Tag: research

Journey to the heart of academic research

Posted on by janet.crompton
Many believe that keeping feelings, emotions, individualities and identities out of the field, the lab and the experiment is the golden rule that guarantees the validity of scientific work. From this perspective, good science requires neutrality and objectivity.
I’m not so sure, and today I want to share stories about the feelings and emotions I have lived with BIOsmart, a project where British, Colombian, Chilean, Irish and Spanish citizens work together, and tell you about how my emotions have made me reflect on what we may mean by good science.
María Paula delighted with her walking stick, lovingly crafted by one of our drivers.

 

I’ll start by saying that I am both Colombian and British. I have lived in the UK for 20 years now and when I have brought the UK team to do fieldwork in Colombia, I have felt pride and joy in having them taste our ajiaco, arepas, empanadas and aguardiente, and feast on the bounty of colours, textures and tastes of our fruit markets. I have felt pride too because my fellow Colombians always greet us with our traditional warmth and cheeky humour and this has put a finger on my nostalgia as an immigrant; for this warmth, the easiness with which we smile and become best friends in a matter of minutes, are what I most dearly miss when I am in England. But this nostalgia is mixed with gratitude, for the academic system in the UK has allowed me to return to Colombia and work for people I love. My identity matters and is at the heart of the passion and commitment with which I work.
These feelings are replenished at every farm visit we make. Coffee, freshly squeezed lemonade, home-made juices and yogurts, even hot chocolate made with home-grown cocoa beans are always waiting for us. We reciprocate this generosity and always arrive with fresh bread from the bakeries and meal by meal we learn about farmers’ lives in Caquetá and they learn about our own lives in the UK. This learning happens outside the lab, before we start counting plants and insects and before we begin the formal interview. This learning, and the feelings of respect, solidarity and gratitude that come with it, is inconspicuous in the data that will go into papers and presentations; but without it, our research practice would be less meaningful for all involved. This learning, imbued with emotions, is what gives real meaning to our work and I feel pride in the British team too, for I have seen them care about the farmers and our Colombian partners as much as I do. This shows in the friendships they have built and the character with which they work.  They have spent time with farmers’ children, they have kept in touch with farmers, drivers and colleagues. It shows too when we get up at the crack of dawn because we want to be as hard-working as the farmers and the Colombian team of scientists who are already waiting for us: we don’t want to be late and mess up their day. Good science cares, so we are out in the cars by six in the morning. I was moved by how this caring goes both ways. My aging body and my city lifestyle makes it tricky for me to walk in this hilly and boggy terrain. The drivers have become part of the team too and, one of them surprised me one day with a gift. He had chosen a branch from a guava tree, peeled it and polished it and crafted a beautiful walking stick that I have with me.
The farmers always showed us great hospitality, we even enjoyed hot chocolate made with homegrown cacao beans. Photo: María Paula.
But there have been other kinds of emotions too. Too often, farmers apologise for their lack of formal education and tell us how this makes them feel ignorant and inferior. This has made me feel angry, for I know this lack of formal education and this sense of inferiority are the result of a political, economic, social and cultural system, of global dimensions, that neglects and despises peasants. On every occasion I tell farmers that their level of formal education does not reflect their worth and I tell them how they are knowledgeable in ways that humble us. I strive for our conversations to return to them the dignity they are owed. This has made me think about objectivity and neutrality. If being objective is the commitment to understand what the real problem is and good science is about caring, then I don’t want to be neutral. I have wanted to spend more time with them and contribute beyond the knowledge we are all creating.
Enjoying some downtime in Florencia. Teamwork is at the heart of BioSmart.
Sometimes, these contributions have been real and immediate. After we finished the interview and we had become instant friends in the way Colombians do, a farmer told me they had come to the village that day not only to see me, but also to sell some chickens. They would have preferred to keep them for longer because then they would have sold for a better price. But they were short of money to pay the electricity bill and the only option was to sell the chickens. However, what they got was not enough and now, they did not have the chickens or the money to pay the bill. Chickens are income and food and electricity is essential. I gave them some of my own money. Some might think my gesture creates a culture of assistencialism, that what I ought to do is help them be more productive so they can improve their income and not have money problems. Perhaps, more cynical views would even question their story. I didn’t and even though my work is meant to help alleviate poverty in the long term, I felt I wanted to help there and then. Was I right to do so? I feel I was.
María Paula conducting an interview with a farmer in Caquetá, Colombia.

 

This questioning of neutrality has been fuelled by other emotions too. For example, one morning, I felt deep sorrow and broke into a deluge of tears as I listened to a woman deliver an improvised fifteen-minute speech. Standing tall by the porch of her house, she wanted to know if we were visiting the farm on behalf of the oil and mining companies. She told us how their presence makes her fear for the future of her children and despair for the effects that extractive projects are having on the land she grew up in. She also told us how some project implementers, not all, have discriminated her and refused to sign her up to agri-environmental initiatives because she is a woman. We were all moved by her courage and her eloquence, including her husband and her children. What a brave mother and wife you have, I told them. As we said goodbye, we had a long and tight hug and again, I felt that I need and I want to do more.
Sometimes this feeling comes with urgency. At the time of writing, my heart is worried about a man who is thinking that selling his land, the most pristine of all the farms I visited, is his only option because he is in debt.  The only way to earn a living is to have cows but he does not want to have cows: he would much rather look after the forest, but this does not provide him with a living. “Help me find a buyer”, he says, “but someone who cares for the forest just as I have”.
I feel rage for the injustices these people live in. I cannot and I don’t want to be neutral. I feel conflicted and wonder if I need to worry, for I am pondering how to be at once the researcher and the activist, the University employee and the solidarity campaigner. I want to help and, as I ponder how, I feel that what we mean by good science might be better practised from this place where my emotions and my research meet. I want to think my feelings and emotions articulate a goodness where impact is not only what comes at the end of the project, often in the shape of outputs or closure activities, but what touches and nurtures the lives of all involved from the beginning.
I want to think good science involves acknowledging emotions to the point of writing publicly about them. Vulnerability may be challenging, but embracing it enriches you as a person and as researcher: after all, one cannot be extricated from the other.
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This blog is by Cabot Institute member Dr María Paula Escobar-Tello. She is the Principal Investigator on the BioSmart project and leads the cultural geographical components. This blog has been reposted with kind permission from María Paula. View the original blog. View the blog in Spanish.
Visit the BioSmartAmazonia website https://www.biosmartamazonia.org/
María Paula Escobar-Tello

