7Feb 2017
CEP’s Dr Clare Twigger-Ross awarded CECAN Fellowship

Photo credit: ‘jigsaw puzzle pieces’ by Electric-Eye on Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

CEP’s Dr Clare Twigger-Ross awarded CECAN Fellowship

CEP’s Dr Clare Twigger-Ross has been awarded a Fellowship by the Centre for the Evaluation of Complexity Across the Nexus (CECAN) Investigating the value of qualitative comparative analysis in relation to the Defra Flood Resilience Community Pathfinder (FRCP) evaluation. Building on the Defra FRCP evaluation undertaken by CEP (2013 – 2015), this study aims to identify key factors that predict improved community resilience.

The key evaluation challenge for this study will be the attribution of causality in the context of community resilience to flooding. A key methodological development will be testing qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) in a novel (flooding) complex evaluation situation to examine its feasibility for similar situations, and to assess the aspects of QCA of most use to this type of evaluation.

This is expected to raise key complexity issues in evaluation, which have been recently explored in CEP’s project for CECAN Learning lessons for evaluating complexity at the nexus: a meta-evaluation of CEP projects. The findings of this project will become available on the CECAN website in the coming months.

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Team CEP
11Jan 2017
CEP to provide further support for participatory planning in the Pentlands

Photo credit: ‘A sunny day in the Pentland hills’ by John Mason on Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

CEP awarded contract extension to support participatory land use planning in the Pentland Hills Regional Park

In 2016, CEP’s Dr Peter Phillips and Paula Orr undertook a successful project for Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH) supporting ecosystems approach based participatory land use planning in the Pentland Hills Regional Park. The report from this project will be published shortly. SNH have now awarded CEP a contract extension to develop this work further by translating the strategic Park-wide results and recommendations into more detailed management plans for two of the ecosystem service ‘hotspot’ areas identified in the 2016 work. As part of this extension work, CEP will design a further participative planning workshop. This will be delivered with key land managers and other stakeholders in February 2017.    

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6Jan 2017
CEP runs training courses for EKN in 2017

CEP TRAINING COURSES FOR ECOSYSTEMS KNOWLEDGE NETWORK IN 2017

Dr Bill Sheate and Dr Peter Phillips will deliver a series of training courses for the Ecosystems Knowledge Network (EKN) during 2017, following the success of our one-day training course on Incorporating ecosystem services into environmental assessment run in London and Manchester during 2016.

The Ecosystem Service and Environmental Assessment course will be run again in Scotland and in Birmingham in May and June 2017 respectively.  In addition, a new one-day training course in Participatory Land Use Planning will run back-to-back with that course:-

INCORPORATING ECOSYSTEM SERVICES AND NATURAL CAPITAL INTO ENVIRONMENTAL ASSESSMENT

  • Battleby Conference Centre, Perth, Central Scotland, 10th May 2017. With kind support from Scottish Natural Heritage.
  • Austin Court, Central Birmingham B1 2NP, 8th June 2017.

PARTICIPATORY LAND USE PLANNING AND THE ECOSYSTEM APPROACH: WHAT, WHEN AND HOW

  • Battleby Conference Centre, Perth PH1 3EW, 9th May 2017.  With kind support from Scottish Natural Heritage.
  • Austin Court, Central Birmingham B1 2NP, 7th June 2017.

For further information and links for booking see below:



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20Dec 2016
CEP to evaluate Big Lottery Fund’s Our Bright Future Programme

Photo credit: ‘Blazin Sun’ by Stephen Bowler on Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

CEP and partners ERS to evaluate Big Lottery Fund’s Our Bright Future Programme

CEP, with partners Economic Research Services (ERS), are undertaking the evaluation of the Our Bright Future Programme. The Our Bright Future Programme aims to empower young people to lead progressive change in their communities and local environment, through a portfolio of 31 projects across the UK, each with a duration of three to five years. The Programme is supported by £33 million of funding from the Big Lottery Fund, and is managed by a consortium of eight organisations led by The Royal Society of Wildlife Trusts. 

The supported projects range in scale from those with a local focus to national level delivering in multiple areas. All the projects are based around key themes including: environmental action, environmental campaigning, leadership and influencing, and sustainable enterprises and vocational training.

CEP and ERS have been commissioned by the Royal Society of  Wildlife Trusts to undertake the Programme level evaluation. The evaluation aims to:

  • Test whether the Our Bright Future Programme has achieved its long term ambitions
  • Provide better evidence on how young people can improve their local environment
  • Test and evidence whether a partnership way of working that invests in human, social and natural capital, is an effective means by which to deliver greater impact
  • Identify good practice and ongoing improvements

Owen White is CEP’s lead for this project.

