NCPT – managing environmental gains and losses

How a new practical tool enables non-specialists to systematically assess and manage planning and development impacts on natural capital

The Opportunities for Digital Conservation in Making Smarter Cities More Natural

Globally, the pace of urbanisation is increasing with 68 % of the world’s population projected to be urban by 2050. The quality of life for and engagement of these urban citizens is coming to the fore as a key issue for urban planners and decision makers as they pursue place-based initiatives to optimise city performance and sustainability credentials. Decision makers tackling multiple urban discourses such as the Smart City and Natural (or green or biophilic) Cities, which now heavily influence research policy and practice agendas, find themselves addressing tricky inter-disciplinary problems. Traditional sectoral silo approaches often hinder integration, reduce the quality of the natural environment and so often fail to deliver the multiple benefits expected by communities. Drawing on a desk based systematic review of the evidence base and a workshop involving key city stakeholders, we consider how digital conservation might contribute to new integrated approaches that consider people and nature together to contribute to the wider need to deliver public services in more innovative ways within cities that are both smart and natural. We suggest that added value is identified through the combination of new technologies and this potential new governance framework, to evidence and deliver the benefits of nature for urban citizens. This builds in citizen engagement for enhancing the natural environment by embedding and exploiting the potential of digital solutions. We comment on the strengths and weaknesses of how this new conceptual approach can improve integration of service delivery, whether it can also help overcome some of the problems and risks associated with digital conservation and if, by encouraging innovation through participatory governance, also help to inform the design a more inclusive smarter and natural city. Key words: smart, natural, digital conservation, green, co-production

Delivering sustainable, resilient and liveable cities via transformed governance

In the context of steadily declining Natural Capital and universal recognition of the imperative to reverse this trend before we get to the point that nature is not able to restore itself, cities have a crucial role to play. The UK Government commissioned a comprehensive study into the value of biodiversity, and by extension nature, reinforcing “why we should change our ways”—yet what is missing is the “how?”. This paper uniquely describes both the “how?” and a conclusive demonstration of the remarkable benefits of implementing it in a city. Critical to this process, it took a UK Parliamentary Inquiry to reveal that nature has become invisible within the economy, yet the ecological ecosystem services nature provides have enormous benefits to both people and the economy. Therefore integration—or seamless weaving—of urban greenspace and nature into people's lives and the places where they live, work, and spend their leisure time is vital. Moreover, what nature does not provide must be provided by engineered systems, and these have an economic cost; put another way, there are enormous cost savings to be made by taking advantage of what nature provides. In addressing these issues, this paper is the definitive paper from a 20-year portfolio of research on how to bring about transformative change in the complex system-of-systems that make up our cities, providing as it does the crucial in-depth research into the many diverse strands of governance—the last link in a chain of the creation, testing and proof of efficacy of methodologies underpinning a theory and practice of change for infrastructure and cities. The impact of this portfolio of research on Birmingham is two-fold: the Star Framework that placed natural environment considerations at the heart of all decision-making in the city, and the successful bid for the largest of the UK Future Parks Accelerator awards. While both are transformative in their different ways, yet mutually supportive, the latter enabled the design of a suite of system interventions from which the value of Birmingham's greenspaces is estimated to rise from £11.0 billion to £14.4 billion—a remarkable return on investment from the research's conceptualization of Birmingham's urban greenspace as a “business” (with its associated business models). In achieving this, the necessary enablers of thinking and practicing systemically, seamlessly working across disciplinary boundaries, an unusually strong focus on both the aspirations of all stakeholders and the context in question to define “the problem,” and the testing of proposed system intervention(s) both now and in the future have been iteratively combined. However, it is the critical enabling steps of identifying the complete range of value-generating opportunities that the interventions offer, formulating them into alternative business models to underpin the case for change and ensuring that they are synergistic with all the dimensions of governance that yielded the profound outcomes sought

Mapping climate risk and vulnerability with publicly available data. A guidance document produced by the WM-Air project, University of Birmingham.

This guidance document describes the GIS techniques used to develop a CRVA map for Birmingham; co-created by the WM-Air project group and Birmingham City Council

A life in progress: motion and emotion in the autobiography of Robert M. La Follette

This article is a study of a La Follette’s Autobiography, the autobiography of the leading Wisconsin progressive Robert M. La Follette, which was published serially in 1911 and, in book form, in 1913. Rather than focusing, as have other historians, on which parts of La Follette’s account are accurate and can therefore be trusted, it explains instead why and how this major autobiography was conceived and written. The article shows that the autobiography was the product of a sustained, complex, and often fraught series of collaborations among La Follette’s family, friends, and political allies, and in the process illuminates the importance of affective ties as well as political ambition and commitment in bringing the project to fruition. In the world of progressive reform, it argues, personal and political experiences were inseparable

Convalescent plasma therapy for the treatment of patients with COVID‐19: Assessment of methods available for antibody detection and their correlation with neutralising antibody levels

Introduction The lack of approved specific therapeutic agents to treat coronavirus disease (COVID‐19) associated with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS‐CoV‐2) infection has led to the rapid implementation of convalescent plasma therapy (CPT) trials in many countries, including the United Kingdom. Effective CPT is likely to require high titres of neutralising antibody (nAb) in convalescent donations. Understanding the relationship between functional neutralising antibodies and antibody levels to specific SARS‐CoV‐2 proteins in scalable assays will be crucial for the success of a large‐scale collection. We assessed whether neutralising antibody titres correlated with reactivity in a range of enzyme‐linked immunosorbent assays (ELISA) targeting the spike (S) protein, the main target for human immune response. Methods Blood samples were collected from 52 individuals with a previous laboratory‐confirmed SARS‐CoV‐2 infection. These were assayed for SARS‐CoV‐2 nAbs by microneutralisation and pseudo‐type assays and for antibodies by four different ELISAs. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis was used to further identify sensitivity and specificity of selected assays to identify samples containing high nAb levels. Results All samples contained SARS‐CoV‐2 antibodies, whereas neutralising antibody titres of greater than 1:20 were detected in 43 samples (83% of those tested) and >1:100 in 22 samples (42%). The best correlations were observed with EUROimmun immunoglobulin G (IgG) reactivity (Spearman Rho correlation coefficient 0.88; p 1:100 with 100% specificity using a reactivity index of 9.1 (13/22). Discussion Robust associations between nAb titres and reactivity in several ELISA‐based antibody tests demonstrate their possible utility for scaled‐up production of convalescent plasma containing potentially therapeutic levels of anti‐SARS‐CoV‐2 nAbs

Asking the right questions: Scoping studies in the commissioning of research on the organisation and delivery of health services

Scoping studies have been used across a range of disciplines for a wide variety of purposes. However, their value is increasingly limited by a lack of definition and clarity of purpose. The UK's Service Delivery and Organisation Research Programme (SDO) has extensive experience of commissioning and using such studies; twenty four have now been completed