 

Equity, diversity and inclusivity at sea

Posted on by janet.crompton
In summer 2017 – for the first time that we know of! – all three of the main UK ships, the RRS Discovery (pictured, with Kate’s ICY-LAB science team!), the RRS James Cook and the RRS James Clark Ross were out at the same time on expeditions, all led by female chief scientists.
Today, we can celebrate a strong representation of women in sea-going science in the United Kingdom, providing positive role models and mentors to encourage and support early career female marine scientists. However, women continue to face challenges to their progression in their careers, especially those who are also members of other underrepresented groups. 

Dr Kate Hendry led a group of women from around the UK from a range of career stages and backgrounds, who are all active or recently active in sea-going research, with the aim of writing a discussion of equity, diversity and inclusivity (EDI) issues in UK marine science. The group has recently published an article in Ocean Challenge with a focus on both successes in gender equality over the last few decades and lessons learned for improving diversity of sea-going science further and more broadly into the future.

Some of the earliest female career marine scientists in the UK started off in fisheries research in the early twentieth century, including Rosa Lee (1884-1976), who was the first woman to graduate in Maths from Bangor University and the first woman to be employed by the Marine Biological Association. She worked at the Lowestoft Laboratory (that later became the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science, Cefas), and published highly-renowned articles including in Nature. “All of this, whilst never being allowed to step foot on a research vessel, and having to leave her employment in the civil service when she got married”, commented Dr Hendry.

Rosa Lee, one of the first female UK marine scientists, in a group of staff at the Marine Biological Association’s Lowestoft laboratory in 1907(Photo courtesy of Cefas)

Dr Hendry added: “As a science community, we’ve come a long way in terms of gender balance and representation, not only in the top science jobs but also in other roles at sea including crew and marine technicians. We wanted to document the history of how these changes happened, and whether any of the pathways to gender equity could be transferred to tackling other forms of underrepresentation in UK marine science, at all career levels”.

The article ends with some firm recommendations to the community to improve sea-going EDI into the future, including the formation of a special interest group by the UK marine science organisation, The Challenger Society, and guidance to the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) for additional training, financial support, and recognition.

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Cabot Institute member Dr Kate Hendry is an Associate Professor in the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol.

Dr Kate Hendry

 

 

Safeguarding sustainable future communities: Lessons from Covid-19

Posted on by janet.crompton
Volunteers packing shopping. Image credit: We Are Bristol
 
The Covid-19 pandemic has brought hardship to many people across the UK, both in terms of the direct health impacts of the virus and the economic and social consequences of lockdowns. However, it has also demonstrated the resilience of our communities, and the importance of strong social infrastructure in responding to crises. Within hours of the first lockdown being announced, community organisations took rapid action, with many completely shifting their models of service delivery to meet the changing needs of their communities. This extraordinary response has been one of the good news stories of the pandemic, as many more people and local governments have realised the value of services provided by community organisations. My research sought to build an understanding of the experience of the community sector in Bristol during the Covid-19 pandemic to determine what allowed them to coordinate such an effective response, and how they can be better supported to respond to future crises.  

Why study community resilience?

Climate change has made it more important to understand how we respond to major shocks and disasters, as they are likely to increase in both frequency and severity in future. While the physical infrastructure required to respond to different shocks – such as floods, heatwaves and pandemics – varies greatly, building strong social and community infrastructure strengthens resilience to many different events. A recent report from the national community network Locality discussed the case of Calderdale Council, which has faced three major flooding incidents in the last eight years. The knowledge, networks and partnerships built through coping with floods in the past made Calderdale more resilient and responsive to the Covid-19 crisis, despite being developed for a different purpose. Understanding the strengths and vulnerabilities of Bristol’s community infrastructure when exposed to a crisis is key to building long-term community resilience.

Community organisations in a crisis

To understand the strengths and weaknesses of community resilience in Bristol, I interviewed thirteen people working across the sector.

I found that community organisations were very well-placed to respond to this crisis. Those interviewed discussed how they could act quickly to meet community needs because their decisions weren’t subject to the same bureaucracy or hierarchical decision-making structure as local governments. The highly localised nature of community organisations also meant that they could deliver solutions and services that were tailored to the needs of the populations they served, like culturally appropriate meals or shopping for older residents.

Community organisations also had access to informal networks within their localities which allowed them to coordinate with local businesses, residents, and other voluntary organisations to deliver necessary services. In Easton, for example, there was coordination across community groups and businesses which allowed each organisation to focus on the service they were best placed to deliver, even if it meant ceding responsibility for their normal functions to another organisation who could deliver it more effectively. Up Our Street, for example, focused on providing resources for children, such as milk, nappies, and activity packs to their communities, identifying that this was a necessary role that they were well-placed to fill.  Community alliances were particularly effective at this coordination, especially those who had access to physical spaces to use as community hubs for service delivery.

There were, however, a number of barriers which community organisations faced. Every single interviewee from the community sector raised the importance of funding sources. Due to central government cuts in recent years, many organisations became reliant on traded income and fundraising to deliver their services, sources of income generation which disappeared quickly during the lockdown. This meant that community organisations had to furlough staff and work on reduced incomes when the need for their services was at an unprecedented high. In contrast, those organisations with access to flexible, long-term grant funding emphasised how valuable it was to  their response. A key message was that many organisations  may not survive to respond to the next crisis without more resilient funding models.