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19Dec 2016
CEP commissioned to explore the implications of global megatrends for the Western Balkans

Photo credit: Lakes and woodland in Montenegro (201408_balcani_714) by Franco Pecchio on Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

CEP IS PART OF A TEAM DEVELOPING WATER USE SCENARIOS AND ASSESSING THE IMPLICATIONS OF GLOBAL MEGATRENDS FOR THE WESTERN BALKANS REGION

CEP is a part of a team commissioned by the European Environment Agency (EEA) to undertake a study: Water Use in the Western Balkans: regional outlooks and global megatrends*. The team is led by the European Topic Center on Inland, Coastal and Marine Waters (ETC/ICM), which is managed by the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research.

The project has two main tasks: developing regional water-use scenarios; and identifying and assessing the implications of global megatrends for the Western Balkans region. CEP is leading the work related to global megatrends, which will involve adapting and implementing a methodology and toolkit previously developed by CEP.

CEP’s work will involve: undertaking desk-based research and assessment of how global megatrends might impact on the Western Balkans, focussing in particular on the nexus of water, energy and food; organising and facilitating regional expert workshops to discuss potential impacts and assess risks and opportunities for the environment and environmental policy in the region; and, preparing outputs to be published by the EEA.

Owen White is CEP’s lead for this project.

* For more information on megatrends see here

 

Team CEP
1Dec 2016
Environmental Psychology conference presentations available

Photo credit: ‘Two trees’ by Jan Tik on Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Environmental Psychology conference presentations available

Dr Clare Twigger-Ross gave a keynote lecture at the British Environmental Psychology conference hosted by the University of Surrey, Sept 21 – 22nd 2016.  The theme of the conference was Healthy and sustainable places: Providing evidence based solutions to real world problems and it was attended by a mixture of researchers, academics and practitioners from a range of disciplines.  The conference shows that the field of environmental psychology in the UK is vibrant, energetic and has much to offer in relation to current real world issues of sustainability and place-making.

A reflection on the conference, presented by Sara Grenni of SUSPLACE, can be found in her blog post here.

A link to all the presentations can be found here.

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25Nov 2016
CEP running a brainstorming event for the European Commission

Photo credit: ‘European Commission’ by Sébastien Bertrand on Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

CEP to run a brainstorming event on the development of a methodological framework for the identification of emerging environmental risks

As part of our work on the ongoing project to develop a methodological framework for the systematic identification of emerging risks to the environment for DG Environment of the European Commission, CEP together with our consortium partner Milieu Ltd are organising and facilitating a one-day brainstorming event.  The event will take place on Thursday 1st December 2016, in Brussels, and will bring together experts from across the European Commission.

The brainstorming will be a participatory event in which the CEP and Milieu team actively facilitate working sessions with experts, to discuss and explore topics including: the scope and characteristics of a potential European system for the identification of emerging environmental risks; and existing methods that could contribute to a systematic framework for identifying emerging environmental risks.

For more information on this event and the project please contact the CEP project manager Owen White.

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25Nov 2016
CEP at Scottish Government stakeholder meeting

CEP at Scottish Government Ecosystems and Land Use Stakeholders Engagement Group meeting

CEP’s Dr Peter Phillips was invited to attend a meeting to discuss the Ecosystems and Land Use related components of the Scottish Government’s new Strategic Research Programme (SRP) 2016-2021. The event, that took place on 14 November, was hosted by the Main Research Providers (James Hutton Institute and SRUC) and provided an opportunity for stakeholders to discuss and influence the forthcoming research programme. 

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18Nov 2016
CEP’s papers at the FloodRisk 2016 conference published

Photo credit: ‘Avon Meadows Community Wetlands’ by Geoff Moore UK on Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

CEP’s papers on community engagement in flooding published

Two papers submitted by CEP’s Dr Clare Twigger-Ross and Paula Orr at the FloodRisk2016 conference are now available online via the following links:

  • Citizen involvement in flood risk management: flood groups and networks by Clare Twigger-Ross, Paula Orr, Katya Brooks and Rolands Sadauskis.  The paper discusses the nature and structure of flood groups, the process of their development, and the extent of their linkages with formal institutions, drawing out the barriers and facilitators to developing institutional resilience at the local level.
  • ‘Pieces of kit’ are not enough: the role of infrastructure in community resilience by Paula Orr, Clare Twigger-Ross, Katya Brooks and Rolands Sadauskis. The paper explores the way that ‘infrastructure resilience capacities’ were developed and examines how physical infrastructure contributed to community flood resilience. It finds that the development of infrastructure resilience depends on strong relations between community members (‘community capital’) as well as relationships between community organisations and flood management institutions (‘institutional resilience’). 

Both papers draw on  research carried out by CEP for the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) to evaluate the Flood Resilience Community Pathfinder (FRCP) scheme in England.

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