The Noah to Now fellowship charts a centuries-long fascination with flooding in the literature of England's coastal and estuary communities across time. It sets this deep cultural history within the context of the heightened flood risks facing coastal and estuary communities now and in future, focusing on three case-study regions: Humber and Lincolnshire, London and South-East, and Bristol and South-West. The project asks how we harness the power of historical flood stories to build future resilience to flooding in England's coastal and estuary communities, and how we work within the framework of new UK Government strategy for teaching sustainability and climate change to embed arts and humanities approaches to flooding in primary schools. The IPCC (2022) have reported that climate change is increasing the frequency and severity of coastal flood hazards, and the Environment Agency's National Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Management Strategy for England (2022) notes an urgent need to cultivate 'climate resilience' in coastal regions. But there are also significant challenges to coproducing climate action in some English coastal and estuary communities where embedded inequalities are not only impacting on education and wellbeing but on environmental resilience. We know fiction can play a key role in communicating flood risk, and research has shown how stories of living with water and flood that are rooted in local literatures and histories can help make the global story of rising seas locally meaningful. We therefore need to equip communities at risk of flooding with the necessary cultural capital to enable them to communicate, contextualise, and historicise today's water risks in locally meaningful ways. 'Noah to Now' addresses this research gap by providing the first, in-depth account of how the centuries-long experience of living with flood risk in England's coastal and estuary regions leaves its mark on the distinctive literary identities that these cultures of risk help create. The project charts connections between literature and the lived experience of flooding across the longue durée - from Chaucer to contemporary climate fiction - and reads literature through a distinctive interdisciplinary lens that draws on Environmental History approaches to water risk management and participatory research methods from Cultural Geography. The project pilots arts and humanities approaches to teaching the topic of flooding in primary schools by collaborating with project partner Hull Music Service; with six primary schools located in areas of Hull and Grimsby that have been identified by UK Government as priorities for flood risk awareness campaigns; and with a production team led by artistic director, Lisa Coates to co-produce public performances of Benjamin Britten's children's opera, 'Noyes Fludde' (1958), at Hull and Grimsby Minsters. The project will measure the impact of these collaborations on flood risk awareness and resilience via stakeholder interviews, audience evaluations, and ethnographic observations of young people, and will use fieldwork findings from our case study region to inform recommendations for future uses of flood stories in classrooms and communities across England. Outputs include a monograph, journal article and conference presentations; a collection of digital curriculum resources for teaching flooding through the arts and humanities in primary schools; and policy publications targeted at national and international education policy audiences. The fellowship's findings will therefore be wide-reaching and transformative: for the disciplines of English, Education, Environmental History, and Cultural Geography; for coastal and estuary communities; for national sustainability and climate change education strategy; and for young people, who are likely to be most impacted by future flood risks and who therefore have most need for the arts and humanities-led adaptation strategies we co-develop here.

Water is an important driver for many environmental processes and can be key in the timing, scale and impact of natural hazards. Floods, landslides, storms and droughts are becoming more frequent and intense under climate and land use change. These water-related hazards pose direct impacts (e.g., damage to buildings, crops and infrastructure, and loss of life and property), and indirect impacts (e.g., losses in productivity and livelihoods, increased investment risk, indebtedness and human health impacts) to society, both acutely and at longer timescales. Traditional methods for assessing, monitoring, analysing, forecasting and disseminating water-related hazards are poorly connected or standalone and, this combined with the complex interactions between rain, river flow, groundwater and tides, make it difficult to predict and understand flooding. Recent advancements in digital technology, communications, numerical modelling and Earth Observations (E.G. remote sensed satellite data) allow many of the limitations of traditional methods to be overcome through the integrated, holistic approach of a Digital Twin (DT). A digital twin is dynamic virtual copy of a physical asset, process, system or environment that looks like?and behaves in real time identically to its real-world partner. For flooding, a digital twin approach is timely, as we can now leverage Earth Observation and large telemetered datasets to inform numerical models of catchment properties in real-time, allowing scenario analysis, forecasting and interpolation to be undertaken with less delay. This also allows the rapid 'gaming' of management scenarios/solutions where practitioners or users of the DT can try out different management methods or scenarios to see if this helps flooding before the events themselves. Through a programme of Earth Observation, sensor and network integration, modelling, data infrastructure development and stakeholder engagement, our project will build a digital twin for water-related hazard forecasting and decision-making for Hull and the East Riding of Yorkshire, a region heavily impacted by complex hydrometeorological hazards. The novelty of our approach is the co-production of the DT in collaboration with multi sectoral end users, as well as our engagement with one of the more complex environmental ecosystems (hydrology and flooding) in terms of data integration and the physical processes involved. This is a 15 month £700k project for the NERC TWINE (developing pilots for environmental digital twin) call. It involves interdisciplinary collaboration between natural and social science researchers from The University of Hull (Modelling, SUDs), Imperial College, London (Remote sensing and surface hydrology), British Geological Survey (Groundwater modelling and digital twin integration) and the University of Western England (investigating stakeholder end user interactions with DT's).