Effective communication with local government was also cited as a challenge. Many Bristolians, particularly vulnerable members of the population, did not have direct access to information about the evolving crisis and relied heavily on community organisations. Improving communication between local governments and citizens, particularly through faith-based organisations, such as gurdwaras, mosques, and churches was recommended. More generally, many organisations felt communication and coordination with local government needs to be improved in future, given the depth of local knowledge and networks such organisations can offer to help improve services.

Indeed, the most effective community responses were achieved where Bristol City Council sought to enable and support the existing work being undertaken by community organisations. For example, the City Council’s Can Do platform and  “We Are Bristol” helpline become important mechanisms for urgent recruitment of volunteers. BCC also removed a lot of superfluous red tape and bureaucracy, trusting organisations to act in the best interests of their communities and take greater responsibility. The Council became more reliant on the efforts of the community sector than before, and the trust built between them has provided community organisations with more “soft power” to influence decision-making. Continuing this trusting and enabling relationship will be key to recovery, and ensuring that community resilience is enhanced moving forward.

Key lessons

Building resilient community and social infrastructure is key to safeguarding Bristol’s sustainable future. Community organisations are vital first responders in a crisis and have the necessary networks and knowledge in their communities to understand and deliver what their communities need. By supporting these organisations, through promoting their long-term financial stability and including them in community decision-making, it is possible to create a more resilient Bristol which will be able to respond to any future shocks.

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This blog is written by Environmental Policy and Management MSc graduate Eveline Hall.

Eveline Hall

 

 

Welcome to our 2020 MScR cohort in Global Environmental Challenges!

Posted on by janet.crompton

September 2020 saw the arrival of the latest cohort on the MScR in Global Environmental Challenges. This year, we have students representing four Faculties, and six Schools; each with a unique independent research project that focuses on some of the most pressing challenges faced today.

With projects ranging from using chemistry to create clean air to artistic expressions of activism in Chile, we are delighted to introduce to you some of our new students below.

Harry Forrester

Can glacial flour stimulate N cycling in croplands? – School of Geographical Sciences

This research involves an investigation of the effects of glacial flour as a stimulant of microbial nitrogen cycling in cropland. Through this study, I aim to establish myself as a well-rounded Biogeochemist and explore interdisciplinary collaborations throughout the academic community. I hope to gain insight into environmental policy making, preparing me to enact effective change.

Lauren Prouse

An analysis into the ability of CMIP6 models reproducing the Sahelian droughts and what impact this has on their future climate predictions – School of Geographical Sciences

After completing my undergraduate dissertation here in the Geography department, I wanted to continue working on something similar. My undergraduate dissertation investigated the climatic impacts of the Great Green Wall of Africa – a forestry initiative implemented following the droughts across the Sahel region. Working with my supervisor Paul Valdes, we devised an idea of examining the ability of CMIP6 models to represent the Sahelian droughts of the 1970s and 80s, and whether their ability to do so affects their future climate change predictions for the Sahel. This is particularly important because the IPCC has recognised this region as a hotspot for the impacts of climate change, so researching potential future impacts will be useful for mitigation planning.

Dora Young

What would a “just transition” in Bristol look like? – School of Geographical Sciences

I’m a geography graduate from the University of Manchester. My academic interest areas are critical cartography and public participatory GIS. My experience studying Indigenous research methodologies in Australia and environmental humanities at undergraduate level also inspired me to develop research techniques that demonstrate a multiplicity of situated, embodied knowledges for democratic land use planning.

I’m excited to join the City Futures theme and its inspiring cohort. I hope to build on my skills of research design to produce a useful map-based participatory planning tool for Bristol and, potentially, other urban areas. It’s my intention map and visualise qualitative and quantitative spatial data, gathered as a collaborative community project, in order to inform both academic institutions and political governing bodies as they embark on ecological transitions and actualise shared futures.

I’m also interested in the diverse ways that people ‘read’ the messages expressed by their landscapes – natural and built – and how we form ‘cognitive maps’ of our surroundings. This is particularly interesting to me as we navigate radically shifting environments. I have some (limited) experience working across disciplines; my sister – a neuroscientist at the Charité University, Berlin – and I hosted a virtual spatial navigation workshop earlier this year. We explored the impacts of lockdown and modern life more generally on our spatial navigation capacities, cultural histories of navigation and how they relate to neural development, and how navigating can help combat eco-anxiety. We are currently working on a collaborative book chapter exploring the latter theme with two German authors; one GIS specialist and spatial anthropologist from the Universitaet Goettingen and a futures studies master from FU Berlin.

Fanny Lehmann

How is the global water cycle responding to climate change? – School of Geographical Sciences

I am a graduate mathematics student from the Ecole Normale Supérieure. I come from Grenoble, a city in the French Alps surrounded by mountains. I am naturally passionate about mountains, a place where climate change is so undeniable that it impacts our sporty lives. I see mathematics as a tool to model the world and help to predict its evolution. My Master’s by Research project focuses on the impact of climate change on the water cycle as part of the Global Mass project. I am delighted to start this year in such a vibrant community and hope to make the most of it to determine the research area of my PhD.

Helen Sheehan

Machine learning for wind flow modelling – School of Civil, Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering

I graduated from the University of Cambridge in 2016 with an MEng in Aerospace Engineering, and since then I’ve worked for a consultancy in Bristol as an engineer within the energy sector, primarily in nuclear power and offshore wind. I’m back at university to undertake Cabot’s MScR programme, with a project on “Machine Learning for Wind Flow Modelling”, which combines my interests in low carbon energy and software development. Although it’ll probably be a very different university experience for the first few months at least, I’m excited to take on this new challenge, gain new skills at the cutting edge of energy technology, and meet researchers from across the Cabot Institute!

