April 2019 – Cabot Institute for the Environment blog

Bristol is Global Competition 2019 – a student response to the global food crisis

Posted on April 29, 2019April 3, 2023 by janet.crompton

Bristol Is Global finalists

Food – not one of us would be able to live without it and crucially, this obvious fact is understated. In the global north, with fast food delivery services available at our fingertips and supermarkets stocked with shelves of tinned cans, frozen meals and fresh fruit and veg, it is unsurprisingly easy to take food for granted. In an increasingly globalised world, where much of our food travels miles across oceans and roads, it is ever more common to find ourselves alienated from the cycles and processes that start in the soil and end up at the tip of our knives and forks. Our disconnection to food is significant given that the global food industry is in a hidden environmental crisis: a crisis of social, cultural, historical, economic, political, and geographical significance. As students, we recognise that if climate demands are not met within our lifetimes: water scarcity, diseases, droughts, floods, and the acidification of oceans will impact the security of our food in irrepressible ways (Empson 2016: 77-8).

And so, this year, Bristol is Global (BiG) asked students to address the question:

How can the university, students and the wider public address the problems with the local and global food industry?

Focusing on three sub-categories:

Food waste
The hunger-obesity paradox
Single-use plastic packaging.

BiG is an annual, university-wide competition organised by students that is themed around a different global socio-political challenge each year, with the winning team being awarded £500. The competition provides an opportunity for students from different disciplines to collaboratively develop a solution to a global problem on a local scale, founded on the belief that no global challenge will ever be resolved by one person, but rather a collective effort of countless individuals each making small actions.

To introduce the theme, Joy Carey, an expert in sustainable food planning who is currently a member of the Bristol Food Policy Council along with Natalie Fee, an environmental campaigner against plastic pollution, gave inspiring talks to launch the competition. This was followed by a panel debate to help students better understand the complex issue at hand a panel event took place. Representatives from Bristol Waste Company, Fair Trade Network, Community Farm, as well as our own Professor Jeffrey Brunstrom engaged in a thought provoking discussion with the students.

This year, the four finalist teams came up with four creative and diverse ideas that could potentially have a significant impact on the Bristol community:

RecycleWise: A comprehensive information pack distributed to second year flats educating students on good recycling practices.
Bright: An all-inclusive app with tutorial videos, interactive maps and reward schemes to encourage people to follow more sustainable eating habits.
Eat Well Bristol: Student-volunteer run holiday cooking sessions in primary schools to make organic and healthy eating more accessible to underprivileged families in Bristol.
Green Brewery Initiative: Growing indoor crops and herbs using plastic bottles rather than pots and used coffee grounds instead of fertiliser to engage the University community in reducing waste.

Members from LettUs Grow, a successful University of Bristol start-up developing vertical farming technology met with the teams to help them refine their pitch. In the final event, each team presented their ideas to a panel of judges. The quality of research and originality in each proposal was truly impressive, as well as the passion and enthusiasm shown by all four teams. The judges ultimately decided to chip in an extra £100 and fund two teams, the Bright App and RecycleWise, as well as providing continued support to all four teams to carry on with their projects. With Bristol Going for Gold (Bristol’s ambition to become the first Gold Award Sustainable Food City in the UK by 2020), each proposal has tremendous potential to help the city reach its goal.

As organisers of BiG we would like to thank the Cabot Institute for providing invaluable support throughout the competition. We would also like to extend our thank you to the Alumni Grant Foundation for funding to further help the teams implement their ideas.

Next year BiG will return with a different socio-economic issue, challenging students to come up with solutions that can truly help the Bristol community in different ways. We hope to engage more students and encourage the entire university community to engage in the issues we face.

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This blog was written by Lina Drozd, Usha Bholah and Smruthi Radhakrishnan, all students at the University of Bristol.

Bees and butterflies are under threat from urbanisation – here’s how city-dwellers can help

Posted on April 29, 2019April 13, 2023 by janet.crompton

File 20190115 152977 13ovnf5.jpg?ixlib=rb 1.1 — All a-flutter.
Shutterstock.

Pollinators such as bees, hoverflies and butterflies, are responsible for the reproduction of many flowering plants and help to produce more than three quarters of the world’s crop species. Globally, the value of the services provided by pollinators is estimated at between US$235 billion and US$577 billion.