Climate change, a multifaceted challenge interwoven with social, economic, and environmental dimensions, defies simplistic solutions. Despite global efforts, the pursuit of sustainability has fallen short, hindered by a narrow technical focus. This limited perspective has impeded the development of integrated, context-specific solutions. In response, AGREE champions transformative sustainability, emphasising interdisciplinary methodologies and societal shifts. It explores the intricate link between cultural heritage governance, climate adaptation, and community resilience, rooted in responses to flooding in urban contexts. AGREE promotes the Historic Urban Landscape concept for integrative decision-making in climate adaptation, considering community resilience amidst environmental changes. An interactive Geographic Information System (GIS) platform will illuminate this interplay over time. An innovative AGREE's contribution is a decision-making model grounded in the HUL paradigm. This model juxtaposes current national and local policies enabling cultural heritage integration in climate adaptation with historical data sources revealing urban resilience lessons and changes in the built environment over time. AGREE employs transformative governance concepts to evaluate decision-makers' comprehension of these synergies and their perspectives. It advances transformative climate adaptation by uncovering potentials and barriers within heritage governance in case studies from the UK, Norway, and Italy. Beyond research, AGREE will shape policies with multi-scalar and cross-sectoral governance, interpreting climate intricacies through cultural heritage. It will strengthen global, national, and local heritage-focused climate strategies through partnerships with the British Council, ICCROM, and the UK's Department for Culture, Media, and Sport and local stakeholders, such as Hull City Council (UK) and Innlandet Region (Norway). AGREE also engages the public, raising climate adaptation awareness and mobilising collective action, benefiting governmental climate efforts.

This project brings together a team of researchers at the University of Hull and three external stakeholder groups - Hull City Council; Groundwork and Probe - to explore how Citizen Inquiry methodologies and digital technologies can improve the quality of research that has public value. An important part of our work is to ensure our research is informed and used by the people who live in the communities around us. Citizen Science is a way of designing research that involves the general public or 'citizens' as contributors and collaborators in the project. There are various methods that we can use to carry out these inquiries but there are also many barriers and challenges that typically hinder academic researchers in universities from engaging the general public with Citizen Science. One of these is small participation rates and participation which is biased towards white, middle-aged and higher-income people (Defra, 2015) This is an issue that the project will challenge by exploring how researchers and the public can co-design research designed that meets the needs of a more diverse range of the population, particularly hard to reach and under-represented communities - the communities that we most want to work with. One approach is called Citizen Inquiry which is more participatory in nature and can involve the public is designing the research, collecting and analyzing data and sharing the findings. Digital technologies, such as mobile phones, often play a significant part in this process and this project will explore their effectiveness in engaging groups that are seen as hard to reach and traditionally reluctant to engage in citizen science, such as young people. The primary aim of the project is to explore how to convince academic researchers that Citizen Science is worthwhile and can add value to their research. We contend that Citizen Inquiry with its greater participatory approach is more likely to achieve this, through, for example, helping researchers to design more effective research questions that focus on issues of greater value to the public. To explore and verify this assumption the project will work with a specific cohort of researchers at the University of Hull who are currently exploring the issue of plastics waste as part of a larger project on plastics funded by the EPSRC. These researchers are part of a team working in what is referred to as the Plastics Collaboratory at the University of Hull. The project will investigate the barriers that traditionally inhibit these researchers from engaging more with the public in the research process itself and those that inhibit the three stakeholder groups themselves from working more closely with the research community. In the first phase of the project (January - February 2020) this will involve interviews and