April 2020 – Cabot Institute for the Environment blog

Predicting the hazards of weather and climate; the partnering of Bristol and the Met Office

Posted on April 22, 2020April 4, 2023 by janet.crompton

Image credit Federico Respini on Unsplash

When people think of the University of Bristol University, or indeed any university, they sometimes think of academics sitting in their ivy towers, researching into obscurities that are three stages removed from reality, and never applicable to the world they live in. Conversely, the perception of the Met Office is often one of purely applied science, forecasting the weather; hours, days, and weeks ahead of time. The reality is far from this, and today, on the rather apt Earth Day 2020, I am delighted to announce a clear example of the multidisciplinary nature of both institutes with our newly formed academic partnership.

This new and exciting partnership brings together the Met Office’s gold standard weather forecasts and climate projections, with Bristol’s world leading impact and hazard models. Our partnership goal is to expand on the advice we already give decision makers around the globe, allowing them to make evidence-based decisions on weather-related impacts, across a range of timescales.

By combining the weather and climate data from the Met Office with our hazard and impact models at Bristol, we could, for instance, model the flooding impact from a storm forecasted a week ahead, or estimate the potential health burden from heat waves in a decade’s time. This kind of advanced knowledge is crucial for decision makers in many sectors. For instance, if we were able to forecast which villages might be flooded from an incoming storm, we could prioritise emergency relief and flood defenses in that area days ahead of time. Or, if we projected that hospital admissions would increase by 10% due to more major heatwaves in London in the 2030s, then decision makers could include the need for more resilient housing and infrastructure in their planning. Infrastructure often lasts decades, so these sorts of decisions can have a long memory, and we want our decision makers to be proactive, rather than reactive in these cases.

While the examples I give are UK focussed, both the University of Bristol and the Met Office are internationally facing and work with stakeholders all over the world. Only last year, while holding a workshop in the Caribbean on island resilience to tropical cyclones; seeing the importance of our work the prime minister of Jamaica invited us to his residence for a celebration. While I don’t see this happening with Boris Johnson anytime soon, it goes to show the different behaviours and levels of engagement policy makers have in different countries. It’s all very well being able to do science around the world, but if you don’t get the culture, they won’t get your science. It is this local knowledge and connection that is essential for an international facing partnership to work, and that is where both Bristol and the Met Office can pool their experience.

To ensure we get the most out of this partnership we will launch a number of new joint Bristol-Met Office academic positions, ranging from doctoral studentships all the way to full professorships. These positions will work with our Research Advisory Group (RAP), made up of academics across the university, and be associated with both institutes. The new positions will sit in this cross-disciplinary space between theory and application; taking a combined approach to addressing some of the most pressing environmental issues of our time.

As the newly appointed Met Office Joint Chair I will be leading this partnership at Bristol over the coming years, and I welcome discussions and ideas from academics across the university; some of the best collaborations I’ve had have come from a random knock on the door, so don’t be shy in sharing your thoughts.

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This blog is written by Dr Dann Mitchell – Met Office Joint Chair and co-lead of the Cabot Institute for the Environment’s Natural Hazards and Disaster Risk research.
You can follow him on Twitter @ClimateDann.

Dann Mitchell

Frozen in time: reflections on a PhD and the history of Antarctica

Posted on April 20, 2020April 4, 2023 by janet.crompton

In March 2020, the third and final instalment of my PhD research made its way into Climate of the Past. In that article, I do my best to synthesise all I learnt over 5 years about an event that occurred 34 million years ago called the Eocene-Oligocene Transition. (Just so we are all on the same page: palaeoclimate scientists are interested in this period of the Earth’s history as it is when the first major Antarctic Ice Sheet appeared; before then Antarctica was warm and at least partially forested.)

An image of what Antarctica might have looked like at the onset of the Eocene-Oligocene Transition.

Four and a half years ago I wrote a piece for the Cabot Institute Blog about using a climate model to understand this point in the Earth’s history, and how many questions remained in our understanding. Why was the Earth so hot beforehand? What caused it to cool and eventually for Antarctica to glaciate? What other important changes would have occurred around the world at this time? At the time, I focussed particularly on the latter question.

The more time I spent trying to answer some of these questions, predictably (as is the way with science), the more complex some of them became. In the end, for my own peace of mind, I simply tried to bring together as much information as I could from lots of different sources to try to create a picture with some sort of clarity. I focussed on the high latitude Southern Hemisphere, because that is where a lot of the action was occurring at the Eocene-Oligocene Transition and it is also where models potentially have some difficulties in reproducing the climate.

