SECURE: SElf Conserving URban Environments

The U.K. population is projected to reach 80 million by 2050 and it is anticipated that the overwhelming majority will continue to live in cities. Besides becoming more densely populated, future cities will be surrounded with expanding urban areas. Interactions within cities; across urban areas and with surrounding cities, towns and 'rural' areas with the rest of the UK will place new and different demands on infrastructure, whether housing, energy, transport, freight distribution and disposal of waste. Decisions that are made now will have profound implications for the resultant pressures on transport, living space, energy use, and ecosystem services (the benefits humans receive from ecosystems). These decisions will play out at two fundamentally different spatial scales. First, and by far the better understood, are those decisions that concern individual households and their neighbourhoods. These include issues of how their members move around, what kinds of housing they occupy, how their energy demands and waste production are reduced, and how their negative influences on the wider environment generally will be limited. Second, broad scale strategic decisions regarding regional planning will determine where in the U.K. population growth is primarily accommodated. This will determine, and be shaped by, the kinds of transport and energy infrastructure required, and the environmental impacts. Obviously these two sets of decisions are not independent. The demands for and impacts of broad scale development (whether this be the creation of new urban areas or the intensification of existing ones) - and thus how this is best achieved to deliver sustainability- will be influenced not by the typical demands and impacts exhibited now by households, but by the way in which these have been changed in response to the modification to the associated infrastructure. This makes for a challenging problem in predicting and evaluating the possible consequences of different potential scenarios of regional development. The proposed study SElf Conserving URban Environments (SECURE) will address this grand challenge of integration across scales (the global aim) by developing a range of future regional urbanization scenarios, and exploring their consequences for selected high profile issues of resource demand and provision (transport, dwellings, energy, and ecosystem services) alongside sustainable waste utilisations. In doing so, it will build on findings of research outputs of several previous SUE projects and harness its relationship in the context of policy and economic growth. The study includes specific research objectives under five broad cross-cutting themes - Urbanisation, Ecosystems Services, Building and Energy, Stakeholder Engagement and Policy Integration across themes. SECURE is designed to assemble novel deliverables to bring about step change in current knowledge and practice. The North East Region will be used as a test bed and evaluation of transitional scenarios leading up to 2050 will quantify the benefits of integration across the scales through conservation across the themes. SECURE will deliver policy formulation and planning decisions for 2030 and 2050 with a focus on creating Sustainable Urban Environment.The contributors to this project are researchers of international standings who have collaborated extensively on several EPSRC funded projects, including the SUE research since its inception. The SECURE team builds on their current collaboration on the SUE2 4M project. The Project consortium is led by Newcastle - Prof Margaret Bell as PI and Dr Anil Namdeo as co-ordinator alongside Dr Jenny Brake with academic partners: Prof David Graham (Environmental Engineering), Prof David Manning (Geosciences); from Loughborough: Prof Kevin Lomas, Prof Jonathan Wright and Dr Steven Firth (Civil and Building Engineering); from Sheffield: Prof Kevin Gaston and Dr Jonathan Leake (Animal and Plant Sciences).

SECURE will develop a Regional Urbanisation Model that synthesises resource-supply-demand-waste systems across city-to-regional scales through the integration of three themes - Urbanisation (land use and transport), Energy (supply and demand) and Ecosystem Services (the benefits humans receive from ecosystems). The model will be used in consultation with 12 local authorities (LAs) in North East England to develop future urbanisation scenarios that will radically cut greenhouse gas emissions and optimise efficiency gains, exploring the consequences for key resource demand and provision at regional scales, to inform across regions, to national scales for the transition up to 2050. The LAs who will benefit are Tyne and Wear (Newcastle, Gateshead, North & South Tyneside and Sunderland), Northumberland, Durham and Tees Valley (Darlington, Hartlepool, Middlesbrough, Redcar & Cleveland and Stockton on Tees Borough Councils) - represented by the Association of North East Councils (ANEC). Our research will be complementary to their existing initiatives and will contribute substantially to provide the scientific evidence base to back-up and drive their policy decisions. The unique benefit (medium to long term) to the 12 LAs is enabling integrated policy actions to remove inefficiencies and substantially reduce demand delivering conservation of resources across the three themes. As a result there will be a better understanding of the complexities and interplay of activities between cities, towns and rural areas across the region, and their impact on energy supply and demand with respect to national targets. SECURE will encourage integrated policy leading to more sustainable practices for managing resources in the light of anticipated population growth and demand for 2050. In adopting a joined-up approach and securing economic, social and environmental benefits, SECURE will make a major contribution to the regional and national political agenda. The timescales of the SECURE project allows it to have some influence on the latter stages of the development of the new integrated regional strategy of the North East (the main beneficiaries being the 12 LAs, ANEC and the NE Regional Information Partnership). SECURE research will also benefit Northumbrian Water by providing a more comprehensive understanding of the complexities and interplay of activities among cities, towns and rural areas and implications to - the supply and demand for energy, especially approaches to managing household liquid and solid waste. SECURE will provide a wider understanding of the environmental impacts of transport at a Regional and National level to feed into the DfT's Delivering a Sustainable Transport System (DaSTS) programme and the Scottish Strategic Transport Review thus benefiting project stakeholders, e.g. DfT and transport consultants (Atkins, Jacobs). Electric vehicle manufacturers and stakeholders involved in this field, e.g. tnei, will benefit from SECURE research as it will investigate the potential market and role of electric vehicles for freight distribution as a bespoke and novel transport initiative and as a passenger car feeder into rail systems. SECURE will help strengthen business plans and the competitiveness of business of industrial partners, e.g. Aggregate Industries, Aecom, Graphite Resources, Northumbrian Water. SECURE will bring advantages to the core business of these stakeholders through a greater understanding and optimisation of resource management and associated financial benefits e.g., through carbon trading. SECURE will raise the national and international profile and competiveness of stakeholder organisations, academic partners and thus of the UK, in delivering tools and methodology for sustainable urban development. Finally, through insights to the public acceptability of Integrated Policies, which is a major aim of SECURE, it is anticipated that broad behaviours may begin to change.