www.lwec.org.uk

Living With Environmental Change

Mary BarkhamLWEC Deputy Director

Understanding Society Workshop

27January 2011

Ensure that decision makers in government, business and society have the knowledge, tools and foresight to mitigate,

adapt to and benefit from environmental change

The LWEC partnership

LWEC brings together 22 UK organisations funding, undertaking and using environmental research to accelerate the delivery of research on

environmental change into policy, business and society

How LWEC deliversPartnership, coordination, alignment• Research funders and policy users : 22 partners

• Business advisors : key industry sectors and FTSE100 companies

• £600m commitment since 2008 launch : target £1bn in 5 years

• Common research objectives : co-design, co-produce, co-deliver

Agreeing prioritiesNatural hazards & humanitarian aid

Biodiversity, environment &health

Ocean Acidification

Geoengineering

Aligning activitiesFlooding,

Ecosystems,

Water

Observations

Developing partnershipsJoint Weather and Climate Research Programme : NERC, Met Office

National Ecosystem Assessment : Defra, SG, others

Ecosystem Services for Poverty Alleviation : DfID, ESRC, NERC

Behaviour and Risk Centres : ESRC, DEFRA, SG and others…

A 2-year research programme to look at the best ways to help people cut their carbon emissions, involving 22 communities in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, led by DECC.

Energy use data- baseline and historic trends of domestic and non-domestic energy use in buildings in each of the communities.

Socio-economic and environmental behaviour data: a before and after household survey across the communities - to capture information on the wider impacts of the Challenge.

Living With Environmental Change partners

Department of Energy and Climate Change, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Department for Communities and Local Government, Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council, Economic & Social Research Council, Welsh Assembly Government, Northern Ireland Executive, plus Sciencewise & Cabinet Office Office for Civil Society Total investment: £11 million

Low Carbon Communities Challenge

LWEC challenges• Climate : exploring the potential impacts of climate change to inform mitigation and adaptation policies

•Ecosystems : managing ecosystem services for human well being & to protect the natural environment in a changing world

•Sustainability : developing a comprehensive programme to help deliver water security

• Health challenge : providing foresight of the threat of new and emerging infectious diseases and how they can be rapidly identified

• Infrastructure : supporting the design and construction of urban systems that are more resilient to climate change

• Society : understanding how people respond to risk and make decisions in a changing environment

Strategic Framework

•Being developed for each of the 6 challenges

•Will consider needs of government, business and society

•Will look at current capabilities and how needs can be jointly addressed

Workshop today will help inform the Societal strategic framework

Societal Challenge

• Political economy & decision-making

• Economic & environmental change

• Fairness and equality

• Risk, conflict & security

• Behaviour change, communication & engagement

• Human well-being & social impacts

• Transformations

Environmental Information

•Environmental Information Framework

•Research database

•UK Environmental Observation Framework

Environmental Information Framework

A step change in the volume and quality of UK public sector environmental data and information available to users.

Collect once, publish once, use many times

www.environment.data.gov.uk

Simple project search

Search menu options

Simple project search – sample search and summary results

www.EnvironmentalResearch.info

Observation Activity Catalogue www.ukeof.org.uk

Assessing Socio-economic Observation Needs

• UKEOF- info on environmental observations taken for or by the UK

• Need to broaden to include socio-economic data to take into account the impact and consequences of human behaviour

• Need to facilitate the interchange between natural science and socio-economic datasets to address real world issues and promote interdisciplinary approaches

Key data sets identified• ONS Census

• National Travel Survey

• Monitor on engagement with natural environment survey

• Supermarket shopping data

• Land use statistics

• UK land cover map

• Public health statistics

• Hospital Episode Data

• ONS Labour Force Survey

• DWP data on employment etc

• Understanding Society: UK Longitudinal Household Survey

Fostering inter-disciplinary working

• Building communities of practice

• Workshops to discuss datasets by social and natural scientists to look at access and potential use

• Adding socio-economic metadata to UKEOF catalogue with links to data repositories

• Written guidance to help users understand the value of joining data sets and provide examples of analyses and applications

www.lwec.org.uk

Living With Environmental Change

www.lwec.org.uk

www.ukeof.org.uk

www.environmentalresearch.info