Lauryn Jones

Eco-innovations for sustainable consumption: Bringing refill stations into leading supermarkets to reduce household plastic consumption – School of Management

During my time at Cabot I hope to gain lots of new insight into environmental challenges around the world and meet new people with innovative ideas. My personal research will be focussing on bringing refill facilities into supermarkets in order to reduce single use plastics, as well as looking at possible impacts the coronavirus pandemic may have had on people’s perception of the use of plastics.

Adam Chmielowski

Change: environmental, cultural, technological change and the stories of sustainable futures – School of Management

I’m thrilled to be starting my MScR at Cabot.  My research topic is “Change: environmental, cultural, technological change and stories of sustainable futures” and I’ll be exploring different ways of thinking about change, asking what forms of change are conceptualised in environmental campaigns and how effective they are in helping people transition to a more sustainable society.  I’m fascinated by the role of culture in enabling or constraining human behaviour, storytelling and the role of future visions to inspire action, and how you create change at a systemic or cultural, not just individual, level.  My research will run parallel to my day job which is running a strategy and insight agency called Starling (I’m awe-struck by murmurations!) where we help brands innovate and communicate better by analysing culture.  In the spirit of cross-disciplinary collaboration, I believe there is much more that the business world and academia can learn from each other to help tackle environmental challenges, so I hope I can help advance that effort.

Over the next year, we look forward to sharing their work and providing opportunities to mingle with the wider Cabot Institute community. Our very first cohort will also be graduating soon, so stay tuned to hear more about them and share in their success! 

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This blog was written by Cabot Institute MScR Coordinator, Jo Norris. You can start the Cabot MScR at any time of year and there are plenty of incredible earth-saving projects to dive into. Find out more on our website at bristol.ac.uk/cabot/postgraduate-opportunities/cabot-masters/

Research and teaching in the midst of climate crisis

Posted on by janet.crompton
Bristol Climate Strike September 2019. Image credit Amanda Woodman-Hardy.

I became a co-convenor of the PSA Environmental Politics sub-group in 2019, against the backdrop of the rise of Extinction Rebellion and the increasing impact of the environmental movement. The convening team decided to reflect this in our workshop on ‘Activism and Academia in an Age of Environmental Breakdown’ at Nottingham Trent which aimed to not only bring together activists and academics but to critically reflect on the intersection between the two and try to explore how to hold academic events in this time of climate crisis.

As anyone who’s organised an event knows, finding a convenient date is half the battle. Balancing the start of term dates for myself and the other co-convenors was difficult and the date of 20th September 2019 was one of the few that worked for us all. But surely holding an event on environmental activism on the date of the global climate strike was contradictory? After much discussion, we decided that the fit between the theme of the conference and the strike could provide a rich source of discussion and that we should try and explore this. So we arranged for the lunch break to include time for anyone who wanted to, to attend the demonstration being held in the nearby city centre with directions provided.

Some participants also mentioned that they would be attending the workshop as part of their strike action, with one participant wearing a strike arm-band. Registration was free and we were clear that people could attend for whatever time they could, to further support people coming along as part of their strike activities. Participating in a climate protest, whether by labelling attendance at the workshop as such or briefly joining the main demonstration, while at the same time critically analysing both the protest and the intersection of activism and academia blurred the objectivity of the workshop, to say the very least. But bringing our practice into the workshop and openly discussing how they intersected, in addition to ensuring that no activism was compulsory, grounded our discussions and prompted each participant to reflect on how they experienced the intersection of both their research and their action.

The current wave of climate action and the groups that are spearheading it, such as the school strike movement and Extinction Rebellion, are distinct in the way that they are driven by young activists. Initially, we recognised this through a panel on youth engagement, with excellent speakers such as Dr Sarah Pickard presenting their work on young people’s political activism. However, this felt disingenuous and was not representative of the movement nor the agency of the young activists driving it.

So we reached out to young climate activists around the globe and asked if they would like to record a video to be shown at the conference which explained why they got involved with the climate strike movement and how the networks they were part of were organised. (We took advice regarding data protection and gained the consent of their parents when necessary.) Hearing directly from these activists from across Europe and America brought balance to the panel, ensuring that we weren’t just discussing youth activism, but listening and responding to them and their work directly. This activist engagement was also reflected in the speakers we invited to the conference and the call for papers.

We wanted to ensure that activists and practitioners were included and highlighted this in both the name of the workshop and throughout. For example, the ‘Critical Reflections on Extinction Rebellion’ panel featured activists from the group as well as academics who study it, and representatives from a local wildlife NGO took part in another panel.

The NGOs represented were from Nottingham and the Midlands in part due to proximity to the conference venue but also because we wanted to reflect the context of the area we held the event in, to ‘think global, act local’. We endeavoured to match this with an engagement with the wider context of climate activism, with a discussion of activism and academic globally and in the Global South in particular. Deciding against a specific panel on this topic, we tried to reflect the global context throughout the day, such as including videos from young activists around the world and a specific reflection on this topic at the start of the roundtable led by a scholar of and from the Global South.

However keeping the balance between the local and the global was difficult, raising questions of whose voices are included and whose are heard.

Within the workshop, we wanted to reflect the growing trend of more inclusive academic conferences, a trend that is particularly prevalent within environmental scholarship. The roundtable at the end of the workshop was designed to facilitate this, with activities that paired up activists and academics for discussion and time for the group as a whole to talk together. This turned out to be one of the strongest aspects of the workshop – certainly, it was one of the most commented upon and more space for this discussion, even at the expense of time for the earlier papers, would I think have been welcomed.

Reflecting on the workshop now, while there are changes I would make, the attempt to not only bring together academics and activists but to embed that approach within the format of the day and its priorities was I felt worthwhile. To research and teach on environmental issues in the face of climate denialism and apathy as well as the increasing environmental collapse is a political act and we should recognise that in our forums.