It’s alarming, then, that pollinators are under threat from factors including more intense farming, climate change, disease and changing land use, such as urbanisation. Yet recent studies have suggested that urban areas could actually be beneficial, at least for some pollinators, as higher numbers of bee species have been recorded in UK towns and cities, compared with neighbouring farmland.

To find out which parts of towns and cities are better for bees and other pollinators, our research team carried out fieldwork in nine different types of land in four UK cities: Bristol, Reading, Leeds and Edinburgh.

An easy win

Urban areas are a complex mosaic of different land uses and habitats. We surveyed pollinators in allotments (also known as community gardens), cemeteries and churchyards, residential gardens, public parks, other green spaces (such as playing fields), nature reserves, road verges, pavements and man-made surfaces such as car parks or industrial estates.

Our results suggest that allotments are good places for bees and other pollinating insects, and that creating more allotments will benefit the pollinators in towns and cities. Allotments are beneficial for human health and well-being, and also help boost local food production.

In the UK, there are waiting lists for allotments in many areas, so local authorities and urban planners need to recognise that creating more allotment sites is a winning move, which will benefit people, pollinators and sustainable food production.

Good tips for green thumbs

We also recorded high numbers of pollinating insects in gardens. Residential gardens made up between a quarter and a third of the total area of the four cities we sampled, so they’re really a crucial habitat for bees and other pollinators in cities. That’s why urban planners and developers need to create new housing developments with gardens.

But it’s not just the quantity of gardens that matters, it’s the quality, too. And there’s a lot that residents can do to ensure their gardens provide a good environment for pollinators.

Rather than paving, decking and neatly mown lawns, gardeners need to be planting flowers, shrubs and bushes that are good for pollinators. Choose plants that have plenty of pollen and nectar that is accessible to pollinators, and aim to have flowers throughout the year to provide a constant supply of food. Our research suggests that borage and lavender are particularly attractive for pollinators.

Often plants and seeds in garden centres are labelled with pollinator logos to help gardeners choose suitable varieties – although a recent study found that that ornamental plants on sale can contain pesticides that are harmful to pollinators, so gardeners should check this with retailers before buying.
Weeds are important too; our results suggest that dandelions, buttercups and brambles are important flowers for pollinators. So create more space for pollinators by mowing less often to allow flowers to grow, and leaving weedy corners, since undisturbed areas make good nesting sites.

An urban refuge

Parks, road verges and other green spaces make up around a third of cities, however our study found that they contain far fewer pollinators than gardens. Our results suggest that increasing the numbers of flowers in these areas, potentially by mowing less often, could have a real benefit for pollinators (and save money). There are already several initiatives underway to encourage local authorities to mow less often.

Roundhay Park in Leeds: not a flower in sight.
Shutterstock.

Ensuring there are healthy populations of pollinators will benefit the native plants and ecosystems in urban areas, as well as anyone who is growing food in their garden or allotment. Towns and cities could act as important refuges for pollinators in the wider landscape, especially since agricultural areas can be limited in terms of the habitat they provide.

It’s crucial for local authorities, urban planners, gardeners and land managers to do their bit to improve the way towns and cities are managed for pollinators. National pollinator strategies already exist for several countries, and local pollinator strategies and action plans are helping to bring together the key stakeholders in cities. Wider adoption of this type of united approach will help to improve towns and cities for both the people and pollinators that live there.

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Dr Katherine Baldock, NERC Knowledge Exchange Fellow, University of Bristol. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

How University-city partnerships can help us tackle the global climate emergency

Posted on April 17, 2019April 3, 2023 by janet.crompton

Image credit: Chris Bhan

Climate scientists have made it clear: we are in a global state of emergency. The International Panel on Climate Change report published late last year was a wake-up call to the world – if we don’t limit warming to 1.5 degrees, 10 million more people will be exposed to flood risk. If we don’t, it will be much, much harder to grow crops and have affordable food. If we don’t, we’ll have more extreme weather, which will undoubtedly impact the most vulnerable. If we don’t, the coral reefs will be almost 100% gone.

And yet… National governments are failing to act with the urgency demanded by our climate crisis. The commitments each country made to reduce emissions under the Paris Agreement won’t get us there – not even close.

How can we make progress in the face of political paralysis?

The answer is local action. Specifically, it’s action at the city-scale that has excited and inspired a plethora of researchers at the Cabot Institute in recent years. Cities are complex places of contradiction – they are where our most significant environmental impacts will be borne out through consumption and emissions, whilst simultaneously being places of inspirational leadership, of rapid change, and of innovation.

