'Thinking beyond the can': Mainstreaming UK-grown beans in healthy meals (BeanMeals) A key challenge for the UK food system is how to move towards healthier diets with lower environmental impact while also enhancing local and national enterprise. However, moderating consumption of foods that are high in fats, sugar and salt (HFSS) requires coordinated action across the food system. BeanMeals will directly address this by researching how to transform the food system based on systemic innovation in institutional catering and home-cooking by using healthier ingredients, new public procurement practises and more-local products. By starting with the meal and working backwards through the supply chain to the grower, research will be based on a 'fork-to-farm' concept (a disruption of the productionist 'farm-to-fork' paradigm). It will feature meals made from two quick-cooking navy bean varieties ('Capulet' and 'Godiva') which have recently been developed at the University of Warwick for UK growing conditions. it is also suitable for a wide range of easily-prepared institutional- and home-cooked meals with lower fat, salt and sugar content. Capulet production is poised to scale with commercial partners, and increased UK production would reduce the amount of dry navy beans (used in tinned baked beans) imported from North America, thereby lessening the environmental costs of shipping and opening new local enterprise opportunities. Environmental benefits of increased production and consumption of UK bean-based meals include reduced fertilizer demand on subsequent crops (beans are a N-fixing rotation crop), and hence reduced GHG related to its manufacture and reduced N2O emissions and runoff from agriculture; reduced water and energy use from more efficient processing (the beans cook quickly); and reduced transport emissions from having more local supply chains and lower importation of dry beans. BeanMeals aims to develop and analyse systemic innovations (i.e. innovations that require collaboration between multiple actors) for reducing HFSS consumption in institutional and home-cooking by using UK-grown navy beans. Research will develop a new 'fork-to-farm' paradigm of the systemic innovation of dietary change, which can be seen as 'reverse-engineering': start with preparation and consumption of the meal, and work backwards though the 'missing middle' (i.e. the retailers/wholesalers, distributors, secondary and primary processors, and the associated logistics), to the grower. By crossing research disciplines with innovation topics in its research design, we will determine both how best to bring about systemic innovation, and analyse the health, environment and enterprise impacts of the transformed system. The project will be centred on Leicestershire, and has been co-designed with a range of local partners co-convened by Leicestershire County Council (LCC), including Leicester City Council, Food for Life and the Leicester and Leicestershire Enterprise Partnership (LLEP), who all see the potential for enhanced outcomes for local health, environment and enterprise. The potential benefits at the UK-level have been identified by organisations with a national remit, including Defra, FSA, NFU, WWF and CIWF.

The recent surge in popularity of wild swimming (also referred to as open water swimming or cold water swimming), or swimming in natural 'blue spaces', including rivers, lakes or the sea, has highlighted the significant scale of opportunity to leverage the use of blue spaces as community assets to combat health inequalities. However, despite the well documented physical and mental health benefits of wild swimming that are relevant to large groups of the population suffering from ill health, current prevention and intervention strategies that focus on wild swimming to mitigate health inequalities tend to be local, place-based and disparate, and lack an overall joined-up approach that would allow them to be scaled up to benefit whole communities as part of established health policy. In collaboration with our project partners (Swim England, Black Swimming Association, The National Trust, Freshwater Biological Association, UK Centre for Hydrology and Ecology, Leicestershire County Council, Social Prescribing at Partners Health, and Thrive health content developers), we have identified one of the main barriers to scaling up successful place-based approaches: the current lack of integrated information about the mental and physical health benefits of wild swimming alongside the risks related to water quality and safety aspects of specific blue spaces that people use for swimming. Our project brings together a team of leading arts and humanities researchers in applied linguistics (Adolphs, Knight, Sotirova), place-based literatures (Jackson, Pratt), and place-names (Carroll), alongside leading experts in health sciences and organisation level implementation strategies (Moffatt and Timmons), and an internationally renowned expert on water quality and freshwater ecosystems (McGowan). Together with our project partners, we bring to bear our combined interdisciplinary expertise to address the following two main research questions: RQ1: How can we co-create an evidence base and sample content about wild swimming that will facilitate scale up of local approaches and initiatives to combat health inequalities? Drawing on databases and sources relating to the histories, literatures, health benefits and safety aspects, as well as water quality of blue spaces, we will co-create and evaluate sample content with our partners and with input from current and prospective swimming communities. RQ 2: What kind of mechanisms and relationships need to be formed and formalised to scale up approaches that leverage blue spaces to combat health inequalities through wild swimming? Working closely with our project partners, we will map the implementation landscape and provide a route map for wider scale up and spread of wild swimming as a health and wellbeing intervention, delineating the full range of agencies that may be involved in this process. Our project will have significant benefits for users within and beyond the academic community. We will develop a new mixed methods approach, drawing on corpus linguistics and narrative analysis, to create effective public health messaging that includes content from a range of academic disciplines. This content, in turn, will be of benefit to promoters and commissioners of wild swimming in the health ecosystem, allowing for scale up of local initiatives. Ultimately our project will benefit the many individuals and diverse communities who will be enabled to enjoy wild swimming in a safe way to improve health, and to gain an increased awareness of the nature of blue spaces and their role as a community asset.