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Dr Ashley Dodsworth, a lecturer in politics in SPAIS at the University of Bristol and co-convenor of the PSA Environment sub-group. Her research explores the intersection of the history of political thought and environmental politics, and environmental rights. She is co-editor of Environmental Human Rights: A Political Theory Perspective (Routledge, 2018). This blog was reposted with kind permission from the Centre for Environmental Humanities at the University of Bristol. View the original blog.

Ashley Dodsworth

World Water Day: How can research and technology reduce water use in agriculture?

Posted on by janet.crompton
Record breaking temperatures in 2018 led to drought in many European countries. Image credit Wikimedia Domain Mimikry11.

World Water Day draws attention to the global water crisis and addresses why so many people are being left behind when it comes to having access to safe water. The UN estimates that globally 80% of people who have to use unsafe and unprotected water sources live in rural areas. This can leave households, schools, workplaces and farms struggling to survive. On farms water is vital for the production of food and is used in a huge range of processes, including irrigation and watering livestock. In this blogpost I will lightly review the current issues around water in agriculture and highlight some exciting research projects that may offer potential solutions.

What is the water crisis?

The UN Sustainable Development Goal 6 is to ensure that all people have access to sustainable, safe water by 2030. Unfortunately, we’re a long way off achieving this goal as a recent report from UNICEF/WHO estimates that there are currently 2.1 billion people living without access to safe water in their homes and workplaces. Another report estimates that 71% of the global population experiences severe water scarcity during at least one month of the year. In recent years we have seen water risks increase, with severe droughts in Africa, China, Europe, India and the US. In sub-Saharan Africa, the number of record breaking dry months increased by 50% from 1980 to 2013. Unfortunately droughts, floods and rising sea levels are predicted to continue and become more unpredictable under climate change scenario models and as the global population continues to grow, there will be increasing demands on water supplies. Increases in water scarcity are likely to lead to increases in political and economic instability, conflict and migration.

Why is water important to agriculture?

In agriculture, water is vital for growing crops and sustaining livestock. Farmers use water to irrigate, apply pesticides and fertilizer and protect from heat and frost. This heavy reliance means that when water supplies run out, farmers are unable to effectively maintain their crops and livestock, leading to food insecurity. Drought stress can result in yield losses of 64% in rice, 50% in chickpea, 18 – 32% in potato. Drought has particularly devastating effects in tropical and sub-tropical regions, where climate change is predicted to have the biggest impact.

The amount of water it takes to produce food and drink products is pretty shocking. Beef production in particular is associated with high levels of water usage. It is estimated that the global average water footprint of a 150g beef burger is 2350 litres; despite producing just 5% of the world’s food calories, beef production is reported to create 40% of the water scarcity burden. Although there are big variations in the environmental impacts of beef farming, with grassland fed, rotational systems being less intensive than grain fed herds on deforested land.

Where does water used for agriculture come from?

The water that is used in agriculture comes from a range of sources, including surface and ground water supplies, rivers and streams, open canals, ponds, reservoirs and municipal systems. Globally, the FAO estimates that agriculture accounts for 70% of freshwater withdrawals, which is predominately used for irrigation. In many areas the high level of groundwater used for irrigation is unsustainable, leading to depletion. For instance, the OECD estimates that groundwater supplies 60% of India’s agricultural water needs but groundwater sources are suffering from depletion and pollution in 60% of states. A big problem is that irrigation is often highly inefficient; in the US the FAO estimates that the amount of irrigated water that is actually used by plants is only 56%. Large amounts of energy are also needed to withdraw, treat and supply agricultural water, leading to significant greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

What happens to agricultural water after use?

As well as depleting freshwater supplies, agriculture can also pollute them, with runoff containing large quantities of nutrients, antibiotics, growth hormones and other chemicals. This in turn has big affects on human health through contamination of surface and ground water with heavy metals, nitrate and pathogens and in the environment; it can cause algal blooms, dead zones and acidification of waterways. Combined these issues mean that better management of water in agriculture has huge potential for improving sustainability, climate resilience and food security, whilst reducing emissions and pollution.

What are the potential solutions?

Thankfully there are many innovative projects that are working to improve issues around water in agriculture. Below are a few examples that I find particularly promising.

How can technology help?

To reduce water wastage on farms, agri-technology is being developed whereby multiple wireless sensors detect soil moisture and evapotranspiration. The sensors feed this information to a cloud-based system that automatically determines precisely how much water to use in different parts of the field, leading to increased yields and saving water. Farmers can get water management recommendations via a smartphone app and the information automatically instructs irrigation systems. At a larger scale, these data systems can feed into a regional crop water demand model to inform decision-making on agricultural policies and management practices, and to provide early warnings of potential flood and drought risks.

Sensor that detects leaf moisture levels. Image credit: Wikimedia Domain Massimiliano Lincetto

Irrigation systems are also being made more efficient; one study found that simply changing from surface sprinklers to drip irrigation that applies water directly to plant roots through low-pressure piping, reduced non-beneficial water wastage by 76%, while maintaining yield production. In arid areas these systems can be used for a technique called partial root drying, whereby water is supplied to alternate side of the roots, the water stressed side then sends signals to close stomatal pores which reduces water lost through evapotranspiration.

These efficient precision irrigation systems are becoming cheaper and easier for farmers to use. However in tropical and sub-tropical areas, the technology can be difficult to apply smallholder farming, where there is often insufficient Internet connectivity, expertise, capital investment, and supply of energy and water. Several precision agriculture projects are working to overcome these challenges to promote efficient use of irrigation water, including in the semi-arid Pavagada region of India, the Gash Delta region of Sudan and São Paulo, Brazil. In Nepal, a Water Resources Information System has been established that collects data to inform river management, whereas in Bangladesh hundreds of solar-fuelled irrigation pumps have been installed that simultaneously reduce reliance on fossil fuels and reduce GHG emissions.