City governments across the world are increasingly taking the lead and recognising that radically changing the way our cities are designed and powered is essential to reducing carbon emissions [ref 1; ref 2]. They are standing against national powers to make a change (see for example We Are Still In, a coalition of cities and other non-state actors responding to Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement). And they are forming innovative partnerships to galvanise action quickly – both in terms of lowering emissions and planning for adaptation to climate change (see for example C40 Cities or 100 Resilient Cities).

Bristol is among them. It was a combination of grass-roots leadership and City support that led to Bristol being the first and only UK city to be awarded the title of European Green Capital in 2015. In November 2018, Bristol City Council unanimously passed the Council Motion to declare a Climate Emergency in Bristol and pledge to make the city Carbon neutral by 2030. It was the first local government authority to do so in the UK.

Today, the University of Bristol is the first UK university to stand alongside its city and declare a Climate Emergency. Far from being a symbolic gesture, these declarations reflect strong local political will to tackle climate change, and they are backed up by action at all levels of the University – from committing to become a carbon neutral campus by 2030, to making education on sustainable futures available to every student.

What’s clear, and potentially even more exciting, is that Universities and cities have a unique opportunity collaborate to innovate for change in truly meaningful and cutting-edge ways.

Within the Cabot Institute for the Environment, we’ve been fortunate to build research partnerships with the many inspiring individuals and organisations in our city. Whether it’s collaborating with the City Council to evaluate the economics of a low carbon Bristol, or with We the Curious to create street art on the impacts and solutions to climate change, or with Ujima Radio and the Bristol Green Capital Partnership to improve inclusion in the city’s sustainability movement – we’ve seen that we can achieve more when we recognise and value knowledge from within and outside the walls of the institution, and make progress together.

Bristol City Council has been working closely with both academics and students at the University of Bristol to explore ways to deliver the highly ambitious target of carbon neutrality by 2030. Cabot Institute researchers have also been working alongside the City Office to embed the UN Sustainable Development Goals in the recently launched One City Plan, which reflects a unique effort to bring together partners from across the public, private and non-profit sectors to collectively define a vision for the city and chart a path towards achieving it. There are many organisations and citizens working to make Bristol more sustainable. The One City Plan is designed to amplify these efforts by improving coordination and encouraging new partnerships.

The good news is that Bristol has already begun reducing its carbon emissions, having cut per capita emissions by 1.76 tonnes since 2010. However, we need to accelerate decarbonisation to avert a crisis and make our contribution to tackling the climate emergency.

We can achieve this in Bristol if we work together in partnership, and we must. We simply cannot wait for our national governments to act. We look forward to standing with our city to meet this challenge together.

This blog is written by Dr Sean Fox and Hayley Shaw with contributions from Dr Alix Dietzel and Allan Macleod.

Dr Sean Fox, Senior Lecturer in Global Development in the School of Geographical Sciences and City Futures theme lead at Cabot Institute for the Environment.

Hayley Shaw, Manager of Cabot Institute for the Environment.

The future of UK-Canada research collaborations in the Arctic

Posted on April 12, 2019April 5, 2023 by janet.crompton

The Arctic is one of the most rapidly changing environments on Earth, with dramatic warming of the atmosphere and the oceans, accelerating glaciers, melting permafrost and shrinking sea ice.

All of these changes have major consequences for the indigenous groups of the Arctic countries: changing ocean ecosystems will impact fisheries and other natural resources, collapsing permafrost damages their homes and infrastructure, and disappearing sea ice effects their trade routes. All with implications for employment, education, and health.

Whilst these headlines reach the UK press, the immediate consequences can seem far away from our shores. However, a changing Arctic has a world-wide reach, contributing towards global sea-level and biodiversity changes, and putting pressure on shipping, natural resources, and international relations.

There have been recent large-scale efforts within the UK research community to increase our understanding of the high-latitudes. The Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) launched the multi-million pound Changing Arctic Ocean program in 2017, initially comprising four projects investigating oceanic processes linked with the shifting sea ice dynamics, largely in the Barents Sea and Fram Straight regions near Iceland and Norway. Whilst these projects have already been successful in producing critical new data, and have developed to include a number of new projects, the focus is still firmly within the natural sciences. There is a clear need to include other disciplines, especially social sciences, and to expand to other geographical regions.

