Climate change is one of the major threats of the 21st Century both nationally and globally. This requires a joint response of mitigation and adaptation as enshrined in the UK Climate Change Act, which mandates a Climate Change Risk Assessment (CCRA) every five years and a quinquennial National Adaptation Plan (NAP) to adapt to the climate risks that are identified. Assessing climate risks and adaptation in a consistent manner is scientifically challenging as climate change is manifest in multiple ways (rising temperature and sea level, changing precipitation, etc.) and impacts every human and natural system. Further there are direct and indirect impacts as these effects cascade and interact with other sectors which are often changing due to non-climate processes. Any proposed adaptations need to be assessed in a similar manner including direct and indirect effects and unintended consequences. Earlier UK climate assessments did not fully address this challenge relying in part on expert synthesis for integration, potentially leading to an over focus on direct consequences and leading to inconsistencies between sectors and between adaptation options. The OpenCLIM project is designed to support UK assessment of climate risks and adaptation needs, and future CCRAs and NAPs in particular, by developing and applying a first UK integrated assessment for climate impacts and adaptation. First and foremost we aim to develop an open, innovative and flexible platform to provide an improved capacity for the next CCRA and NAP. Our model will consider UK-wide climate impacts and adaptation in biodiversity, agriculture, infrastructure and urban areas, considering the impacts of flooding, heat stress and changing temperature and precipitation. It will also consider two detailed case studies: (1) an urban analysis of Glasgow and environs (the Clyde); and (2) a more rural analysis of the Norfolk Broads and environs. These will serve as a demonstration and validation exercise to inform the national analysis. Secondly, we will also design an open-access platform with a strong legacy which is flexible to allow further development of the integrated model beyond this funding. We aspire to develop a community model where new and improved models could be easily incorporated and innovative science and new policy questions investigated. Hence future CCRAs and NAPs could be linked to a living science process, drawing on evolving understanding and stakeholder needs. This would include improving knowledge in established sectors and areas, and developing better sectoral linkages and interactions, as well as adding new models of less established sectors and areas as they emerge, including the ability to reframe and pose new questions. Recognising the significant challenge of achieving this second goal, our model will be developed within the UKCIRC DAFNI (Data & Analytics Facility for National Infrastructure) facility for High Performance Computing. The platform will be designed to take the UKCP18 and new UK socioeconomic scenarios to ensure the best scientific inputs. The approach will be explicitly spatial and allow highlighting of geographical hotspot areas and the prioritisation of risks in a systematic and consistent manner including tabulation and mapping of outputs. The models that are included are all physically-based (rather than emulators or rules-of-thumb) and this will enable the generation of new research insights, including climatic risks in the UK. Importantly, the use of physically-based models will allow credible simulation of conditions that have not been previously observed and improve confidence in the results compared to earlier analyses.

The global water cycle consists of a complex web of interacting physical, biogeochemical, ecological and human systems. Management of this complex cycle has been practised for decades, but new challenges lie ahead due to increasing population pressure and environmental change. These challenges can only be ad-dressed by fundamental changes, both in perspective and in practice. The recent focus on the role of water security in addressing ecosystem services and sustainability has also emphasised the need for new approaches to achieving this dual goal. This in turn requires new, whole-system, multi-faceted, data-intensive, interdisciplinary approaches to research, training and development - approaches which take advantage of the information explosion and leading-edge technologies of the 21st century. Water informatics (also known as 'hydroinformatics' or Water Information Engineering) has grown rapidly in recent years and seeks to take full advantage of the proliferation of remotely sensed information from space and ground based sensors with increasing capabilities in terms of spatial, temporal and spectral resolution. Information and knowledge gained from data allows more efficient and reliable monitoring, modelling and management of the water cycle at global, regional and local scales. Water informatics deals with the intersection of 'big data' with 'smart technologies', to deliver more sustainable water solutions over these diverse scales, enabling innovation through evidence based insight. As the capabilities of digital devices soar and their prices plummet, sensors are providing greater amounts of information than ever, at lower costs and with greater reliability than previously possible. In addition, many more people have access to far more powerful Information and Communication Technology (ICT) tools and devices (e.g., there are 6 billion mobile-phone subscriptions worldwide - 81.6 million in the UK in 2011, with over 2.5 billion people using the internet - 52.7 million in the UK in 2012). These tools also enable 'People as sensors' (crowd-sourcing), bringing together the skills of humans to observe and interpret with the interconnection of the Internet to enable new types of information to be crowd-sourced. Combining these trends provides amazing new opportunities to address old and new problems in wholly new ways to meet emerging challenges around the water cycle. Globally, it is estimated that savings of up to £8.4 billion per annum may be realised through the adoption of smart water technologies to minimize operational inefficiencies and to maximize the effect of capital and operational expenditure. Reports by the Council for Science and Technology (2009), the Royal Academy of Engineering (2012) and the Institution of Civil Engineers (2012) have highlighted a particular shortage of engineers and scientists in industries of national importance, such as "energy, water, sanitation, communications and IT systems". The projected skills shortage in the IT sector in Europe (900,000 vacancies by 2015) has prompted the European Commission to launch a 'grand coalition' to tackle the shortage. It is difficult to envisage that the need for skilled engineers working at the interface of IT and water science and engineering disciplines will be met by IT graduates alone. The aim of the WISE CDT will therefore be to fill this skills gap by offering a postgraduate programme that fosters new levels of innovation and collaboration and trains a cohort of engineers and scientists at the boundary of water informatics, science and engineering. Furthermore, the WISE CDT will link with other traditionally separate disciplines, which are relevant to sustainable water management, ranging from statistics to social sciences, geography, psychology and economics.

