Enhancing engagement with community sector organisations working in sustainable waste management: a case study

Voluntary and community sector organisations are increasingly being viewed as key agents of change in the shifts towards the concepts of resource efficiency and circular economy, at the community level. Using a meta-analysis and questionnaire surveys across three towns in the East Midlands of England, namely Northampton, Milton Keynes and Luton, this study aimed to understand public engagement with these organisations. The findings suggest that these organisations play a significant and wide-spread role, not only with regard to sustainable environmental management, but also a social role in community development and regeneration. The surveys indicated that there were generally high levels of awareness of the organisations and strong engagement with them. Clothes were the items most donated. Key reasons for engagement included the financial value offered and the perception that it helped the environment. However, potential limitations in future public engagement were also determined and recommendations for addressing these suggested

Are advisory services ‘fit for purpose’ to support sustainable soil management? An assessment of advice in Europe

This assessment examines the extent to which advisory services are able to address practitioners (primarily farmers) current and emerging knowledge needs about sustainable soil management (SSM) in Europe. The assessment is structured around the following components: the context of advice (policy, market, socio economic conditions, privatisation of advisory systems); the challenges that SSM presents for advice; the current and emerging practitioner knowledge needs and the existing structure and function of advisory services for SSM. The analysis reveals fragmented policy and advisory services, paralleled by the multi-scale character of SSM and a diverse audience for advice. The challenges and opportunities this complex arena presents are analysed and suggestions made for achieving more effective advisory services for SSM, together with examples of existing approaches

Urban and river flooding: Comparison of flood risk management approaches in the UK and China and an assessment of future knowledge needs

Increased urbanisation, economic growth, and long-term climate variability have made both the UK and China more susceptible to urban and river flooding, putting people and property at increased risk. This paper presents a review of the current flooding challenges that are affecting the UK and China and the actions that each country is undertaking to tackle these problems. Particular emphases in this paper are laid on (1) learning from previous flooding events in the UK and China, and (2) which management methodologies are commonly used to reduce flood risk. The paper concludes with a strategic research plan suggested by the authors, together with proposed ways to overcome identified knowledge gaps in flood management. Recommendations briefly comprise the engagement of all stakeholders to ensure a proactive approach to land use planning, early warning systems, and water-sensitive urban design or redesign through more effective policy, multi-level flood models, and data driven models of water quantity and quality

Fit for purpose and fit for the future? An evaluation of the UK’s new flood reinsurance pool

Flood Re is widely hailed as an innovative approach to disaster risk insurance. This paper offers a mixed-methods evaluation of the new pool, asking whether it is “fit for purpose” and “fit for the future”. The investigation considers the roles of the public and private sectors, risk modelling and risk communication, technical underwriting, distributional aspects and the behavioural implications of Flood Re, particularly with regards to risk reduction and prevention. The paper concludes that the new pool is a transitional reinsurance arrangement that supports the private insurance market and secures affordability of flood insurance in the UK through premium subsidies. However, this approach is likely to come under pressure in the face of rising flood risk as it fails to incentivize flood risk management and risk reduction efforts

The availability of land for perennial energy crops in Great Britain

This paper defines the potentially available land for perennial energy crops across Great Britain as the first component of a broader appraisal undertaken by the ‘Spatial Modelling of Bioenergy in Great Britain to 2050’ project. Combining data on seven primary constraints in a GIS reduced the available area to just over 9 M ha (40% of GB). Adding other restrictions based on land cover naturalness scores to represent landscape considerations resulted in a final area of 8.5 M ha (37% of GB). This distribution was compared with the locations of Miscanthus and SRC willow established under the English Energy Crop Scheme during 2001–2011 and it was found that 83% of the planting fell within the defined available land. Such a correspondence provides confidence that the factors considered in the analysis were broadly consistent with previous planting decisions

A conceptual framework for negotiating public involvement in municipal waste management decision-making in the UK

The technical expertise that politicians relied on in the past to produce cost-effective and environmentally sound solutions no longer provides sufficient justification to approve waste facilities. Local authorities need to find more effective ways to involve stakeholders and communities in decision-making since public acceptance of municipal waste facilities is integral to delivering effective waste strategies. This paper presents findings from a research project that explored attitudes towards greater levels of public involvement in UK waste management decision-making. The study addressed questions of perception, interests, the decision context, the means of engagement and the necessary resources and capacity for adopting a participatory decision process. Adopting a mixed methods approach, the research produced an empirical framework for negotiating the mode and level of public involvement in waste management decision-making. The framework captures and builds on theories of public involvement and the experiences of practitioners, and offers guidance for integrating analysis and deliberation with public groups in different waste management decision contexts. Principles in the framework operate on the premise that the decision about ‘more’ and ‘better’ forms of public involvement can be negotiated, based on the nature of the waste problem and wider social context of decision-making. The collection of opinions from the wide range of stakeholders involved in the study has produced new insights for the design of public engagement processes that are context-dependent and ‘fit-for-purpose’; these suggest a need for greater inclusivity in the case of contentious technologies and high levels of uncertainty regarding decision outcomes