Earlier this week, I had an opportunity to attend a joint meeting between NERC and Polar Knowledge, Canada, as part of the 2018 ArcticNet meeting in Ottawa. The meeting brought together researchers and funding organisations from the UK and Canada, together with representatives of indigenous groups and northern communities. By getting these groups of people around a table together in one place, the aim was to go some way to creating a new strong international Arctic research partnership, to understand the interests and strengths in Arctic research in the two countries, make personal links and identify the next steps for all stakeholders.

For me, the meeting was worthwhile alone for the connections that I made, but also for the steep learning-curve in my understanding of Canadian research priorities: linking with people in Northern communities, building on infrastructure, engaging with communities, and blending with Indigenous Knowledge. I was particularly impressed with the true public engagement that is carried out, in their Northern approach to science, through public consultations, gap analysis, and identification of key principles in research and research ethics.

Now it’s a matter of developing the ideas that were discussed enthusiastically in the room, to build research plans with direct societal impact, true stakeholder engagement, and opportunities for early career researchers. It’s an exciting – and timely – moment to be in Arctic research.

This blog is written by Dr Kate Hendry from the University of Bristol School of Earth Sciences and the Cabot Institute for the Environment.

Antarctica: Why are we here again?

Posted on April 8, 2019April 13, 2023 by janet.crompton

The ship’s roll reaches 19° and everything falls off the desk, nearly followed by me off my chair if it weren’t for an evasive leap to one side. My roommate wakes with a start as the curtains around his bed have flung themselves open. “What are you doing?” he asks, in a confused state. Aside from the fact that everything falling off the desk was the weather’s fault, not mine, his question is a good one.

What are a team of 20 scientists, mostly from the UK, doing out here in the Southern Ocean? Surely there’s somewhere closer to home we could measure the sea. The main aim of this research cruise is to understand the process of deep water formation around Antarctica. First, let me briefly explain what deep water formation is and why it’s important in about 300 words. To understand this, the most important thing to remember is that water becomes denser when it is colder and/or when it is saltier. I think they teach that in GCSE science; if they don’t, they should.

Deep water formation

Antarctica is pretty cold, obviously. Where we are now, the sea temperature is around 1 °C. If we were to go further south or wait until winter, the sea will approach its freezing point of around -2 °C, forming sea ice. That’s a little colder than normal water, which freezes at 0 °C, because the sea is salty. However, when the sea freezes to form sea ice, the salt from the water is not incorporated into the ice – the salt that was in the sea water is left behind, making the remaining water a little bit saltier. As a result, the water close to the sea ice edge is both cold and salty compared to the rest of the world’s oceans, and therefore is denser than most of the rest of the world’s oceans. Dense water sinks below less dense water, and so the deepest water at the bottom of the oceans around the world all comes from around Antarctica.

Sea ice drifting close to the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula

When the water is at the surface of the sea, it can absorb heat and gases, including carbon dioxide, from the atmosphere. When deep water formation occurs, this heat and carbon dioxide can be drawn down into the depths of ocean, where it will stay for 1000 years or so. The research cruise I am on now wants to measure the amount of deep water formation occurring so we can better understand how much heat and carbon dioxide is being taken up by the ocean, which helps understand how much the climate will change in the future with global warming. That’s why we are here, basically, instead of the Bristol Channel.

Chlorofluorocarbons

Our team, based at the University of Exeter, are specifically measuring CFCs in the water. CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) are manmade gases that were used for many industrial and commercial processes for a few decades before people realised they were destroying ozone in the atmosphere. This was creating a hole in the Earth’s ozone layer in the stratosphere over Antarctica and the Southern Hemisphere. Ozone is important for absorbing some of the Sun’s strong and damaging ultraviolet radiation before it reaches the Earth’s surface. Excessive ultraviolet radiation causes sunburn and skin cancer in humans, so people were concerned about the ozone hole when it was discovered in the 1980s. As a result, all nations of the world agreed the Montreal Protocol to stop producing CFCs that were destroying the ozone layer. Although this was a geopolitical and diplomatic success story, the ozone hole is only slowly showing signs of recovering and some CFCs still seem to be increasing (presumably suggesting some illegal production of them still occurs). However, luckily the ozone hole is no longer getting bigger and it is mostly contained to the very high Southern Hemisphere. Don’t worry, I brought plenty of factor 50 for my pasty Irish skin.

