Claire Walsh and Mark Powell are currently working with the Big Lottery funded, Greening Wingrove community partnership project.  This was established to encourage the people of Wingrove Ward (Newcastle) to ‘green’ their local area and explore more sustainable ways of living.

While much of Claire and Mark’s work has centred on exploring ways to evaluate the project’s success, they have also helped organise workshops that showcase CEG research, especially around flooding. The most recent workshop took place on Wednesday evening of last week, when CEG PhD student Eleanor Starkey presented at a local community event entitled, ‘When Water Engineers Meet Gardeners.’

This workshop was designed to showcase civil engineering approaches to managing urban flood risk and using models, illustrate the potential impact of extreme flood events on both the local Wingrove area and Newcastle City more generally. Eleanor revealed that while Wingrove is not an area particularly badly affected by floods, water runoff from this part of the city significantly impacts on other areas. Eleanor presented a reconstruction of the 2012 ‘Toon Monsoon’ and introduced the concept of Sustainable Drainage Systems (SuDS) and their possible multiple benefits. These measures not only slow down the speed of storm water runoff, which benefit the city as a whole, but also provide local householders with a water supply for use in the garden.

While encouraging individual households to keep a single water butt might appear to offer only minor benefits for larger flood management strategies, this might also encourage a more general interest in gardening and a cultural shift in how individuals choose to engage with their environment.

However, many Wingrove residents live in terraced properties with concrete yards, and therefore have limited access to land suitable for planting and growing.  One challenge for the Greening Wingrove Project is to encourage residents living in these areas to also take up the greening philosophy.  In an effort to identify new planting opportunities, Mark Ridsdill Smith has been running a series of project workshops on how to grow using containers and window boxes.  According to Mark, who writes a column in The Guardian on ‘Vertical Veg,’ a major problem for container growers is securing a reliable water supply. Installing a water butt for gardening use not only reduces costs it also makes for a much speedier watering operation. During the workshop, Mark demonstrated how to build different forms of water reservoir and irrigation systems, all fed from a water butt connected to domestic guttering down-pipe

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/mar/14/container-gardens-mark-ridsdill-smith

Eleanor and Mark Ridsdill-Smiths’ presentations revealed how installing a water butt in Wingrove has the potential to provide a range of interdependent benefits.  The water butt not only forms part of a Sustainable Drainage Systems (SuDS), it also offers a ready-made solution to the problem of container growing.  By encouraging local people to cultivate plants and enjoy the greening of previously concrete yards, the Wingrove Project seeks to generate new environmental perceptions and engagements that will have citywide benefits. To find out more about the Greening Wingrove project visit http://greeningwingrove.org.uk/ 

Over 600 people attended the Great Geoengineering Debate that took place at the 2014 European Geophysical Union meeting in Vienna on 29th April. A panel of experts, Prof. Ken Caldeira, Dr Krishna Kumar Kanikicharla, Prof. Mark Lawrence, Prof. Andreas Oschlies and CESER academic Dr Paul Quinn, debated the implications of climate engineering and whether there is an appetite to start Geoengineering experiments now as part of the Geoscience community agenda. A number of concerns were raised by the panel but more importantly the sentiment of the audience was very much against the idea of starting Geoengineering experiments now.

http://client.cntv.at/EGU2014/?play=48

STREAM PhD Student Matthew Holmes won the best presentation prize at the IWA’s UK conference for Young Water Professionals which was held at the University of Manchester, 23-25 April. The theme of the conference was, ‘What is smart?’, Matt’s presentation, ‘Resilient Infrastructure: Do loosely-coupled dependencies mediate the risk of cascading failure?’ covered his PhD work in collaboration with United Utilities, Severn Trent Water and Yorkshire Water. Congratulations Matt!

Matt is currently in the final year of the PhD STREAM Programme and is sponsored by United Utilities. STREAM is the Industrial Doctoral Centre for the Water Sector funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and companies who sponsor research projects. For more information about STREAM visit: http://www.stream-idc.net/index.php 

Newcastle University has 25 PhD scholarships available to excellent students.  The funding is available across all research areas of science and engineering – but Earth Systems Engineering has been identified as a priority theme.

CESER encourage applications across any relevant area, but please feel free to consider indicative topics listed here: http://www.ncl.ac.uk/ceser/phds/

For further information you can contact CESER members directly http://www.ncl.ac.uk/ceser/people/ and email the director at richard.dawson@newcastle.ac.uk

The deadline is tight – 28th March so please get in touch soon.

The Times Higher Education magazine has published an independent survey sharing the views of university staff working at 150 higher education institutions, across the country. They analysed the views of thousands of people to find out what we really think about where we work. 

The survey’s results are published in four key tables and Newcastle University is in the top five in all four categories:

• “I would recommend working at my university”
• “The leadership of my university is performing well”
• “My university offers a fair deal to its employees in terms of working conditions and benefits”
• “My work responsibilities allow for a healthy work-life balance”

To read the full article, follow this link .

To find out about jobs here and funded PhDs in areas infrastructure, sustainability and other areas