Hydroponic systems whereby plants are grown in water containing nutrients are becoming increasingly popular; the global market for hydroponics is projected to reach £325 million by 2020. Compared with land-based agriculture, hydroponics uses less land; causes less pollution and soil erosion and so these systems are less vulnerable to climate change. Critically they also reduce water use; once the initial water requirements are met, the closed-system recycles water and there is less evapotranspiration. The adoption of these systems is predicted to occur predominately in water stressed regions of the Middle East and Africa and in highly urbanised countries such as Israel, Japan and the Netherlands.

How can researching traditional approaches help?

It’s not just about agri-tech; there are relatively simple, traditional ways to tackle water issues in agriculture. To protect against drought, farmers can harvest and store rainwater during heavy downpours by building ponds and storage reservoirs. To reduce water wastage, farmers can improve the ability of soil to absorb and hold water through reducing tillage and using rotational livestock grazing, compost, mulch and cover crops. Wetlands, grasslands and riparian buffers can be managed to protect against floods, prevent waterlogging of crops and improve water quality. Increasingly these traditional methods valued and research is being done to optimise them. For instance a novel forage grass hybrid has been developed that is more resilient to water stress and can reduce runoff by 43 – 51% compared with conventional grass cultivars.

A small-scale farmer in Kenya who is harvest rainwater. Image credit: Wikimedia Domain Timothy Mburu.

How can crop and livestock breeding help?

In the past, crop and livestock varieties have been selected for high productivity. However, these varieties are often severely affected by changes in climate and extreme weather events such as drought and require high levels of water and nutrients. To improve resilience and sustainability, breeders increasingly need to also select for stress responses and resource use efficiency. In crops, drought resilience and water use efficiency is influenced by many traits, including root and shoot architecture, stomatal density and thickness of the waxy cuticle that covers leaves and reduces evapotranspiration. The complexity of these traits makes breeding crops for drought resilience challenging, as many different groups of genes need to be selected for. To deal with this, the International Rice Research Institute’s Green Super Rice project has been crossing high-yielding parent lines with hundreds of diverse varieties to produce new high-yielding varieties that require less water, fertilisers and pesticides. These varieties are now being delivered to farmers in countries across Asia and Africa. Similarly, climate change resilience is also vital for current and future livestock farming. Projects run by Professor Eileen Wall (SRUC) have identified novel traits and genes associated with drought and heat resilience in UK and African dairy cattle, which can be incorporated into breeding programmes.

What are the incentives?

Although these projects might sound promising, without incentives to drive their uptake it may take a long time for real impacts to come to fruition. Unfortunately, in some countries such as India there can be a lack of monetary incentives that would effectively enable farmers to take up new water management technology and practices. In the EU, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has allocated funds to support farmers in complying with ‘greening rules’ that improve sustainability, preserve ecosystems and efficient use of natural resources, including water. Farmers across the EU receive CAP payments for environmentally friendly farming practices, such as crop diversification and maintaining permanent grassland.

In many European countries, there is increasing consumer demand for sustainably farmed food products. This is driving large and small manufacturers to seek out sustainable suppliers and so farmers are incentivised to improve the sustainability of their farming practices so that they can be certified.  For instance the Sustainable Farming Assurance Programme requires farmers to follow good agricultural and environmental protection practices, including sustainable water use. In the coming years, more food products are likely to have water foot print labels that provide the consumer with information on the amount of water used during production and processing. This places considerable power in the hands of the consumer and large manufacturers are responding. For instance, by 2020 Kellogg has pledged to buy ten priority ingredients (corn, wheat, rice, potatoes, sugar and cocoa) only from farms that prioritise protecting water supplies, as well as using fertilizers safely, reducing emissions, and improving soil health. And Pepsico has created sustainable agriculture sourcing programmes that aim to help farmers improve water and soil resource management, protect water supplies, minimise emissions and improve soil health.

What can we do?

There are ways to take responsibility for reducing our own water footprints, including reducing meat and animal production consumption, reducing food wastage and buying sustainably farmed products. Finally, we can all get involved with communicating and promoting the importance of water in agriculture so that more people are aware of the issues. Head to the World Water Day website to find out about resources and events that may be happening near you.

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This blog is written by Caboteer Dr Katie Tomlinson, who recently completed her PhD at the University of Bristol on cassava brown streak disease. Katie is now an Innovation and Skills manager at the BBSRC and is running the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Innovation Club. Views presented in this blog are her own. You can follow Katie on Twitter: @KatieTomlinson4.

Dr Katie Tomlinson

 

On the lively materiality of soil: A Somali Drylands artistic collaboration

Posted on by janet.crompton
© Sage Brice, 2018.

The WIDER-SOMA project was a cross-disciplinary and multi-institution research collaborative project headed by Dr Katerina Michaelides at the University of Bristol, investigating the effect of warfare on dryland environments in Somalia. I was excited to be invited to join the project in its later stages as artist in residence, supported by a small grant from the Cabot Innovation Fund. As an artist-geographer, my work explores the potential of drawing as a research methodology. I am interested in the unexpected things that happen in cross-disciplinary encounters, and the hazy zones where categories and definitions begin to break down.

The brief was to produce an artwork responding to the range of research specialisms involved in the project, to celebrate the ‘liveliness’ both of the collaborative research processes, and of the Somali Drylands themselves. We wanted to push back against the idea of drylands as ‘dead spaces’, drawing on the knowledge of people who engage closely with these landscapes in different ways, and appreciate their rich and complex ecologies.

