Children spend 30% of their time in school. Thermal comfort in classrooms has been extensively researched but we know little about outdoor exposures, like those taking place in school playgrounds where children may spend up to one third of their time at school. Outdoor play is important for children's health and wellbeing and outdoor learning experiences are effective in developing cognitive skills. Many of the playgrounds are in dense urban areas where the outdoor temperatures are exacerbated. Children are one of the population groups most disproportionately affected by the extreme climatic conditions and regularly identified as a vulnerable group with respect to heat-health and climate change. In the design and evaluations of children's spaces, typically, adult heat budget models are used scaled to children's proportions. These models may be resulting in large discrepancies in comfort as well as physiological strain for the children population, due to the inaccurate assumptions employed in the models and due to their lack of a children-based validation. Therefore, there is an urgent need to better understand children's thermal comfort in outdoor spaces, particularly schoolyards, to deliver spaces that are effective in promoting outdoor activity and keep children safe across the seasons, especially given the increasingly frequent hot periods. The project aims to develop models and guidelines that ensure outdoor spaces in schools provide comfort conditions which reflect children's thermal state, along with preferences and expectations and are resilient to climate change. The research objectives are the development of outdoor thermal comfort models for children and thresholds for thermal comfort, while accounting for different forms of adaptation and habituation specifically for children, to evaluate the potential impact of different climate change scenarios, concluding with the development of guidance for the design of the schools' open spaces. This will be achieved by the complementary expertise of four UK universities (Kent, Brunel, Loughborough and Portsmouth) supported by the Department for Education (DfE), Greater London Authority (GLA), London Climate Change Programme (LCCP), The Chartered Institution of Building Service Engineer (CIBSE)-Resilient Cities Special Interest Group, Arup, Atkins, and the Met Office. The project will carry out measurements and thermal comfort surveys in six primary schools selected from dense urban areas in different parts of the UK to account for different climatic zones and socio-economic backgrounds. This will allow the development of empirical comfort models based on extensive field studies. Detailed laboratory data on exposures of children in climatic chambers will further investigate a wide range of parameters, which cannot be captured through surveys. Simulations will be carried out based on data from the schools to study how physical parameters and microclimate of the playground impact on children's thermal comfort. Design studies will be performed (based on data collected from surveys, laboratory and simulations) to propose solutions. The resilience of the solutions will be investigated using climate change weather data. The models and guidelines of the project will be of benefit to a range of beneficiaries within and outside Higher Education including academics in the different disciplines, school communities, professionals in the related fields (e.g. engineers, architects, specialist consultants), professional association and standardisation bodies, planners and policy makers. Representatives from the different user groups will participate in the Stakeholders Advisory Board, along with the DfE, a key partner for the project.

Biochar is a circular and ecological solution to manage waste that is not recyclable. It is a charcoal-like substance, produced by heating organic biomass from biodegradable municipal, agriculture and forestry waste in the absence of oxygen (pyrolysis) to make it carbon-rich and chemically-stable offering enormous potential to combat climate change. Many forms of biochar use and application are emerging including its use as a building material. The use of biochar as low as 1% replacement of the fine aggregate in cementitious composites has been found to improve the compressive strength by approximately 10%. As well as having excellent insulating properties, improving air quality, being able to soak up moisture and protect from radiation, biochar also allows buildings to be turned into carbon sinks. The project vision is to provide a decision support framework to enhance the use of biochar within the UK building industry to make a significant contribution to fight climate change. The aim is to increase the level of awareness of biochar and its commercial, healthy revenue generation potential, carbon credits and environmental benefits for the building industry. We will carry out detailed analysis of the inclusion of different types of biochar in varying quantities in cementitious composites such as concrete, bricks, plaster, and grout. The physical, mechanical, and chemical properties of these composites such as concrete will be studied to understand their performance, overall durability and thermal conductivity for applications within buildings. In parallel to this these biochar composites would also run through building modelling to investigate contribution to energy savings and enhanced thermal efficiency in buildings. We will compare carbon savings with standard building construction for chosen building archetypes. The savings achieved will help us to assess the value of biochar in construction. Our interdisciplinary approach includes the participation and collaboration of stakeholders to generate qualitative and quantitative indicators to express, holistically, the value of biochar in modern low-carbon construction. Through an integrative stakeholder approach, this project aims to explore (a) the awareness of the commercial and revenue generation potential of biochar (b) its potential to realise carbon credits and environmental benefits for the built environment as well as (c) subjective perceptions of the overall value attached to biochar and the interest and motivation to increase its usage within the built environment sector. To share the outcomes of our research and to identify next steps for promoting the use of biochar in the UK we will use qualitative approaches to carefully design a series of events and workshops. True innovation in the built environment is highly dependent on national policy, building standards, urban regulations, construction codes, market conditions and financial mechanisms which facilitate or obstruct the emergence of innovative solutions. We will be therefore speaking to multi-stakeholders including policy makers, energy ministers, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero and to understand the effectiveness, readiness, cost, social acceptability and limitations of biochar as the building material. We will illicit concerns, attitudes, challenges and opportunities for the biochar application within buildings and identify ways of how best to adapt legal regulations regarding production and usage of biochar and associated carbon credits. The final outcome being a decision support framework for practitioners in adopting biochar as a sustainable construction material with indicators proposed would be transferrable to other new (or less used) materials.