Over 50 capital cities of the Least Developed Countries in the world lie on top of faults in regions that are building up significant stresses within the crust. This continually growing stress will eventually lead to future earthquakes. Earthquakes are a natural hazard that are killing an increasing number of people, in part because populations are growing and densifying into urban centres. The recurrence time between earthquakes may be hundreds of years; many cities that are large today were small towns or non-existent in the past when the last big earthquake struck. There is often little social and community memory and first-hand experience of these previous events. Furthermore, urban development in the intervening years has often hidden the expressions of the active earthquake faults beneath and around a city, making them harder to identify today. In the Least Developed Countries, the impact of earthquakes on people's lives and livelihoods is much greater due to the vulnerability of buildings and communities. A major challenge has been to ensure that the mitigation of earthquake risk is a high priority in vulnerable cities, where earthquakes rarely occur but are devastating when they do. This is particularly difficult in cities in the least developed countries, where building earthquake resilience has to be balanced against other economic & social pressures facing cities & their development. We will develop a blueprint for the concept of "Seismic Cities", which we believe will be a powerful approach for raising awareness of the devastating potential of earthquakes in cities & for making them more sustainable & resilient to such shocks. This will be a biennial workshop & event that will bring together a range of stakeholders to target communities vulnerable to seismic hazard, and to develop more sustainable cities that can better cope with future environmental shocks from earthquakes. This will build on an existing successful concept of Cities On Volcanoes-a biennial conference and series of workshops that aims to reduce the impacts of volcanism & its effects on society by understanding volcanic phenomena, recognising the hazards & their impacts on people, emergency management, community education, case histories & risk mitigation. In order to test the effectiveness of our methodological approaches, as well as help develop the Seismic Cities concept, we will target a large city that has recently experience major earthquakes-Santiago in Chile. We will conduct interviews & focus groups with communities in the city to explore their own perceptions of risk & coping strategies. We will also document these experiences through story-telling & sensory mapping of the built environment, & create a virtual archive of these to which the community can add. Through co-production methods such as focus groups, walking trails, mobile interviewing, live projections & tours of both historic & contemporary urban sites, valuable data on the effects of earthquakes & their potential danger will be gathered. We will use satellite imagery to construct a 3D model of the built environment & highlight active fault structures within the city, integrating this with the community resources to better communicate the findings derived from the scientific data. The strategies to best prepare & protect the community can be embedded as community members become responsible for mapping & curating their own lived environments. The long-term (20-year) aim is to raise resilience to earthquake hazard across the whole world to the standards of the US, New Zealand & Japan. This is particularly challenging for many ODA-Recipient countries, where awareness of the threat from earthquakes may be low, & where increasing resilience to earthquake hazard may be a low priority. We envisage Seismic Cities as a flagship, high-profile event that significantly raises awareness in the host city, among both professionals & the public, drawing focus & resources to that city.