© Sage Brice, 2018

I took as my starting point the lively materiality of the soil itself – its vibrant colours, varied textures, and characteristic dispositions offered a tangible way of engaging with the remarkable diversity within the research site. I was prompted by a comment from Dr Marianna Dudley, head of Bristol’s Centre for Environmental Humanities, and a key contributor to the project:

I love the way the soil gets loose and wanders. When we had the exhibitions in London and Bristol we found that the soil got everywhere; even though it was displayed in petri dishes, and when it hadn’t been moved – still the soil got out.

The messy, wandering, sideways processes were what interested me: how did ideas and inspiration cross between researchers in different disciplines, or between researchers and the materials they encountered? Could I, as an artist, enrich, facilitate, or make tangible those processes?

I decided to create two large drawings with the earth pigments, using layers of imagery relating to the different strands of research, and letting them overlap and disrupt each other on the surface of the paper. I was interested in everything – in my e-mail to participants I asked for

photographic imagery of microbial life, soil colour-charts, scribbles and sketches from the margins of your notebooks, graphs and maps, snapshots, postcards from sites you visited, random finds, slide presentations, logos and letterheads, gifts and mementos – anything and everything.

Thus I set out in a quest for incidental imagery – seeking out the visual traces of process, and looking to see where they might differ from the formalised imagery of presentations.

© Sage Brice, 2018.

I met and interviewed many of the researchers involved in the project, to hear about their specific strand of the research, and what about it had been most animating – but also to explain more clearly what I was after. To scientists used to presenting only clean, clear, and coherent findings, it seemed counterintuitive to ask for scribbles, notes, sketches, and first attempts. Many of the processes were more fully digitised or highly sanitised than I had imagined – in some cases there was little to work with visually, and I instead sourced imagery from internet searches, based on keywords the researchers helped to define.

© Sage Brice, 2018.

Once I had collected what I needed, I set about sifting through the material, sampling and experimenting with the soils themselves as pigments, feeling my way into an encounter with the various strands of material and practice. Working with the soils was a joy – as pigments they produced a richly clouded medium, with a range of textures and tones. I worked vertically with a water-based medium, allowing the pigments to dribble and disturb each other. Some were sandy or gritty and difficult to work – others sleek, fluid, and vibrant. I used each soil to draw imagery relating to its source of origin, and layered them over each other by colour to differentiate the strands of the work.

© Sage Brice, 2018.

The two drawings are arranged to echo and contrast with one another – a digitally plotted map against a hand-drawn one; the frenetic lines of cyanobacteria and a delicate web of roads, the sharp line of a mounted machine gun and a goat’s left horn. The drawings are large; seen close up the textures of the soils are on an equal standing with the content of the imagery.

The different threads of the project come together here in a messy collision – sometimes speaking to each other, sometimes disturbing each other. As a practice-based researcher with a special interest in cross-disciplinary collaboration, I am interested in how art processes can help to draw unexpected connections and enliven relations across conventional disciplinary divides. Coming in towards the end of a project, my role here was to look back at what had been done, to draw out and enliven an account of the collaborative process. I believe this way of working is important, and has a lot to offer for building connection, right from the start. Teasing out resonances between different disciplines of practice can help encourage people to work together and to step outside their comfort zones, in order to think afresh with new tools and approaches. I learned a lot about diverse kinds of research from interviewing the different participants – but what they consistently valued most from the process was what they learned from encountering and learning to understand each other’s work.

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Sage Brice, Artist In Residence with the support of the Cabot Institute Innovation Fund. Sage is an internationally exhibiting artist and an SWW DTP doctoral student in human geography at the University of Bristol. More on her work can be found at Sagebrice.com. Her doctoral research blog is cranecultures.wordpress.com.

All images © Sage Brice, 2018.

Sage Brice

 

Taking basic research to application: Using light quality to improve herb growth

Posted on by janet.crompton
Coriander has a distinctive flavour and is popular in dishes such as curry. (Image By Deeptimanta (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons)

Coriander is the UK’s top-selling culinary herb, an industry worth £18 million a year. However, maintaining high standards of product quality is expensive and can lead to lots of plants being rejected before they make it to supermarket shelves. One of the key objectives for the potted herb industry is the production of compact plants with dark green leaves, but the plants that consumers end up with often do not conform with this ideal and can appear leggy and weak.

Plants compete for light by growing taller

Plants go to extraordinary lengths to maximise their light capture for photosynthesis. When plants grow close together however, they compete for resources and one resource that becomes limited in closely spaced plants is light due to mutual shading.

Shade has a negative impact on a plant’s health as it limits the light that a plant can use for photosynthesis. But unlike animals, which can move to new areas once space, water or food becomes limited, plants are immotile and have evolved unique strategies to compete for and maximise light capture. Chief among these is the shade avoidance syndrome. Incredibly, plants anticipate that they are at risk of being shaded even before they actually are shaded through the detection of local light quality – the depletion of red and blue light and the relative enrichment of longer wavelengths of light due to the absorption and reflection properties of vegetation. The shade avoidance syndrome is triggered in response to this change in light quality and the most dramatic changes in plant form involve the elongation of stems and the raising of leaves so as to move light capturing organs into sunlight.

Elongation does have drawbacks however – resources are diverted away from seed, chlorophyll and leaf production; there is also an increased risk of lodging (where plants fall over due to over-elongation making them unable to support their organs), which puts a limit on how densely we can plant crops before they over-compete with each other and it impacts yields.

UV-B suppresses elongation

On the other hand, plants have mechanisms in place to prevent over-elongation. These are often related to light-quality as well and one such mechanism is the sensing of UV-B wavelengths.

Classical Ultra-Violet research on plants has focused on the damaging effects that this shorter wavelength, higher energy light can have on DNA, or cell structure through production of reactive oxygen species. These UV-B wavelengths are beyond our visible range, but plants have specific photoreceptors that can detect UV-B and trigger a signaling cascade that will lead to the accumulation of sun screening compounds as well as architectural changes. Indeed, it is now clear that the plant responses to UV-B are not only a reaction to UV-B damage, but also a specific response to the sensing of UV-B (read more on this on the UV4Plants society website).

