Research Projects

Summary
Infrastructure assets are typically capital intensive investments with long lifetimes – they include both single megaprojects, or resource allocation across multiple options for smaller projects. Megaprojects also have public and private stakeholders and take years to develop and build adding to their complexity/uncertainty. These investment decisions are thus intrinsically made under great uncertainty over the future planning horizon.

This Network will take an interdisciplinary approach to understanding:

• The state-of-the-art in use of modelling support for infrastructure planning decision making, both in industry and policy practice, and in the research community;
• Needs of the practitioner community for research and innovation on methodology;
• Research communities which must be engaged to achieve this, and at a high level the methodologies which might have applied to the challenges elicited from the practitioner community.

A key activity of this Network will be to draw on knowledge and expertise beyond the core project team. This will be achieved through literature review; in-depth discussions with key individuals; an online survey; and two scoping workshops (the first emphasising innovation and capability needs, the second how the research community can help meet these needs).

The topic of this Network may be seen as a cross-cutting integrative activity across the DBB Framework, showing how the different DBB components may be brought together in making important planning decisions.

Funded by
The Centre for Digital Built Britain (CDBB)

Project duration
1 July 2018 – 31 December 2018

Network core team:

Dr Chris Dent (Edinburgh University & Alan Turing Institute) – PI
Dr James Hetherington (Turing Institute)
Professor Gordon Mackerron (Sussex University)
Professor Gordon Masterton (Edinburgh University)
Professor Henry Wynn (LSE)
Dr Hailiang Du and the Durham Energy Institute support team (Durham University)

Summary

Research student Edward Wheatcroft and Professor Leonard Smith worked with the RNLI to provide support for lifeboat operators with respect to both current and potential meteorological conditions. By providing guidance to develop tools that give real time information on the weather outlook, the target was to help provide decision makers with better support to make the right choices with regards to the safety of both the lifeboat crew and the general public.

Funded by
NERC PURE Associates

Grant reference
PA13-038

Grant value (to LSE)
£28,022

Project duration
1 November 2013 to May 2014

See RNLI Project Case Study

See the Poster presented at the PURE Associates Showcase and NERC Environmental Risks to Infrastructure Innovation Call, 20 May 2014

Summary

Society is becoming increasingly aware of climate change and its consequences for us. Examples of likely impacts are changes in food production, increases in mortality rates due to heat waves, and changes in our marine environment. Despite such emerging knowledge, precise predictions of future climate are (and will remain) unattainable owing to the fundamental chaotic nature of the climate system and to imperfections in our understanding, our climate simulation models and our observations of the climate system. This situation limits our ability to take effective adaptation actions. However, effective adaptation is still possible, particularly if we assess the level of precision associated with predictions, and thus quantify the risk posed by climate change. Coupled with assessments of the limitations on our knowledge, this approach can be a powerful tool for informing decision makers. Clearly, then, the quantification of uncertainty in the prediction of climate and its impacts is a critical issue. Considerable thought has gone into this issue with regard to climate change research, although a consensus on the best methods is yet to emerge. Climate impacts research, on the other hand, has focussed primarily on a different set of problems: what are the mechanisms through which climate change is likely to affect for example, agriculture and health, and what are the non-climatic influences that also need to be accounted for? Thus the research base for climate impacts is sound, but tends to be less thorough in its quantification of uncertainty than the physical climate change research that supports it. As a result, statements regarding the impacts of climate change often take a less sophisticated approach to risk and uncertainty. The logical next stage for climate impacts research is therefore to learn from the methods used for climate change predictions. Since climate and its impacts both exist within a broader earth system, with many interrelated components, this next stage is not a simple transfer of technology. Rather, it means taking an ‘end-to-end’ integrated look at climate and its impacts, and assessing risk and uncertainty across whole systems. These systems include not only physical and biological mechanisms, but also the decisions taken by users of climate information. The climate impacts chosen in EQUIP have been chosen to cover this spectrum from end to end. As well as aiding impacts research, end-to-end analyses are also the logical next stage for climate change research, since it is through impacts that society experiences climate change. The project focuses primarily on the next few decades, since this is a timescale of relevance for societies adapting to climate change. It is also a timescale at which our projections of greenhouse gas emissions are relatively well constrained, thus uncertainty is smaller than for, say, the end of the century. Work on longer timescales will also be carried out in order to gain a greater understanding of uncertainty. EQUIP research will build on work to date on the mechanisms and processes that lead to climate change and its impacts, since it is this understanding that forms the basis of predictive power. This knowledge is in the form of observations and experiments (e.g. experiments on crops have demonstrated that even brief episodes of high temperatures near the flowering of the crop can seriously reduce yield) and also simulation models. It is through effective use and combination of climate science and impacts science, and the models used by each community, that we will be able to quantify uncertainty, assess risk, and thus equip society to deal with climate change.

Principal Investigator
Andy Challinor (Leeds)

Principal Investigator at LSE
Professor Leonard Smith

Funded by
NERC

Grant Reference
NE/H003479/1

Project duration
21 January 2010 – 30 June 2013

EQUIP Project Conclusions
PDF
The two page leaflet presents the main conclusions from the EQUIP project including recommendations on good practice.

Summary

The main objectives of the research were:

1) To reach out to industry through a series of in-house educational workshops in selected industrial organisations and thereby to transfer knowledge and create awareness of the potential benefits of recent results and methods in the area of end-to-end estimation of operational weather risk.

2) To provide a hardware and software platform to enable interested organisations to use new methods of end-to-end estimation to forecast and feedback to the science base the impact of weather upon their businesses or public sector concerns. The intention was to deepen and update their engagement with the science base.

The main achievements of the project were firstly, a significant increase in the awareness of British companies exposed to weather risk, of the value of current methods and meteorological information available to them; and secondly, a major increase in academic understanding of the limitations of today’s probabilistic forecast information for decision support.

Funded by
NERC

Grant reference
NE/D00120X/1

Grant value (to LSE)
£152,481

Project duration
1 November 2005 – 30 April 2008

Read the Napster brochure