CEP delivering online sense-making workshops as part of the fourth annual cycle of the EU Foresight System to Detect Emerging Environmental Issues
CEP is continuing in our role of providing the secretariat for the EU Commission’s Foresight System for the detection of emerging environmental issues (FORENV). Now in its fourth annual cycle, FORENV is focussing on identifying and characterising emerging environmental issues due to EU and global demographic changes.
This topic will explore what projected European and global demographic changes, such as ageing and population dynamics within and between territories, might mean for the development of key sectors (such as mobility, agriculture and food, energy) and what the implications of these developments may be for the environment.
A broad scanning to compile and characterise weak signals of emerging issues for Europe’s environment.
The organisation and facilitation of four participatory online sense-making workshops, to identify and select ten priority emerging environmental issues related to the topic (i.e. demography).
The characterisation of the ten priority emerging issues to define related risks and opportunities for the environment, through an evidence review and expert discussions.
Preparation of a final report including infographic presentation of each emerging issue. A short video is also prepared for each cycle.
Miro board from last year’s workshop
Preparation for this cycle’s workshops is currently underway and these will be held online on 5th and 7th April 2022. In total around 60 experts from the Commission, academia and NGOs will participate. Across the workshops approximately 110 ‘weak signals’ of change related to the topic will discussed, clustered and prioritised. CEP are leading the organisation of the workshops and will moderate them with support from our partners Cranfield University, Milieu Ltd and representatives of the European Commission.
More information together with the final reports and videos prepared to date can be found on the Commission FORENV webpages.
For further information please contact Owen White (Technical Director) or Rolands Sadauskis (Senior Consultant).
Natural England have published a new report: “LIFE Recreation ReMEDIES Behaviour Change Project: Understanding the behavioural context ”, written by CEP in partnership with Plymouth University and Plymouth Marine Laboratory.
The ReMEDIES Behaviour Change Project aimed to help Natural England and partners develop evidence-based interventions to influence the behaviour of recreational boaters to reduce disturbance and damage to seagrass. This report responded to the Behaviour Change Project’s objectives to review current knowledge on:
Recreational boating behaviours – specifically anchoring and mooring – with relation to their impacts on seagrass and the effectiveness of existing mitigation measures, and
The behavioural context at two test sites: Plymouth Sound and Estuaries and the Solent Maritime Special Areas of Conservation.
Using theCOM-B behaviour change model and associated Behaviour Change Wheel, CEP and partners studied the extent to which boaters felt that their Behaviour in relation to seagrass was influenced by:
Capability (e.g. do boat users feel they can control the extent to which their activity causes damage?),
Opportunity (e.g. do they have options for anchoring away from vulnerable areas?), and
Motivation (e.g. to what extent do they feel that protecting seagrass matters to them?).
The findings of the study explore the effects of anchoring and mooring behaviours on seagrass, potential approaches to changing behaviours to prevent damage to seagrass, and the barriers and facilitators to boaters taking action. Examples of some of the key implications for behaviour change strategies derived from the findings include:
To be effective, interventions for behaviour change need to address the psychological (e.g. motivations, emotions), social (e.g. social norms) as well as the physical (e.g. Advanced mooring Systems) aspects of boater behaviour.
Interventions should build on the desire of boaters to protect the ocean. Attention should be paid to incorporating messages that facilitate ocean connectedness.
Collaborate with boaters to develop co-created solutions and encourage discussion around potential interventions to explore their strengths and weaknesses for a particular location.
CEP has been awarded a new project to analyse drivers of environmental transitions in European cities
Collingwood Environmental Planning (CEP) (in partnership with Eunomia Research & Consulting), LSE Cities at the London School of Economics and Milieu has been commissioned by the European Environment Agency (EEA) to support the delivery of the EEA’s project aiming to better understand what enables or hinders environmental sustainability transitions in European cities, and how these factors may have changed due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
This project follows a previous project delivered by a CEP-led team (2019-2020) which piloted a survey of the drivers and enablers of urban sustainability in European cities. The results of this previous work were published in the EEA’s report Urban sustainability in Europe – What is driving cities’ environmental change?. Using the method developed in this previous project, the new project involves a survey targeting 100 European cities followed up by 25 interviews. The results of this project will directly inform the EEA’s ongoing work on urban sustainability, including the next European State and Outlook on the Environment Report (SOER) in 2025.
This exciting new project builds on our long track-record of supporting the EEA in developing a knowledge base, conceptual understanding and assessments in the field of urban environmental sustainability. More information on our wider work on urban environmental sustainability can be found here.