To build up this picture, I used multiple climate model simulations of the period from two different modelling groups and compared these to the biggest dataset of proxy records of Southern Hemisphere climate 34 million years ago that I could compile by myself. Just reading and compiling all of the data from papers took me around a year. Not solidly (I had lots of other things to do too), but even still, reading papers solidly is very difficult in my opinion. Synthesising all of that different information into something coherent in my head is also something that I cannot force to happen quickly. It comes when it is ready.

Some of the complied proxy data for the high latitude Southern Hemisphere the Eocene-Oligocene Transition included in Kennedy-Asser et al. (2020).

In the end for this paper, I generated no primary data myself. It is all secondary data, either provided by other researchers I work with or taken from this very slow and lengthy review of scientific literature. Maybe, back at the start, that is not how I had pictured the finale of my thesis might look. Maybe the plan was to build up to some exceptional new result that I discovered, with data I produced with my own hands. But that wasn’t the case and, to be honest, I think it is better the way it is. Science is, and should be, a collaborative effort. In the spirit of this, I put all of the data I compiled and used, including all of my analysis scripts and detailed notes of where I obtained secondary data, up on the Open Science Framework. This way I hope the science can keep collaborating and continue growing.

Two thirds of my thesis were based on ‘my own’ data, messing around with a climate model, trying out new ideas, seeing if anything revolutionary popped out. This was really important too: for me to grow as a researcher, to learn about how the model works and to try to generate some outside-the-box ideas. Occasionally, of course, something truly revolutionary will be discovered. In the end, however, my conclusion is that model results often lack meaning by themselves: they need observations or proxy records to go with them to provide some sort of truth of what really happened, whether that is outside right now or 34 million years ago.

My new paper finds very similar things about why the Earth changed so much at the Eocene-Oligocene Transition to earlier research carried out nearly 20 years ago. It doesn’t challenge or rewrite everything we know, but that’s okay. The main scientific conclusion from my paper is that incorporating all of this data is actually essential to coming to the same conclusion as the research from many years ago. Without the inclusion of the boring, extensive data review, I might have quickly, excitedly jumped to a different conclusion that, on balance, seems less likely to be correct.

Much like this paper brings together different existing scientific data to compliment research built up over many years, it also brings together my own work and thoughts. It took many years, but it wouldn’t make sense to rush it: the conclusions take a bit of time, even if all of the data and answers are already out there.

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Alan Kennedy-Asser, a Research Associate at the School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol. You can follow Alan on Twitter @EzekielBoom.

Alan Kennedy-Asser

Teach for the Future: Greening the national curriculum

Posted on April 1, 2020March 31, 2023 by janet.crompton

Do you feel like you learnt enough about climate change in school? Most likely, you didn’t as only 44% in a national survey of students felt like they had. If you think that’s disgraceful than I have good news for you. In the last few months the National Union of Students (NUS) launched a partner charity called Students Organising for Sustainability (SOS). SOS’s first campaign is ‘Teach the Future’ which aims to incorporate sustainability into the wider English curriculum instead of the topic being squeezed into either Geography or Science. The campaign includes the first ever legislation to be drafted by pupils and students: The Climate Emergency Education Bill!

The Climate Emergency Education Bill has extensive demands from students across the UK for sustainability to be included in all parts of their education, as well as a guide for supporting teachers and student voices. There’s even proposed money earmarked for making educational buildings net-zero carbon. Here’s an excerpt from the Bill’s cover that explains all of the demands in a bit more detail:

A government commissioned review into how the whole of the English formal education system is preparing students for the climate emergency and ecological crisis (in the gift of the Secretary of State);
Inclusion of the climate emergency and ecological crisis in teacher training and a new professional teaching qualification (in the gift of the Secretary of State);
An English Climate Emergency Education Act that:

obligates education providers to teach the climate emergency and ecological crisis, and to have a member of their leadership team responsible for it;
provides new funding for: the upskilling of existing teachers and lecturers; development of teaching resources; vocational centres of excellence on low carbon skills; establishing youth voice climate boards; more youth-led climate and environmental social action; support with eco-anxiety;
requires, and provides new funding, to ensure all new state-funded educational buildings are net-zero from 2022, and all existing state-funded educational buildings are net-zero by 2030.

Emma and I were lucky enough to win a competition and get spots on the exclusive guest list for the launch of the Bill at Parliament on the 26 February 2020! We met up with the 46 students aged 13-26 in Parliament Square for photos before heading into the main event at Parliament. The reception was filled with students, representatives from environmental and educational charities, and MPs. We spoke with everyone, advocating for the Bill, before stopping to watch the speeches. Speeches were given by students, Parliamentarians, and educational leaders all emphasizing the urgent need for educating pupils across the nation about the climate emergency and its effects. Interestingly, most of the speakers emphasised the need for the social and economic effects of climate change to be included in the curriculum alongside the environmental. As Emma and I are quite ‘in the know’ about the devastating social effects of climate change it was good to be reminded that not everyone does. We left the event feeling inspired and ready to tackle sustainability challenges in Bristol and beyond!

