Newcastle University

Impact & engagement

The Centre for Earth Systems Engineering Research seeks to have impact in academic terms and to act as a positive force for change in policy and engineering practice - thus 'Impact and engagement' with stakeholders and the wider public are central to our programme.  Our research has had an impact at the highest levels of government and industry through a wide range of agenda setting activities.  Some detailed case studies can be found in the menu, but others include:

• The same method was used to generate national flood risk estimates under scenarios of climatic and socio-economic change in the Office of Science and Technology's Foresight: Future Flooding study.

• The Foresight methodology has now been applied in the Taihu Basin in China, in collaboration with the China Institute for Hydropower and Water Resources Research. Jim Hall has been co-ordinating the risk analysis component of this work.

• CESER researchers developed the uncertainty analysis method use in the Thames Estuary 2100 (TE2100) long term flood management study to ensure policy makers understood how robust their decisions would be to modelling assumptions.

• The Sustainable Management of the West Bank and Gaza Aquifers (SUSMAQ) supported the Palestinian Water Authorities case in the Final Status Negotiations with Israel over water. Outputs including technical reports, a summary report and two films can be accessed at www.hwe.org.ps the website of a new NGO, House of Water and Environment, which is building upon the capacity established under SUSMAQ.

• The Environment Agency Weather Generator (EARWIG), developed jointly by CESER and the University of East Anglia is now in use throughout the Environment Agency and formed the basis for the first ever UK catchment-scale climate change adaptation study on the river Wear.

• EARWIG was extended by the CESER team and UEA to provide the rainfall generator for the UKCP09 climate scenarios, placing the UK at the forefront of the shift to risk-based adaptation decision making.

• CESER’s work is extensively cited in the 4^th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (23 publications cited on 34 occasions in the Working Group I and II reports). The group also contributed to the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change.  Richard Dawson co-leads the Cities and Coasts theme of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research.

• Through a short NERC funded secondment (reported here) to the Greater London Authority (GLA), Richard Dawson provided quantitative evidence, generated by our Integrated Systems Demonstration in Cities programme, on climate change impacts and greenhouse gas emissions to the 2009 Spatial Development Strategy for Greater London.

• The Tyndall Centre Cities programme also provided evidence used to inform the GLA's 2011 Water Strategy.

• As members of the Tyndall Centre Coasts programme we have demonstrated the effects of changing marine climates on coastal flood and erosion risk. This work has taken place over an unusually broad spatial scale and extended temporal scale (up to 100 years in the future). Outputs from the modelling have been linked with a GIS to develop a visualisation of the evolving coastal environment to improve participation and communication with coastal communities. The work, reported here (and here), is having a significant influence on the policy debate concerning coastal governance in the UK, and through engagement with communities in North Norfolk where the case study is situated.
  
  
• Paul Quinn was invited to speak on his work relating to Natural Flood Management at the House of Commons Office of Science and Technology (Jan 2012). This Parliamentary review meeting was set up to help refine the inputs to the governments Environment White Paper (see PostNote).
  
  
• The soft engineered runoff management work being undertaken at Belford was cited in the response to Pitt Review.

 

A selection of papers can be found in the publications section.

Key publications