focus groups with a cross-section of participants from these different communities, leading to a project report and set of recommendations. In the second phase of the project (March-April, 2020), the research community and the three stakeholder groups will be brought together in a collaborative half-day workshop to share their collective wisdom on the issue and to explore how they might use Citizen Inquiry methodologies in the future. This workshop will include practical, hands-on-sessions to explore how mobile technologies and particular apps can be used to undertake Citizen Inquiry projects, laying down a foundation for further activities and engagement beyond the lifetime of the project itself which, if funded, will run from January to April, 2020. The project will conclude in April 2020 with an open conference bringing together researchers and interested stakeholder groups to share the findings from the research and to explore further opportunities to design collaborative research projects and seek additional funding.

From earliest times people have used hard skeletal tissues, such as bone, antler, ivory, horn, baleen (whalebone) and tortoiseshell, as raw material to create almost everything from simple tools to subtle and evocative works of art. Working these raw materials can greatly change their appearance and decay processes can render them almost unrecognisable. Today animal hard tissues have almost entirely been replaced as raw material for artefacts by metallic alloys and synthetic plastics, and wildlife conservation concerns have made some unavailable and unacceptable. With the passing of these raw materials, familiarity with their characteristics and properties has been lost, posing a challenge for those who work with historic and prehistoric artefacts, and to the detection of illegally trafficked, CITES protected materials. The correct identification of these materials is, however, fundamental to understanding the cultural significance, preservation needs and authenticity of these objects. Research is already in hand to refine and develop identification protocols through the collation, evaluation and validation of visual criteria and analytical techniques. This work has made great strides in improving our confidence in recognising, for instance, objects made in different species of ivory or in separating real tortoiseshell from fakes in horn or plastic. Using low-power microscopy, this can be done without the need to take disfiguring samples and at no risk to the object, by revealing the materials structure and patterns of degradation. However, like wood, these are complex 3D materials that can look and behave entirely differently depending on how they are worked and which aspects are revealed in the surfaces of an object. To interpret the evidence correctly it is necessary to understand the orientation of the object in terms of the material's natural structure. This is particularly difficult when similarly worked specimens of these materials are not available for comparison with the object being studied. Even if some of these raw materials, such as rhino horn, were available, it would be illegal (and questionable ethically) to prepare worked specimens. Using printed or web resources, illustrated by 2D diagrams and photographs to convey the detail of these complex structures, success largely relies on the ability of the user to think in 3D, and will not always lead to the correct identification. To overcome these problems, this project will develop a web-based resource for the 3D visualisation of the structures of these animal tissues. At its core will be a fully-rotatable 3D photo-realistic image of each raw material, a 3D diagram of its structure and 3D X-rays (CT scans) revealing the internal shape and structure. Zooming-in, the surface of the material can be explored at different scales with 'hot-spots' linking to photographs at a range of magnifications showing the structures revealed when it is cut in different directions, worked in different ways, fractured, aged or degraded. Once the correct material has been identified, it will be possible to orientate images of the object against the framework of the 3D model by matching the features revealed on the surface of an object with those indicated in the model. This will aid understanding of how the raw material was utilised and provide estimates of the size of the original tissue used, such as the minimum dimensions of the elephant tusk required to provide the material for a sculpture. Supported by on-line tutorials, this interactive visualisation resource will not only improve the accuracy of materials identification but will be an invaluable tool for researchers exploring the way that these raw materials have been used in the manufacture of artefacts, whether functional tools, devotional objects or fine art, across all time periods and geographical zones.