The Stern and Dasgupta reviews on the economics of climate change and biodiversity respectively make clear, wealth creation, ecosystem health, and quality of life are inextricably linked. The UK government is committed to showing global leadership in climate change and biodiversity (and in their intersection) building on commitment that will be made in 2021 for climate change at Glasgow (COP26) and biodiversity at Kunming (COP15). Furthermore, the UK government's 25-Year Environment Plan includes the pledge to leave the environment in a better state than it is in now, while the Environment Bill currently going through parliament commits the government to set legally enforceable targets for different areas including climate, air quality, water quality, land management and biodiversity. Within these broad areas, there are numerous decisions requiring scientific input that have to be made in short timeframes (6-12 months). However, Universities are adept at doing excellent research within the typical three to five years projects, and UKRI is highly skilled at selecting the most promising of these projects. This presents the problem of delivering interdisciplinary research (IDR) with stakeholders to address challenges and provide tangible outcomes and environmental solutions within much shorter public and private sector policy cycles. The challenge we identify for this call is urgency and rapid delivery of IDR to provide a clear path from discovery to translation and impact. Our approach within AGILE is to build capacity within Oxford University to rapidly bring together IDR, and identify evidence-based solutions to major social and environmental challenges. AGILE is composed three overarching goals. First is delivering a collection of Sprint projects, characterized by policy pull for their socio-economic importance, timeliness for policy and practice, co-creation with stakeholders, and researchers with the capability to communicate effectively across boundaries to adopt a whole systems approach. Goal 1 will deliver five central objectives: 1) Demand-led Sprint formulation through engagement with stakeholders, 2) Convene Sprint teams to set tangible outcomes and robust action plans, 3) Monitor and evaluate progress to accelerate projects ensuring optimal deployment of resources, 4) Creation of a body of knowledge on effective approaches to IDR and the capability of IDR researchers, to be embedded in the university culture and shared with UKRI, and crucially 5) Uptake partnerships and reformulation to ensure implementable solutions. Second is to create a critical mass of IDR researchers, through 1) capturing lessons learned from these Sprints and translating them into training opportunities for the wider research community, 2) building a community of IDR researchers through shared learning and ongoing engagement with the programme and policy-makers, and 3) and enabling rapid development of AGILE teams creating capability and supporting career development. Third is the AGILE legacy, of creating a culture shift in the way universities evaluate IDR and work towards ensuring the outputs of IDR are recognised as of equal value in recruitment and retention policies. This will ensure increased opportunities for funding and delivering excellent interdisciplinary research, with users, providing the evidence base for effective policy and practice, in a more realistic policy-cycle timeframe. AGILE will enable transformational change in the way high-quality interdisciplinary research informs decision-making on how we manage the natural environment in a rapidly warming world.

Modernising the UK's health and social care system is a priority for government and for the country as a whole. To do this, wide ranging organisational and funding reforms are being put in place. An unprecedented investment to renew the built and technical infrastructure for delivering care is also underway: new hospitals and primary care centres are being built, information and communication technology is being upgraded and new technologies for diagnosing and treating disease are being introduced. If world-class infrastructure is to be delivered, this investment must achieve its full potential. The aim of HaCIRIC is to establish a new research centre to help accomplish this. HaCIRIC's focus is on the built and technical infrastructure for health and social care, and the interaction between infrastructure specification and the way patients are treated. Improving the way this is planned, delivered and managed is at the core of HaCIRIC's activity. What are the challenges? The health and social care system is one of the most complex and rapidly changing organisational and technical environments in any sector of the economy. Many stakeholders are involved in delivering care, funding mechanisms are convoluted, and patterns of demand and use are changing, as are government health policies. All this places new pressures on the underlying infrastructure. These are compounded by two problems. First, there is an historic legacy of out-dated buildings and cultures within the care system. Second, the life cycles of the various elements of the infrastructure / buildings, medical and information technology / are mismatched. Each involves complex supply chains, multiple users with their own needs and differing institutional and funding arrangements. All these have to be reconciled. For example, the current PFI programme for new hospitals involves supply contracts for thirty years or more, but incorporates technologies which have five year life cycles to help deliver diagnostics and therapies which are undergoing rapid evolutionary change. Modernising the health and social care infrastructure will therefore require innovative approaches. HaCIRIC will help develop the tools and processes which will embed 'innovation as normal business' amongst those responsible for delivering the investment in infrastructure. Its research programme has been developed in partnership with all the key stakeholders from the care system, including the Department of Health, the NHS, the Department of Trade and Industry and the supply industries. Seven research themes have been identified:- Managing innovation in a context of technological change- Procurement for innovation- Innovative design and construction- Care delivery practices- Delivering improved performance through operations management- Knowledge management in complex systems - Design and evaluation of integrated systems HaCIRIC is a collaboration between existing research centres at Imperial College London and the Universities of Loughborough, Reading and Salford. Additional partners from other universities, industry and the care system will be involved in specific research projects. Together this represents a resource valued at more than 11m, of which 7.0m consists of EPSRC support, 2.9m is from the four existing research centres, 500,000 is from the Department of Trade and Industry and 720,000 is from industrial partners. HaCIRIC will therefore represent a substantial resource and a unique capability in skills and knowledge to find solutions to the key healthcare infrastructure problems of the 21st century.