A special issue on Earth Systems Engineering, following from the successful ESE2012 symposium that was held in Newcastle, has now been published in ‘Engineering Sustainability’ Volume 166, Issue 5 – you can view and download the papers, including the editorial by Richard Dawson here:

http://www.icevirtuallibrary.com/content/issue/ensu/166/5

Delegates at ESE symposium

Professor Richard Dawson, Director of the Centre for Earth Systems Engineering Research named to the Urban Climate Change Research Network (UCCRN) – a team of international climate scientists pledged to help cities.

Professor Richard Dawson has been named a key member of an international effort by top climate scientists to help cities around the world address the causes and consequences of climate change, according to Dr. Cynthia Rosenzweig of NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University’s Earth Institute in New York City. Rosenzweig is a founder of the Urban Climate Change Research Network (UCCRN). Richard Dawson is a member of the Network, andalso sits on the Steering Group. The UCCRN includes a group of approximately 500 researchers in cities located throughout the world.

More than half of the world’s population now lives in urban centres, many of them located in coastal or delta areas. Because of topography and population density, cities are disproportionately vulnerable to weather extremes like flooding from storm surges and heat waves. Cities are important economic engines, promoting economic development and providing jobs that support their own residents as well as large numbers of families outside city boundaries. They are also a source of some of the most innovative efforts to reduce greenhouse gases. In addition, says Rosenzweig, “Cities, not central national governments, already lead the action on responding to climate change. Our job is to help by providing the strongest possible physical and social science information and state-of-the-art knowledge so cities can prepare for rising temperatures and changing patterns of extreme weather events, and soften their impacts when they hit.”

Richard Dawson is a member of the expert team that will produce an assessment on the impacts and vulnerabilities in cities and their infrastructure, but also the mechanisms available to reduce these risks and their greenhouse gas emissions. The work is part of a larger effort by UCCRN to produce a resource for guiding cities in their response to climate change. The Second UCCRN Assessment Report on Climate Change and Cities (ARC3-2) will be published in 2015 and will cover a range of issues, from urban health to food to water and energy systems, transportation, economics and private finance, and governance. This will be the second major Assessment Report. City mayors praised the first, published in 2011, as a practical, action-oriented resource.

As part of the British Science Festival 2013 being hosted at Newcastle University, researchers, staff, lecturers and students were invited to contribute to a comic being developed and designed by local comic enthusiasts. The comic was officially targeting children between the ages of 8-13, with a view to promoting STEM subjects and science in general. The proposed content of the comic had, you guessed it, a distinctly scientific theme to it, with organisers interested in hearing from those staff members who could fit their work (or at least make it look like their work fits) in to one of the following themes:

• Robots
• Explosions and danger
• Dinosaurs
• Space, time and travel
• Very big and very small things
• Things we eat, and things that eat us
• Codes, ciphers and hidden messages
• Heroes and villains
• Matters of life and death

Some of the work related to networks, connectivity and infrastructure that is currently being conducted within the context of the Infrastructure Transitions Research Consortium (ITRC – www.itrc.org.uk) and also within the School of Civil Engineering and Geosciences, seemed like something that kids could be interested in, and the idea of presenting this type of work within a comic context offered an alternative and novel mechanism for communicating our research. Once an expression of interest in contributing to the comic had been lodged, it was simply a case of meeting an artist and writer assigned by the organising committee, and beginning to think about what a comic to represent networks, connectivity and infrastructure should look like! In fact, largely due to the expertise and imagination of the artist I had been assigned (Terry Wiley), the ideas began to come together, and rather than stick to the traditional panel-based approach we decided on more of a spider diagram affair to communicate how different bits of infrastructure are connected together. However I still wish we had managed to get our idea of slightly transparent paper with networks hidden until the page was held up to the light, to fly to communicate the idea of hidden or non-obvious connections! Oh well, maybe next time. For all those interested, the comic, entitled “Asteroid Belter”,  in hard copy format was distributed at the British Science Festival 2013 (7^th-12^th September), but more information about it can be found here.

Post by David Alderson