UK coasts provide recreation, transportation, commerce, natural beauty and food for coastal communities. However, they face interrelated challenges from issues such as climate change, coastal realignment, demographic shift and infrastructure development. Managing such issues can be difficult, with coasts and their seas providing diverse meanings and values for their stakeholders and communities. In this respect, coastal residents, users, and managers experience challenges in coherently and meaningfully attending to livelihoods, health and wellbeing, as well as natural biodiversity, ecosystem productivity and conservation. This complexity highlights the need to develop and evaluate fair and transferrable approaches to promote sustainable use of diverse coastal resources. This will be critical to strengthening resilience: the ability to anticipate, withstand, adjust to, and thrive after disruption and change. We consider five foundational types of capital resources shown to help coastal communities build resilience: human, social, natural, physical, and financial. Elsewhere, place-based policy interventions have been shown to strengthen these types of capital and help build resilience through developing stronger relationships between people, their location, and their environment. However, examples like education campaigns, enforcement initiatives, and community engagement are often designed through the lens of place-based histories, identities, and community values unique to the place where they are implemented. Such interventions may work in one place, but not the other, or may disparately strengthen certain capitals of local concern at the expense of others. We thus come to a conundrum. If policy interventions are influenced by place-based community values where they are designed and implemented, how can we take transferable lessons from one coastal community to another, using interventions that reliably account for each of the five capitals? ARISE: Advancing Resilience and Innovation for a Sustainable Environment, is designed to propose, develop and evaluate an intervention framework to practically address this puzzle. We will gather evidence to develop best-practice intervention methods, applicable across places and regions, focussed on achieving balanced strengthening across each of the five capitals.

Along the well-to-wake value chain from upstream processes associated with fuels production and supply, components manufacture, and ships construction to the operation of ports and vessels, the UK domestic and international shipping produced 5.9 Mt CO2eq and 13.8 Mt CO2eq, respectively in 2017, totalling 3.4% of the UK's overall greenhouse gas emissions. The sector contributes significantly to air pollution challenges with emissions of nitrogen oxide, sulphur dioxide and particulate matters, harming human health and the environment particularly in coastal areas. The annual global market for maritime emission reduction technologies could reach $15 billion by 2050. This provides substantial economic opportunities for the UK. The Department for Transport's Clean Maritime Plan provides a route map for action on infrastructure, economics, regulation, and innovation that covers high technology readiness level (TRL 3-7). There is a genuine opportunity to explore fundamental research and go beyond conventional marine engineering and naval architecture and exploit the UK's world-leading cross-sectoral fundamental research expertise on hydrodynamics, fuels, combustion, electric machines and power electronics, batteries and fuel cells, energy systems, digitization, management, finance, logistics, safety engineering, etc. The proposed UK-MaRes Hub is a multidisciplinary research consortium and will conduct interdisciplinary research focussed on delivering disruptive solutions which have tangible potential to transform existing practice and reach a zero-carbon future by 2050. The challenges faced by UK maritime activity and their solutions are generally common but when deployed locally, they are bespoke due to the specifics of the port, the vessels they support, and the dependencies on their supply chains. Implementation will be heavily dependent on the local community, existing infrastructure, as well as opportunities and constraints related to the supply, distribution, storage and bunkering of alternative fuels, in decarbonising port handling facilities and cold-ironing, with the integration of renewable energy, reducing air pollution, to land-use and increased capacity and capability, and the local development of skills. The types of vessels and the cargoes handled through UK ports varies and are related to several factors, such as geographical location, regional industrial and business activity and wider transport links. Therefore, UK-MaRes Hub aims to feed into a clean maritime strategy that can adapt to place-based challenges and provide targeted technical and socio-economic interventions through a novel Co-innovation Methodology. This will bring together Research Exploration themes/work packages and Responsive Research Fund project activity into focus on port-centric scenarios and assess possibilities to innovate and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, 2040 and 2050 timeframes, sharing best practice across the whole maritime ecosystem. A diverse, and inclusive Clean Maritime Network+ will ensure wider dissemination and knowledge take-up to achieve greater impact across UK ports and other maritime activity. The Network+ will have coordinated regional activity in South-West, Southern, London, Yorkshire & Lincolnshire, Midlands, North-West, North-East, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. An already established Clean Maritime Research Partnership has vibrant academic, industrial, and civic stakeholder members from across the UK. UK-MaRes Hub will establish a Clean Maritime Policy Unit to provide expert advice and quantitative evidence to enable rapid decarbonisation of the maritime sector. It will ensure that the UK-MaRes Hub is engaging with policymakers at all stages of the hub activities.