modelling tool for assessing the resilience of integrated water systems. Novel resilience metrics that combine concepts of a critical threshold in performance data with performance metrics evaluation will be informed by Greater London Authority, Thames and Affinity Water and Environment Agency's engagement through participatory workshops. Stressors will be defined as acute (e.g., component failure) and chronic (e.g., climate change) disruptions. The RIWS project aims to develop scenarios that can provide evidence for water companies, planning authorities and environmental regulators on the feasibility of water systems adaptive planning when assessed by resilience metrics, such as structural options (e.g., wastewater treatment plant upgrade) or coordinated operational decisions (e.g., water supply and wastewater systems information exchange to manage river water quality). The project directly contributes to the 'Building a secure and resilient world' strategy focus on 'adaptation to change and robust decision making' and place-based resilience of integrated rural-urban water systems.