Coastal hazards pose a significant risk to people, property, and infrastructure worldwide and in the UK. For example, over 1.8 million homes are at risk of coastal flooding and erosion in England alone and coastal flooding is recognized as one of the top two environmental hazards in terms of impact in the 2020 National Risk Register. The occurrence, intensity and impacts of coastal flooding and erosion are projected to increase with climate change and will have major socio-economic consequences. Historically, coastal protection has relied on overwhelming use of hard engineered defence schemes, but adverse effects and high costs of these schemes have driven advocacy of coastal practices that are based on Working with Natural Processes (WWNP). However, future changes in regional sea level, storms, pluvial and fluvial inputs, coastal habitats, and their interrelations lead to significant epistemic uncertainties (due to limited knowledge) about controls on flooding and erosion and limit the implementation of WWNP schemes. Questions remain on how multiple terrestrial and marine drivers of extreme hydrodynamic conditions will combine to control coastal flooding and erosion in the future, on the vulnerability and efficacy of protective services afforded by coastal habitats, and on the performance of WWNP solutions on coasts that already have partial protection by traditional engineered coastal defences. Event-scale coastal flooding and erosion mainly occur in response to synoptic scale meteorological events. These meteorological events can result in a series of individual hazard components to coastal environments, such as storm surges, extreme waves, extreme rainfall, and extreme river flows. However, these hazard components are not independent of each other, and coastal flooding and erosion commonly arise from the collective impact due to interrelated and/or successive hazard components. In other words, coastal flooding and erosion are controlled by multi-hazards. The CHAMFER project will characterise how multi-hazards at the coast control coastal flooding and erosion and determine how these multi-hazards will respond to climate change and coastal management. We will deliver a new community modelling system coupled across terrestrial and marine sectors, numerical simulations of which will be used to support multi-hazard analyses under present and future scenarios. This will be combined with an assessment of the role of coastal habitats resulting in national maps for protective services and vulnerabilities of coastal habitats to climate-driven multi-hazards. We will provide tools to analyse the efficacy of future WWNP schemes. CHAMFER will rely on a multi-scale approach both spatially, by considering UK/GB scales and more local spatial scales, and temporally, by considering responses to meteorological events under long-term climate-related or management-related changes. CHAMFER includes significant elements of co-design with stakeholders and we will work with government departments, public sector organisations, and industry users to inform and support coastal protection and adaptation options.

The IPCC's CMIP-3 and CMIP-5 model inter-comparisons focus on uncertainty in the large-scale temperature response of the coupled atmosphere-ocean system to a given emissions or concentration scenario, treating uncertainty in downscaling, in the hydrological cycle and in the biosphere as additional sources of error. This fully coupled approach only permits relatively coarse-resolution global models and limited ensemble sizes, with large systematic errors and low signal-to-noise in hydrological variables, problems which persist in initialized decadal forecasts. As a result, precipitation observations play only a minor role in constraining precipitation forecasts, resulting in large and potentially unphysical ranges of uncertainty on high-impact variables such as the frequency of occurrence of extreme rainfall. Hence CMIP-style simulations have been found to be of limited use by what should be one of our key stakeholders, insurance risk modeling. Much of this uncertainty may be unnecessary since we know how sea surface temperatures and ice cover (SSTICs) have evolved over the past few decades and how the hydrological cycle has responded, so we should be using this information directly to constrain atmospheric and land-surface parameters. Moreover, all studies suggest a limited range of degrees of freedom in the large-scale externally-driven SSTIC change over the next few decades. Hence a powerful complementary approach to the CMIP 'emissions scenario driven' paradigm is the 'temperature scenario driven' approach under which a range of large-scale SSTIC changes are used to drive higher-resolution models, either directly or by relaxation in a simple model of the ocean mixed layer. This allows much larger ensembles and reduced bias over the recent observational period, providing a more systematic exploration of uncertainty in the atmospheric, hydrological and land-surface response. Detailed comparison with observations for the same years, including satellite-derived top-of-atmosphere fluxes, should allow much tighter constraints to be placed on atmospheric and land-surface parameters than is possible when coupled models are run free and comparisons are restricted to large-scale climatology and recent trends. A key challenge in quantitative comparison of simulated precipitation trends with observations is systematic biases in the location of precipitation features such as convergence zones. We will address this using image-warping techniques developed for neuro-imaging which have been demonstrated on a pilot scale to correct feature-location biases in climate models. These will also provide a powerful tool to detect externally-driven shifts in feature location, such as an expansion of the Hadley circulation. We will run large ensembles of global atmospheric/land-surface models driven with observed SSTICs over the past 60 years together with projected changes to 2040 derived from a broad range of sources, including CMIP-3, CMIP-5 and the UKCP09 and climateprediction.net perturbed physics ensembles. Repeat simulations of the past 60 years with the estimated signature of anthropogenic influence removed will be used to address how far recent observed changes in precipitation, land-surface variables and run-off can be attributed to human influence. Multi-thousand-member ensembles will allow the distribution of hydrological and land-surface variables to be mapped in detail, largely eliminating stochastic uncertainty from predictions of their underlying statistical moments. A representative subset of these simulations will be used to drive nested regional models over Europe, and the output used to drive run-off models to evaluate their utility for flood and drought risk modeling. The modeling framework will be made available to international partners to address other regions. All simulations will be performed using climateprediction.net public resource distributed computing, minimizing both their cost and environmental impact.