The reason we are measuring CFCs, however, is not actually to understand what they are doing to the ozone layer. We care about CFCs because they are manmade gases that are not naturally found in the atmosphere or ocean. This allows them to be used to trace ocean circulation and processes such as deep water formation. Let me explain how.

Jetsam

Since setting off from the Falklands five weeks ago, we have seen two manmade things: a ship on the horizon and some rusty metal oil barrels floating around amongst a heavy scattering of icebergs. The ship was a fishing boat, not far from the Falklands or Punta Arenas, so was not too surprising. The oil barrels however, were a bit more unexpected. They were floating right in the middle of the Weddell Sea, almost as far from civilisation as they could be. There were at least four of them, however they weren’t lashed together like some sort of raft made by Tom Hanks, they were all floating individually within a few hours steam of each other.

Oil barrel floating in the Weddell Sea, originally dumped around 6,000 km away (image credit: Hugh Venables, BAS)

The most curious thing about these barrels, however, is that when we were able to zoom in on a photo taken of one with a camera with a good telephoto lens, we could see their origin. They had writing and the branding from Operation Deepfreeze, a US mission to set up an Antarctic base in the Ross Sea in the 1950s. After initially being surprised at seeing any litter in the pristine Southern Ocean, we had to question how these barrels got here. The Ross Sea is on the entire other side of the Antarctic continent, around 6,000 km away by sea.

The Operation Deepfreeze base was built on the Ross Ice Shelf. This is thick ice that has flown out from the glaciers on land to create an area the size of France floating over the Ross Sea. Although this ice is very thick and reasonably slow moving, it is not permanent and does break off from time to time to form huge icebergs. The same process has formed some icebergs that have made the news recently, including one berg a quarter of the size of Wales and a potential berg break off that is threatening to take the British Antarctic Survey’s Halley research station with it. Well, presumably the old dumping ground from Operation Deepfreeze has at some stage broken off from the Ross Ice Shelf, floated halfway around the Southern Ocean carried by the Antarctic Circumpolar Current and been taken into the Weddell Sea gyre, where it melted and broke up, scattering all the rubbish into the Weddell Sea.

Just like these oil barrels can be used to trace how the ocean’s surface currents circulate (a similar story involves a spilt shipping container of rubber ducks in the Pacific Ocean in 1992), looking at where manmade gases such as CFCs end up in the deep ocean can tell us how the deep water formation takes water from the surface to depth. To measure the CFCs, we first take samples using a probe known as a CTD (which stands for Conductivity Temperature Depth). This probe has 24 bottles on it as well as instruments for measuring of salinity, temperature and other water properties. The probe is lowered to the bottom of the ocean (which around here can be more than 6 km deep) and as it is brought back up to the surface, the 24 bottles are closed at different depths. When the CTD arrives back on the ship’s deck, we then have samples of water from 24 depths through the ocean at that particular location. Over the course of the cruise, we will be carrying out around 100 CTDs.

Sampling using the CTD (lowered by winch off the side of the ship) continues morning, noon and night, meaning we work 12 hour shifts

With the water brought up in the bottles, our team takes a 500 ml sample from each and we store them in a walk-in fridge on the ship. We then analyse one sample at a time, which takes about 20 minutes using a custom-built machine that strips all the gases out of the water and calculates the amount of CFCs it contains. This setup for measuring CFCs is in its own portable lab, built in a shipping container that it strapped onto the aft deck of the James Clark Ross. While it’s pretty time-consuming running 100 CTDs with 24 bottles each taking 20 minutes (I calculate that to be more than 33 days of continually running the machine, assuming no delays) at least we have a good view from our container out over the wildlife and icebergs of the Southern Ocean.

Our CFC lab inside a shipping container, strapped onto the aft deck, as we sail by the South Orkney Islands

Other science

Besides our team measuring CFCs, other scientists are also using the water from the CTD to analyse oxygen isotopes, nutrient content, pH and microbes. When the CTD comes on deck, there is usually a bit of a mad scramble as everyone gets water for their own analysis, with a strict pecking order as who gets to take their water first. For maximum inconvenience, usually the CTD comes up just before dinner or lunch, just to make sampling that little bit more frantic.