For more information please contact CEP’s Owen White (Managing Director) or Špela Kolarič (Senior Consultant) for more information.
CEP is undertaking the evaluation of Natural England’s Environmental Benefits from Nature tool.
The Beta version of the tool was released for testing in July 2021. The tool is intended to expand net gain approaches to include wider Natural Capital benefits such as flood protection, recreation and improved water and air quality.
Natural England has been developing the Environmental Benefits from Nature (EBN) tool as a voluntary tool to encourage developers to consider net gain of wider ecosystem services at the same time that they work to achieve mandatory Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG).
The evaluation of the Environmental Benefits from Nature Tool (EBN) is intended to deliver the recommendations of the work carried out by CEP early in 2021 on the Creation of an Evaluation Framework for the Environmental Benefits from Nature Tooland ultimately support Natural England’s work to deliver the 25 Year Environment Plan (25 YEP) commitment to expand net gain approaches.
This evaluation will look at who is using the tool in the Beta phase, for what purposes, in what ways and why. The results will help take the tool forward into the future ensuring it is able to deliver on policy needs and requirements and that it continues to have the support of users.
The evaluation will:
co-ordinate and evaluate up to 20 case-studies of users of the EBN tool, based upon a list supplied by the NE PM, to assess the impact of the EBN tool at different scales, in different uses and at different stages of development
document the way the tool has been applied, the actions taken, why it has been applied in these ways and the results of these applications
carry out a case study with a local planning authority (LPA) to take an in depth look at their experience of interacting with the EBN tool in their capacity of both approving planning decisions and acting as a consultee for changes in land use that do not require Local Authority planning permission.
The project will run till the end of March 2022.
For further information, contact Paula Orr (Technical Director)
CEP to deliver a webinar for Western Balkan countries to build interest and facilitate discussion on the use of foresight information in their SOE reporting
CEP is part of a team commissioned by the European Environment Agency (EEA) to design and lead a webinar for national experts from Western Balkan countries on 28th October 2021, as part of the project ’Strengthening the participation of the Western Balkans in the work of the European Environment Agency 2020-2021. Actions for Water and Foresight assessments’. The project is being led by the European Topic Center on Inland, Coastal and Marine Waters (ETC/ICM).
CEP is responsible for the development of a checklist document for the assessment of the implications of Global Megatrends at the national level. This checklist is intended to guide WB countries through the process of developing foresight content for national State of the Environment (SOE) reporting.
This checklist document represents a simplified version of the approach described in a methodological toolkit Mapping Europe’s environmental future: understanding the impacts of global megatrends at the national level (Eionet report No 1/2017) also developed by CEP and published by EEA in 2017. The streamlined process sets out clearly the steps that countries can take to complete a ’light-touch’ study suitable for preparing outlook information for SoE.
The webinar will present the checklist to national experts and elaborate how its implementation can help Western Balkan countries develop foresight content for national SoE reporting. The webinar will also provide an opportunity for participants to discuss and explore the proposed process and share expectations, and concerns for completing it.
Please contact Rolands Sadauskis (Project Manager) for further information on the project.
This research built on CEP’s work on flood resilience and investigated international approaches to assessing recovery from extreme weather events, the data sources they use and their applicability to Scotland. The aim was to develop a common understanding of climate resilience and the critical components in planning for local and national recovery from extreme weather.
The report identifies monitoring frameworks used internationally which could be relevant to Scotland and evaluates the extent to which they would work with the approaches set out in Scotland’s National Performance Framework and the Scottish Climate Change Adaptation Programme (SCCAP).
Based on international experience, the building blocks for developing a system for monitoring recovery from extreme weather events in Scotland are:
Framing recovery within a set of wider social goals such as wellbeing or resilience.
An approach that establishes the different areas or recovery that need to be considered and the role the community will play in deciding the system to be used.
A set of indicators of recovery.
Joined-up data across different scales (national, regional/local and community) with a focus on process and outcomes.
Relevance of the spatial scale at which data is collected and the timing and frequency of collection to the indicator.
Drawing on existing information.
For more information, please contact the Project Director, Paula Orr (Technical Director).
CEP are leading on a new project for Defra to carry out a process and impact evaluation of the Property Flood Resilience (PFR) grant scheme
CEP, in partnership with University of the West of England (UWE) Bristol and Flood Hazard Research Centre (FHRC), Middlesex University, has been awarded a project by DEFRA to carry out a process and impact evaluation of the Property Flood Resilience (PFR) repair scheme to help understand the effect of the scheme on resilience in flood affected council areas.