A finding that emerged from our laboratory in Bristol was that the elongation that plants exhibited in crowded conditions could be suppressed with the addition of UV-B to their light conditions (Hayes et al., 2014). UV-B is a component of direct sunlight, so an interpretation of this adaptation is that plants use UV-B as a signal that they are in direct sunlight and hence no longer need to elongate to escape shade.

Applying our research to the glasshouse

Armed with this new knowledge of plant responses to light, we are collaborating with a major potted herb grower to improve their product quality. A problem with glasshouse grown coriander in the winter months is that they grow long and spindly. Often these herbs are planted densely with around 60 seedlings per pot – conditions that are conducive to shade avoidance. Short days and cloud cover during winter further contribute to over-elongation. To compound this, many materials used in glasshouse construction such as glass or clear acrylic filter out UV-B radiation. Thus, plants growing in these conditions are no longer receiving the UV-B brake on elongation that they would be if they were growing outdoors. If we restore this brake by using artificial UV-B light sources then we could solve this problem. We’ve started trialing UV-B treatments this summer and early results look promising. However, we need to wait until winter to collect our most informative data as in summer, with bright and long days, coriander plants grow far more compact than in winter.

Both pots were planted at the same density, the coriander on the left were grown in normal conditions while the coriander on the right were supplemented with UV-B radiation.

Hayes S, Velanis CN, Jenkins GI, Franklin KA. UV-B detected by the UVR8 photoreceptor antagonises auxin signalling and plant shade avoidance. Proc Natl Acad U.S.A. 2014. 111(32):11894-9

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Donald Fraser who is a PhD student in the Department of Life Sciences at the University of Bristol, he is studying plant responses to light and the circadian clock.

Sharing routine statistics must continue post-Brexit when tackling health and climate change

Posted on by janet.crompton

Post-Brexit vote, we are posting some blogs from our Cabot Institute members outlining their thoughts on Brexit and potential implications for environmental research, environmental law and the environment.  
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It has been argued that one of the EU’s major contributions has been its legislation regarding environmental protection. Some of these bear directly on human health (for example, concerning air pollution levels). Looking forwards, moves to adapt and mitigate the effects of climate change may be greatly facilitated by sharing data on emerging trends across Europe.

An excellent example is provided by analysis carried out on “excess winter deaths” across Europe. Every country in the world displays seasonal patterns of mortality whereby more deaths occur in winter than at other times of year. However the extent of this excess varies between countries even within Europe. Intuitively one might have expected the excess to be greater in countries where winter temperatures are more extreme, yet this is not so. Healy (2003) used data from 14 European countries to demonstrate that in 1988-97, the relative Excess Winter Deaths Index (EWDI) was greatest for Portugal, where the mean winter temperature was highest. Conversely Finland with the lowest mean winter temperature showed the lowest EWDI. Data on mortality were available from the United Nations Statistics Databank and the World Bank, as well as some macro-economic indicators, but Healy also availed himself of the European Community Household Panel survey on socioeconomic indicators and housing conditions. This revealed that high EWDI was associated with lower expenditure on public health per head of population, as well as income poverty, inequality, deprivation, and fuel poverty. Furthermore, several indicators of residential thermal standards appeared to carry influence, whereby countries where houses had better insulation experienced lower EWDI.

A similar study was reported in 2014 by Fowler et al, partly as an update of Healy’s work, this time on 31 countries across Europe for the years 2002-11. The same geographic pattern still seemed to be present, with southern European countries faring worse in terms of winter deaths. However a few countries such as Greece, Spain and Ireland demonstrated a reduction in their EWDI. It is possible that Healy’s study had highlighted the need for improvement in those countries. All 27 countries who by that time were members of the European Union were included in analysis, and use was made of the Eurostat database.

In view of the projected increases in global temperature in coming decades, it might be hoped that the problem of excess deaths in winter will gradually disappear from Europe. Yet the greater susceptibility of warmer European countries to winter deaths compared with colder countries suggests such an assumption may be mistaken. It will be important for carefully collected routine data to be analysed, to investigate any changes in the patterns previously seen in Europe.

My colleagues and I were led to consider whether relatively low temperatures were more threatening to older people than absolute temperature level, and whether this might hold for individuals, as well as at a national level as highlighted by Healy’s and Fowler et al’s studies. We carried out analyses of two European cohort studies, of around 10,000 people aged 60 or over, followed over 10 years. Using daily temperature data for the localities of where these participants lived, we investigated weather patterns experienced by those who suffered major heart attacks and strokes. There was some evidence that cold spells (cold in relation to the month of the year) increased people’s risk over a 3-4 day period. We hope to replicate this finding in other datasets.

Reflecting on the data used by Healy and Fowler et al, it is noticeable that most (though not all) came from EU countries. Some of the data in Healy’s study was held by the United Nations or World Bank. Yet the Eurostat database was a major contributor to these enlightening analyses. Eurostat was established as long ago as 1953, initially to meet the requirements of the Coal and Steel Community. Over the years its task has broadened, and when accessed on 29 June 2016 displayed detailed comparative data on many domains including aspects of health.

It would be deeply disappointing as well as surprising if the UK were in future to withhold such valuable information, or conversely if such pan-European data were to become unavailable to UK-based researchers. This would seem unlikely, as Eurostat seems to draw upon data from EFTA nations as well as the EU, and advertises its data as freely available. It behoves the UK research community to continue to use these valuable data in a collaborative way with EU-based partners, and also to encourage continuing provision of UK data so that our EU-colleagues (both academics and policymakers) may benefit from this common enterprise.

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This blog is by Professor Richard Morris, from the University of Bristol’s School of Social and Community Medicine.  Richard’s research focuses around statistics applied to epidemiology, primary care and public health research.
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