Flooding has a big impact on people's lives.
Living With Environmental Change played a major role in putting together the funding from partners and enabling partners to participate in the National Ecosystem Assessment.
'It is a tremendous achivement to have published the National Ecoystem Assessment' says Andrew Watkinson, Director of Living With Environmental Change. 'Information from the report has been fed through to policy makers developing the Natural Environment White Paper and Living With Environmental Change has helped to spread the knowledge to organisations with a role to play in deliverying ecosystem services, such as non-governmental organisations and the devolved administrations.'
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| UKNEA_SynthesisReport.zip | 6.33 MB |
This 12' video about Ocean Acidification created by Plymouth Marine Laboratory for the Natural Environment Research Council is to be featured at an LWEC knowledge exchange good practice sharing event on 11 July 2011.
Vulnerable people to benefit from health/research collaboration on climate change.
The summer heat wave that hit Britain in 2006 caused an estimated 2000 excess deaths. For hospitals, such statistics are particularly concerning. Overheating is already starting to pose problems for patients, as well as staff, and rising temperatures could badly compromise future care.
“Hospital patients are vulnerable people and liable to suffer disproportionately when temperatures climb”, says Professor Alan Short of Cambridge University.
Funded by the LWEC-accredited Adaptation and Resilience to a Changing Climate initiative, Professor Short is leading a pioneering collaborative project – Design and Delivery of Robust Hospital Environments in a Changing Climate.
“We’re looking at how existing hospital buildings can be redesigned to adapt to and mitigate climate change.”
NHS Trusts in Bradford, Cambridge, Leicester and West Hertfordshire are taking part, enabling the team to collect real-world data and devise practical measures that enhance climate resilience and help cut the NHS’s annual £0.5 billion energy bill and 18 million-tonne carbon footprint. Installing better heating controls, removing false walls and ceilings, reducing glazed areas and introducing shading are just some of the potential pathways that could achieve results.
For hospitals like Bradford’s Royal Infirmary and St Luke’s Hospital, the value of participating is clear. “It’s critical that hospitals can deliver effective and sustainable patient care that isn’t undermined by climate change and that’s consistent with carbon and energy saving targets”, says Ian Hinitt of the Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. “With their diverse building stock, our hospitals are the perfect crucible for trialling a range of measures that could be replicated by other hospitals at home and abroad.”
Watch a film about the work here http://upload.sms.cam.ac.uk/media/1152091
Future economic growth will be undermined unless we understand the full value of the natural world on which our wealth, health and well-being depend.
This is one of the messages from the UK’s first National Ecosystem Assessment report, published earlier this month (June).
The report highlights the considerable economic value of our environment and also shows the environment's very real benefits to health, community and wellbeing - things that are beyond price.
Until now, the many services and benefits provided by natural processes have been ignored or degraded because their economic, social and even spiritual value falls outside traditional economics. The National Ecosystem Assessment develops new ways of assessing and valuing so-called ecosystem services so that we can make our current economic and business models more robust.
Economist, Ian Bateman, is one of over 500 experts from many different fields of knowledge who have contributed to this undertaking. In our interview, Ian explains what the services are that nature provides and why you would want to put a monetary value on these services.