Taking water samples for analysis from the 24 bottles on the CTD once it is back on deck (image credit: Charel Wohl, PML)

As well as measuring water from depth using the CTD, other scientists on the ship also continually measure the air and surface sea water as we sail. The air measurements, taken from the very front of the ship so not to get contaminated by exhaust or air conditioning fumes, must be measuring some of the cleanest air in the world. It’s pretty nice to stand up there and breathe it in, although it’s often accompanied by a blizzard of snow and biting wind, which makes the experience slightly less enjoyable.

We also have deployed some floats that will continue to measure the salinity and temperature of the sea here for the next five years or so. Using a gas bladder, these floats can adjust their density so they rise and sink through the ocean, measuring continually as they go. Every time these floats get back to the surface, they send their data back via a satellite connection. Although they don’t measure as much stuff as the scientists on the ship (for example, they don’t measure CFCs), they will be here all year round so keep making measurements through the winter. The ship on the other hand will have to retreat from the sea ice before the winter sets in, in case we end up repeating Shackleton’s antics with the Endurance. Which is fine with me because, interesting as it is, I don’t really fancy a further 6 months down here in the dark.

A float being deployed, which will continue to make measurements through the winter and for years after we leave

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This blog is part of a blog series from Antarctica by Alan Kennedy-Asser, who has recently completed his PhD at the University of Bristol. This blog has been republished with kind permission from Alan. View the original blog. You can follow Alan on Twitter @EzekielBoom.

Alan Kennedy-Asser

Read part one of Alan’s Antarctica blog series – Antarctica: Ship life
Read part two of Alan’s Antarctica blog series – Antarctica: Why are we here again?
Read part three of Alan’s Antarcica blog series: Antarctica: Looking back

The social animals that are inspiring new behaviours for robot swarms

Posted on April 8, 2019April 4, 2023 by janet.crompton

File 20190326 36252 wdqi1n.jpg?ixlib=rb 1.1 — Termite team.
7th Son Studio/Shutterstock

From flocks of birds to fish schools in the sea, or towering termite mounds, many social groups in nature exist together to survive and thrive. This cooperative behaviour can be used by engineers as “bio-inspiration” to solve practical human problems, and by computer scientists studying swarm intelligence.

“Swarm robotics” took off in the early 2000s, an early example being the “s-bot” (short for swarm-bot). This is a fully autonomous robot that can perform basic tasks including navigation and the grasping of objects, and which can self-assemble into chains to cross gaps or pull heavy loads. More recently, “TERMES” robots have been developed as a concept in construction, and the “CoCoRo” project has developed an underwater robot swarm that functions like a school of fish that exchanges information to monitor the environment. So far, we’ve only just begun to explore the vast possibilities that animal collectives and their behaviour can offer as inspiration to robot swarm design.

Swarm behaviour in birds – or robots designed to mimic them?
EyeSeeMicrostock/Shutterstock

Robots that can cooperate in large numbers could achieve things that would be difficult or even impossible for a single entity. Following an earthquake, for example, a swarm of search and rescue robots could quickly explore multiple collapsed buildings looking for signs of life. Threatened by a large wildfire, a swarm of drones could help emergency services track and predict the fire’s spread. Or a swarm of floating robots (“Row-bots”) could nibble away at oceanic garbage patches, powered by plastic-eating bacteria.

A future where floating robots powered by plastic-eating bacteria could tackle ocean waste.
Shutterstock

Bio-inspiration in swarm robotics usually starts with social insects – ants, bees and termites – because colony members are highly related, which favours impressive cooperation. Three further characteristics appeal to researchers: robustness, because individuals can be lost without affecting performance; flexibility, because social insect workers are able to respond to changing work needs; and scalability, because a colony’s decentralised organisation is sustainable with 100 workers or 100,000. These characteristics could be especially useful for doing jobs such as environmental monitoring, which requires coverage of huge, varied and sometimes hazardous areas.

Social learning

Beyond social insects, other species and behavioural phenomena in the animal kingdom offer inspiration to engineers. A growing area of biological research is in animal cultures, where animals engage in social learning to pick up behaviours that they are unlikely to innovate alone. For example, whales and dolphins can have distinctive foraging methods that are passed down through the generations. This includes forms of tool use – dolphins have been observed breaking off marine sponges to protect their beaks as they go rooting around for fish, like a person might put a glove over a hand.

Bottlenose dolphin playing with a sponge. Some have learned to use them to help them catch fish.
Yann Hubert/Shutterstock

Forms of social learning and artificial robotic cultures, perhaps using forms of artificial intelligence, could be very powerful in adapting robots to their environment over time. For example, assistive robots for home care could adapt to human behavioural differences in different communities and countries over time.