The UK uses around 50 GW of energy to heat and cool buildings, only 6% of which comes from renewable sources. Reducing building sector emissions is an essential part of the UK's decarbonisation strategy for achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2050. However, heat is challenging to decarbonise due to its extreme seasonality. Daily heat demand ranges from around 15 to 150 GW, so new technologies with inter-seasonal storage are essential. Heating buildings in winter and cooling them in summer produces waste heat or cool that is currently lost. We propose a technology to instead store this and re-use when required, by warming or cooling groundwater that is pumped underground and stored in an aquifer (porous rock mass). In summer, warm water is stored to provide heating in winter; in winter, cool water is stored to provide cooling in summer. This technology is termed aquifer thermal energy storage (ATES) and has been widely applied in other countries, notably the Netherlands where there are over 2500 ATES installations. These have shown that the technology is highly efficient, recycling up to 90% of the energy that would otherwise be wasted. ATES can be deployed with renewable electricity sources, storing excess output to help ease the challenges of integrating >40 GW of intermittent offshore wind energy. The UK has only a handful of projects, mainly located in London and supplying less than 0.025% of UK demand. Yet it has high potential for ATES: there are seasonal variations in temperature and widespread aquifers where heat and cool can be stored. Moreover, there is increasing demand for cooling as well as heating, as summers become hotter and longer. Experience in other countries has shown that widespread deployment of ATES can be prevented by technical, economic and societal barriers, such as uncertainty in the response of aquifers to energy storage, a lack of knowledge of the economic value and decarbonisation potential of the technology, and lack of public understanding or acceptance. This project brings together geoscientists, geoengineers, economists and social scientists to address key barriers to deployment of ATES in the UK, proposing solutions that inform government policy, the regulatory framework, planning authorities, and energy and infrastructure companies. The project integrates four key strands, combining technical geoscience and geoengineering research with economics and social science research. This integrated approach is essential to address deployment barriers. Our overall goal is to deliver solutions and recommendations that facilitate an increase the capacity of ATES in the UK to several GW (a thousand-fold increase on current capacity) with projects widely deployed across the UK. Our research will determine the UK capacity for ATES, linking supply and demand and creating maps for policy makers and planners. We will understand how a key UK aquifer responds to ATES by conducting field trials and laboratory experiments. We will identify strategies to deploy and operate ATES systems that maximize storage capacity and efficiency, while accounting for uncertainties in aquifer behaviour that are inevitable when engineering natural systems. Our economic research will quantify the economic value of ATES, accounting for the lifecycle costs of installation and operation, and the added value that ATES can deliver to the wider energy system storing excess renewable energy from wind and solar in times of low demand. We will quantify the decarbonisation potential of ATES in a lifecycle context, so it can be objectively compared against other low carbon heating and cooling options. Our social science research will ensure responsible deployment of ATES, promoting the co-design of ATES projects in line with societal priorities and values. It will use international examples to identify best practice, and identify and quantify broader societal benefits, such as the potential to develop a demand for skilled jobs.