The PFR repair scheme is activated following severe weather events that impact multiple local authorities, lastly in February 2020 and November 2019. All eligible flooded properties have access to grants through the PFR scheme. To be eligible a council area has to have more than 25 properties flooded.
This project will evaluate how the PFR repair scheme’s delivery process has worked and the impact this has had in areas affected by flooding. The two key questions are:
How effective are processes employed for delivering the Government Property Flooding Resilience (PFR) repair schemes in 2019 and 2020?
What benefits has the scheme delivered?
What improvements (if any) could be made?
What is the impact of the scheme in council areas that have received PFR grants and have flooded since?
In these areas, did the resilience measures make a measurable difference and if so, how
How does this contrast with areas where flooding has occurred, but PFR has not been utilised?
Has the scheme contributed to increase the uptake of PFR?
The project started in August 2021 and will run until August 2022.
Sustainability consultancy Eunomia Research & Consulting has completed the acquisition of Collingwood Environmental Planning (CEP). The acquisition process completed on 28th July. CEP is now wholly owned by Eunomia and becomes part of the Eunomia group.
The acquisition strengthens and widens the combined team’s expertise and capacity in a number of key fields, including water and flood risk management, natural capital and green infrastructure, policy evaluation, climate change adaptation, environmental foresight and the social aspects of environmental change.
In its 20th anniversary year, Eunomia employs more than 100 consultants across offices in Bristol, Manchester, London, New York, Brussels, Athens, Sydney and Auckland and works with supranational, national and local government, non-governmental and private sector clients. Eunomia specialises in policy, strategy, technical analysis and implementation advice to address the world’s environmental and social crises. It is a key advisor on circular economy and decarbonisation to the European Commission and many of the world’s leading environmental NGOs, brands, retailers and materials companies. It also carries out work on the natural economy, biodiversity and sustainable transport.
Founded in 1995, CEP works with a range of public, private and non-governmental clients both in the UK and internationally, including the EU institutions, to put the environment and communities at the heart of decision making by promoting positive environmental, social and sustainability change through robust and innovative research, strategy and policy support.
Joe Papineschi, Chairperson of Eunomia, said: “We’re hugely excited that, through our first acquisition, we’re bringing CEP into the Eunomia group. Our two companies are natural partners, driven by common values. We both take an evidence-based approach to maximise the positive environmental and social impacts of our work, and focus on providing high-quality advice with the aim of delivering practical solutions for clients.
“We’re a great home for the CEP team and thanks to their highly complementary skills and experience, together we will be able to expand our work in a number of key areas focused on the climate and biodiversity crises. The excellent reputation and track record of the CEP team allows us to offer services to a wider range of clients, increasing and amplifying the impact of our work.”
Ric Eales, Managing Director at CEP, said: “I am personally hugely proud of what CEP has achieved over the last 26 years. What has made CEP different as an environmental and sustainability consultancy has been our ability to operate at the nexus of research and practice, our inter-disciplinary approach, and our focus on new challenges and innovative approaches. We are delighted to become a part of Eunomia, an organisation that shares our culture and values, along with our commitment to delivering quality and innovation for clients. This presents a fantastic opportunity to continue our journey and significantly enhance our ability to deliver positive change and real impact.”
Following this acquisition, Eunomia aims to further strengthen and broaden its expertise on a range of specialist environmental and sustainability issues. Alongside continued strong organic growth, the company will be seeking further complementary acquisitions in areas such as sustainable food, farming and transport.
For more information, please contact Ric Eales (Director, CEP).
CEP taking part in FloodRisk conference: What is the future of communities’ and citizens’ “active involvement” in the delivery of FCERM to support proactive resilience? What are the challenge and opportunities for research?
CEP are taking part in the virtual FloodRisk conference which takes place between 22nd June – 24th June online.
Dr Clare Twigger-Ross will be leading a special session along with CEP colleagues Paula Orr, Rolands Sadauskis together with colleagues from Middlesex University Flood Hazard Research Centre (Dr Simon McCarthy) and HR Wallingford (Dr Jonathan Simm). The special session comes out of work CEP led on Community participation and Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Management. It will be a workshop style session allowing for discussion and debate. Prof Lindsey McEwen (University of West of England) and Susan Durden (US Army Engineering Corps) will provide short presentations designed to challenge and raise key issues specifically around community participation in long term adaptation.
More information can be found on the website here.