Robot (or animal) cultures, however, depend on learning abilities that are costly to develop, requiring a larger brain – or, in the case of robots, a more advanced computer. But the value of the “swarm” approach is to deploy robots that are simple, cheap and disposable. Swarm robotics exploits the reality of emergence (“more is different”) to create social complexity from individual simplicity. A more fundamental form of “learning” about the environment is seen in nature – in sensitive developmental processes – which do not require a big brain.

‘Phenotypic plasticity’

Some animals can change behavioural type, or even develop different forms, shapes or internal functions, within the same species, despite having the same initial “programming”. This is known as “phenotypic plasticity” – where the genes of an organism produce different observable results depending on environmental conditions. Such flexibility can be seen in the social insects, but sometimes even more dramatically in other animals.
Most spiders are decidedly solitary, but in about 20 of 45,000 spider species, individuals live in a shared nest and capture food on a shared web. These social spiders benefit from having a mixture of “personality” types in their group, for example bold and shy.

Social spider (Stegodyphus) spin collective webs in Addo Elephant Park, South Africa.
PicturesofThings/Shutterstock

My research identified a flexibility in behaviour where shy spiders would step into a role vacated by absent bold nestmates. This is necessary because the spider colony needs a balance of bold individuals to encourage collective predation, and shyer ones to focus on nest maintenance and parental care. Robots could be programmed with adjustable risk-taking behaviour, sensitive to group composition, with bolder robots entering into hazardous environments while shyer ones know to hold back. This could be very helpful in mapping a disaster area such as Fukushima, including its most dangerous parts, while avoiding too many robots in the swarm being damaged at once.

The ability to adapt

Cane toads were introduced in Australia in the 1930s as a pest control, and have since become an invasive species themselves. In new areas cane toads are seen to be somewhat social. One reason for their growth in numbers is that they are able to adapt to a wide temperature range, a form of physiological plasticity. Swarms of robots with the capability to switch power consumption mode, depending on environmental conditions such as ambient temperature, could be considerably more durable if we want them to function autonomously for the long term. For example, if we want to send robots off to map Mars then they will need to cope with temperatures that can swing from -150°C at the poles to 20°C at the equator.

Cane toads can adapt to temperature changes.
Radek Ziemniewicz/Shutterstock

In addition to behavioural and physiological plasticity, some organisms show morphological (shape) plasticity. For example, some bacteria change their shape in response to stress, becoming elongated and so more resilient to being “eaten” by other organisms. If swarms of robots can combine together in a modular fashion and (re)assemble into more suitable structures this could be very helpful in unpredictable environments. For example, groups of robots could aggregate together for safety when the weather takes a challenging turn.

Whether it’s the “cultures” developed by animal groups that are reliant on learning abilities, or the more fundamental ability to change “personality”, internal function or shape, swarm robotics still has plenty of mileage left when it comes to drawing inspiration from nature. We might even wish to mix and match behaviours from different species, to create robot “hybrids” of our own. Humanity faces challenges ranging from climate change affecting ocean currents, to a growing need for food production, to space exploration – and swarm robotics can play a decisive part given the right bio-inspiration.

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This blog was written by Cabot Institute member Dr Edmund Hunt, EPSRC Doctoral Prize Fellow, University of Bristol. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Edmund Hunt

UK Climate Projections 2018: From science to policy making

Posted on April 1, 2019April 4, 2023 by janet.crompton

On a sunny day earlier this week, I attended the UK Climate Projections 2018: From science to policy making, meeting in Westminster on behalf of the Cabot Institute. Co-hosted by the All-Party Parliamentary Climate Change Group and the UK Met Office, the main purpose of this event was to forge discussions between scientists involved in producing the latest UK Climate Projections (UKCP18) and users from various sectors about the role of UKCP18 in increasing the UK’s preparedness of future climate change.

Many people in my constituency come and ask about climate change every day.

The event began with an opening remark by Rebecca Pow, the MP for Taunton Deane in Somerset. Somerset has seen some devastating floods over the years, and a new land drainage bill was passed a week prior to manage flood risk in the area. Constantly faced with questions from her constituents about climate change, Rebecca is particularly interested in regional climate change, both at present and in the future, and any opportunities that may arise from it.

Everyone would like a model of their back garden.