If you want to support the Teach for the Future campaign write to your MP and ask them to help make the Bill into law.

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This blog was written by Anya Kaufman, a Sustainability masters student at the University of Bristol.

Lab efficiency: Towards a greener future

Posted on April 1, 2020March 31, 2023 by janet.crompton

The Laboratory Efficiency Assessment Framework 2020 (LEAF) marks the University of Bristol’s move to a greener future. Following on from the University’s ‘climate emergency’ declaration and 2030 carbon neutrality pledge, we’ve set a new ambition for 100% Green Lab Accreditation and institutional LEAF. This will make us the first University in the world to achieve this.

Labs impact the environment, in fact they have a greater environmental impact than offices by at least five times. They use more water and energy, produce larger quantities of waste and generally use more resources. In order to tackle this ever-growing problem LEAF was created with lab users in mind and sustainable thinking at the forefront. LEAF is an innovative tool used to drive sustainability and efficiency within STEMed labs.

In 2019 the LEAF national pilot took place involving 16 national Higher Education Institutions, including the University of Bristol. To gain LEAF accreditation each participating lab must meet a set of criteria to achieve Bronze, Silver or Gold accreditation. Through LEAF, each lab’s carbon and financial savings can be recorded as they progress.

The LEAF criteria cover all environmental aspects of the lab including circular economy and waste, procurement, business travel, equipment efficiency and chemical management. In addition to this, the criteria also include research quality, addressing international issues regarding the ‘reproducibility crisis’. LEAF differs from the previous Green Labs Initiative as it includes metrics that enable us to quantify tangible environmental and financial savings so that we can measure real time changes in line with the University’s 2030 carbon neutrality goals.

Research councils and funding bodies are also collaborating with the Higher Education Institutions taking part in LEAF with an aim for inclusion in relevant research grant proposals within two to three years.

The LEAF accreditation is designed for academic groups or facilities rather than whole departments and involves the technical community, students and research staff.

Benefits of taking part in LEAF

Reduces utility costs and our environmental footprint
Provides the opportunity for direct savings through our financial incentive schemes
Ensures health and safety compliance within labs
Increases research efficiency
Provides recognition for individual labs and the University on a national stage
Enables a bottom-up sustainability movement
Aligns with our commitment to the Global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
Integrates different labs and departments
Strengthens relationships between Estates, lab users and other stakeholders
Aligns your research with the University strategy and Bristol Futures
Provides chances of gaining additional research funding
A selling point for prospective students
Inter-lab and inter-departmental benchmarking
Provides practice-based learning experiences that improve professional skills and employability
Improves student experience via volunteering opportunities as Laboratory Efficiency Assessment Volunteers (LEAVs)
Creates a better understanding within our community of our science buildings and operations

How LEAF works

After signing-up to LEAF, participants are sent the LEAF Framework – an electronic workbook with a set of easy-to-implement actions. For each accreditation (Bronze, Silver and Gold), participants need to fulfil certain criteria. The workbook provides useful links to help achieve the criteria and information on why these actions are important for improving lab sustainability.

Completing Bronze accreditation should only take an average of five hours, as most of our labs will already be running to Bronze standards. As you progress through Silver and Gold, criteria become more challenging and include categories such as minimising the amount of single-use plastic your lab uses.

There are also several special awards: Environmental Improvement, Environmental Hero, Innovation for Engagement and Community Action.

Throughout LEAF, participants are supported by the Green Labs Team and student LEAF volunteers (LEAVs), who have received environmental audit training. On submission of workbooks, laboratory audits can be organised, led by LEAVs. LEAF aims to improve student experience by providing volunteering opportunities and training. Alternatively, teams can also be audited by staff from Campus Division, or by peer assessment if they wish. On successful completion of the workbook and audit, labs will receive green accreditation status.

LEAF closes 13 November 2020, but teams can submit workbooks and complete audits at any point during the year, note workbooks can be submitted multiple times.

So, if you’re a Technician or academic and aren’t already actively involved in LEAF 2020, sign up now! If you’re a student and you’d like to volunteer with LEAF then sign up here.

This is an exciting time for Sustainability and especially for our University, being the first institution in the UK to declare a climate emergency and the first in the world to aim for 100% LEAF accreditation in all STEMed labs!

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This blog is written by Rachael Ward and Anna Lewis from the University of Bristol’s Sustainability Team.