Combining two national‐scale datasets to map soil properties, the case of available magnesium in England and Wales

Given the costs of soil survey it is necessary to make the best use of available datasets, but data that differ with respect to some aspect of the sampling or analytical protocol cannot be combined simply. In this paper we consider a case where two datasets were available on the concentration of plant‐available magnesium in the topsoil. The datasets were the Representative Soil Sampling Scheme (RSSS) and the National Soil Inventory (NSI) of England and Wales. The variable was measured over the same depth interval and with the same laboratory method, but the sample supports were different and so the datasets differ in their variance. We used a multivariate geostatistical model, the linear model of coregionalization (LMCR), to model the joint spatial distribution of the two datasets. The model allowed us to elucidate the effects of the sample support on the two datasets, and to show that there was a strong correlation between the underlying variables. The LMCR allowed us to make spatial predictions of the variable on the RSSS support by cokriging the RSSS data with the NSI data. We used cross‐validation to test the validity of the LMCR and showed how incorporating the NSI data restricted the range of prediction error variances relative to univariate ordinary kriging predictions from the RSSS data alone. The standardized squared prediction errors were computed and the coverage of prediction intervals (i.e. the proportion of sites at which the prediction interval included the observed value of the variable). Both these statistics suggested that the prediction error variances were consistent for the cokriging predictions but not for the ordinary kriging predictions from the simple combination of the RSSS and NSI data, which might be proposed on the basis of their very similar mean values. The LMCR is therefore proposed as a general tool for the combined analysis of different datasets on soil properties

Modelling the impacts of agricultural management practices on river water quality in Eastern England

Agricultural diffuse water pollution remains a notable global pressure on water quality, posing risks to aquatic ecosystems, human health and water resources and as a result legislation has been introduced in many parts of the world to protect water bodies. Due to their efficiency and cost-effectiveness, water quality models have been increasingly applied to catchments as Decision Support Tools (DSTs) to identify mitigation options that can be introduced to reduce agricultural diffuse water pollution and improve water quality. In this study, the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) was applied to the River Wensum catchment in eastern England with the aim of quantifying the long-term impacts of potential changes to agricultural management practices on river water quality. Calibration and validation were successfully performed at a daily time-step against observations of discharge, nitrate and total phosphorus obtained from high-frequency water quality monitoring within the Blackwater sub-catchment, covering an area of 19.6 km2. A variety of mitigation options were identified and modelled, both singly and in combination, and their long-term effects on nitrate and total phosphorus losses were quantified together with the 95% uncertainty range of model predictions. Results showed that introducing a red clover cover crop to the crop rotation scheme applied within the catchment reduced nitrate losses by 19.6%. Buffer strips of 2 m and 6 m width represented the most effective options to reduce total phosphorus losses, achieving reductions of 12.2% and 16.9%, respectively. This is one of the first studies to quantify the impacts of agricultural mitigation options on long-term water quality for nitrate and total phosphorus at a daily resolution, in addition to providing an estimate of the uncertainties of those impacts. The results highlighted the need to consider multiple pollutants, the degree of uncertainty associated with model predictions and the risk of unintended pollutant impacts when evaluating the effectiveness of mitigation options, and showed that high-frequency water quality datasets can be applied to robustly calibrate water quality models, creating DSTs that are more effective and reliable

Rural Development Programme measures on cultivated land in Europe to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions – regional ‘hotspots’ and priority measures

© 2016 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.Agriculture is a significant source of GHG emissions, contributing 10% of total emissions within the EU-28. Emissions from European agriculture have been reduced, albeit at the expense of crop yield and the risk of production displacement (the transfer of production, and associated emissions, to land outside of Europe). This article assesses the impact on GHG emissions of selected European Rural Development Program measures, representative of a diversity of management strategies implemented on cultivated land, within nine European Member States. Climatic zone and underlying spatial environmental variables were accounted for using a novel technique, “Regional Variation Categories,” developed with European-scale GIS data sets. Production displacement is assessed with two benchmarks: (1) compared with existing crop production and (2) relative to a “minimum requirement” land management scenario, where an emissions reduction of less than this does not constitute mitigation. Most measures reduce emissions relative to the baseline crop scenario; however, many do not reduce emissions beyond the “minimum requirement,” this being limited to measures such as catch crops and within-field grass areas to prevent soil erosion. The selection and targeting of measures to maximize agricultural GHG mitigation on cultivated land within Europe is discussed...Peer reviewedFinal Published versio