Prof Sir Brian Hoskins, the Founding Director and Chair of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment, and Professor in Meteorology at the University of Reading, gave an overview on climate projection. He listed three main sources of uncertainty in 21st century climate projection: internal variability, model uncertainty, and human activity uncertainty. Climate scientists deal with these uncertainties by using large ensembles of simulations, a range of climate models, and a range of climate scenarios. However, there is always tension between model resolution, complexity and the need for many model runs in global climate projections due to constraints in computer resources. Regional climate models can be embedded in global domains to provide local weather and climate information, but they cannot correct large scale errors. The peer-reviewed UKCP18 provide both the statistics of global climate by combining data from different climate models and runs, and regional daily data for the UK and Europe.

A greater chance of warmer, wetter winters and hotter, drier summers.

This was one of the headline results from UKCP18 shown by Prof Jason Lowe, Head of Climate Services for Government at the Met Office Hadley Centre. UKCP18 is an update from its predecessor, UKCP09, but with constraints from new observations and data from more climate models from around the world. The horizontal resolution of regional climate projections for the UK and Europe has increased from 25 km in UKCP09 to 12 km in UKCP18, with an even higher resolution (2.2 km) dataset coming out in summer 2019. UKCP18 results show that all areas of the UK are projected to experience warming, with greater warming in the summer than the winter. Summer rainfall is expected to decrease in the UK, whereas winter precipitation is expected to increase. However, when it rains in summer it may rain harder. Sea-level rise will continue under all greenhouse gas emission scenarios at all locations around the UK, impacting extreme water levels in the future.

Heat and health inter-connections are complex.

Prof Sarah Lindley, Professor of Geography at the University of Manchester, shared how UKCP18 could be used to study the health effects of climate change and urban heat in the UK. Many of us would remember how hot it was last summer; by 2050, hot summers of that type may happen every other year, even under a low greenhouse gas emission scenario. The most extreme heat-related hazards are in cities due to the Urban Heat Island effect (UHI), i.e. urban areas are often warmer than surrounding rural areas. For instance, Manchester’s UHI intensity (difference between urban and rural temperatures) has increased significantly since the late 1990s. By the end of this century, the city of Manchester is projected to be 2.4ºC warmer than its surrounding rural area in a UKCP09 medium emission scenario. With an aging population, UK’s vulnerability to heat may increase in the future. Both exposure and vulnerability to heat contribute to heat disadvantage. High-resolution UKCP18 data, together with social vulnerability maps of the UK, provide new opportunities to heat disadvantage and adaptation research.

European birds will need to shift about 550 km north-east under 3ºC warming.

The next speaker was Dr Olly Watts, Senior Climate Change Policy Officer for the RSPB, the largest nature conservation charity in the UK. Climate adaptation is an important aspect of nature conservation work, as it should be in everyone’s work. The Climatic Atlas of European Breeding Birds finds that not only will European birds shift 550 km under a likely 3ºC increase in global average temperature, but also a quarter of the bird species will be at high risk. Currently 5000 bird species are changing species distribution, and they face an uncertain future. The UKCP18 data of 2-4ºC warmer worlds could be used to derive qualitative strategies to build wildlife resilience against climate change. Adaptation strategies including informing nature reserve management will be in place across the RSPB conservation programme. The RSPB will also use UKCP18 data to raise public awareness of climate change.

Water demand can increase by 30% on a hot day.

Dr Geoff Darch, Water Resources Strategy Manager at Anglian Water, began his talk by highlighting the inherent climate vulnerabilities in water management in the East of England. It is a “water stressed” region that has low lying and extensive coastline, sensitive habitats, and vulnerable soils. On a hot day, water demand can go up by 30%. Climate change alone is expected to have a total impact of 55 Ml/day on water supplies in the region by 2045. A growing risk of severe drought means an additional impact of 26 Ml/day is expected, not to mention the impacts of population growth. The water industry is proactively adapting to these challenges by setting up plans to reduce leakage and install smart meters for customers. UKCP09 has been used extensively for climate change risk assessment across the water sector; the latest UKCP18 could be used in hydrological modelling, demand modelling, storm impact modelling, flood risk assessment, and sensitivity testing to assess the robustness of water resources management solutions under a range of climate scenarios.

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This blog was written by Cabot Institute member Dr Eunice Lo, from the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol. Her research focusses on climate change, extreme weather and human health.

Dr Eunice Lo