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In order to effectively model the potential impacts of future climate change, there is a requirement for climate data inputs which (a) are of high spatial and temporal resolution, (b) explore a range of future climate change scenarios, (c) are consistent with historical observations in the historical period, and (d) provide an exploration of climate model uncertainty. This paper presents a suite of climate projections for the United Kingdom that conform to these requirements: CHESS-SCAPE. CHESS-SCAPE is a 1 km resolution dataset containing 11 near-surface meteorological variables that can be used to as input to many different impact models. The variables are available at several time resolutions, from daily to decadal means, for the years 1980–2080. It was derived from the state-of-the art regional climate projections in the United Kingdom Climate Projections 2018 (UKCP18) regional climate model (RCM) 12 km ensemble, downscaled to 1 km using a combination of physical and empirical methods to account for local topographic effects. CHESS-SCAPE has four ensemble members, which were chosen to span the range of temperature and precipitation change in the UKCP18 ensemble, representing the ensemble climate model uncertainty. CHESS-SCAPE consists of projections for four emissions scenarios, given by the Representative Concentration Pathways 2.6, 4.5, 6.0 and 8.5, which were derived from the UKCP18 RCM RCP8.5 scenarios using time shifting and pattern scaling. These correspond to UK annual warming projections of between 0.9–1.9 K for RCP2.6 up to 2.8–4.3 K for RCP8.5 between 1980–2000 and 2060–2080. Little change in annual precipitation is projected, but larger changes in seasonal precipitation are seen with some scenarios projecting large increases in precipitation in the winter (up to 22 %) and large decreases in the summer (up to - 39 %). All four RCP scenarios and ensemble members are also provided with bias correction, using the CHESS-met historical gridded dataset as a baseline. With high spatial and temporal resolution, an extensive range of warming scenarios and multiple ensemble members, CHESS-SCAPE provides a comprehensive data resource for modellers of climate change impacts in the UK. The CHESS-SCAPE data are available for download from the NERC EDS Centre for Environmental Data Analysis: 10.5285/8194b416cbee482b89e0dfbe17c5786c. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Permaculture is a growing but little researched phenomenon emphasising care for the environment, equity, fair treatment of people and working with—and not against—nature. It thus represents a potential alternative to business as usual, capable of addressing fundamental challenges posed by human‐made climate change. The paper examines a previously ignored site of entrepreneurship by taking a practice perspective, exploring connections between the practice and growth of permaculture and institutional entrepreneurship. It assesses practice‐related and institutional factors affecting the start‐up and operation of permaculture enterprises in the United Kingdom. The study maps and surveys UK Permaculture Association members who have started up their own business and reports on qualitative data from personal interviews with twenty of them. Data analysis employs NVivo software and involves thematic analysis pertaining to the practice, institutional biographies and institutional portfolios of permaculture entrepreneurs. The findings show the importance of permaculture activists' institutional biographies and institutional portfolios to the start‐up and operation of permaculture enterprises and for shaping permaculture‐related practice. The contribution of the paper lies in how it balances attention to individual agency with subfield‐specific, organisational field and macrosocial factors in understanding 'beyond profit' entrepreneurship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The science of climate change is full of uncertainty, but the greater vulnerability of poor countries to the impacts of climate change is one aspect that is widely acknowledged. This paper adapts Dryzek''s ‘components’ approach to discourse analysis to explore the media construction of climate change and development in UK ‘quality’ newspapers between 1997 and 2007. Eight discourses are identified from more than 150 articles, based on the entities recognised, assumptions about natural relationships, agents and their motives, rhetorical devices and normative judgements. They show a wide range of opinions regarding the impacts of climate change on development and the appropriate action to be taken. Discourses concerned with likely severe impacts have dominated coverage in the Guardian and the Independent since 1997, and in all four papers since 2006. Previously discourses proposing that climate change was a low development priority had formed the coverage in the Times and the Telegraph. The classification of different discourses allows an inductive, nuanced analysis of the factors influencing representation of climate change and development issues; an analysis which highlights the role of key events, individual actors, newspaper ideology and wider social and political factors. Overall the findings demonstrate media perceptions of a rising sense of an impending catastrophe for the developing world that is defenceless without the help of the West, perpetuating to an extent views of the poor as victims. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The Low Carbon Futures project, funded by the Adaptation and Resilience in a Changing Climate (ARCC) Programme, has the objective of using the latest UK climate projections (UKCP’09) to assess overheating in a range of domestic and non-domestic buildings. As these climate projections are probabilistic in nature, and dynamic building simulation is being used by the project to assess building performance, the information produced is vast. To understand how to filter this data into a useable tool that can interact with current building practices, the project has commissioned a range of focus groups to obtain practitioner feedback. These focus groups provide guidance on how buildings are currently designed with respect to overheating but also how future overheating risk assessments, incorporating probabilistic climate projections, might be carried out. This paper describes the assimilation of all this research into a coherent building simulation methodology that could be used by building practitioners to assess future overheating risks of a range of buildings, and provide guidance for applying adaptation solutions to prevent defined comfort thresholds being exceeded. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: This paper develops tools to assess regional drought events based on limited periods of record and applies them to regional climate model output to examine potential future changes in drought due to increased greenhouse gases. The drought metric was defined as a monthly time series of standardized 12-month precipitation accumulations. Regional drought events were characterised by determining the severity, area, duration and frequency of dry periods. In order to improve statistical inference of drought events, a drought generator was adopted to synthesis a large number of events trained on the available data. In nearly all cases, the drought generator produces synthetic events with drought characteristics statistically indistinguishable from the training data. Severity–Area–Frequency (SAF) curves and Area–Probability (Area–P) curves could then be constructed from the synthetic data to determine the return period of a drought event of a given severity covering a given area. These techniques were applied to observations and to output from the Hadley Centre regional climate model (HadRM3). HadRM3, when driven by climate reanalysis data, has good correlation with the observed drought metric. HadRM3 also captures the timing of observed dry periods but not the relative seriousness of any particular period. Natural variability is large with regional drought characteristics highly dependent on the time period covered by the training data. Although the synthetic drought characteristics of HadRM3 generally overlap with the observed natural variability; the model slightly overestimates the area of observed drought; underestimate its frequency; and underestimate the severity at any given area. HadRM3 projections of changes in drought characteristics over the second half of the 21st century under increased atmospheric greenhouse gases hint at an increase in the severity of drought. However, any changes are not readily distinguishable from natural variability or projection uncertainty. Therefore it is not yet possible to robustly predict changes in UK meteorological droughts arising from increased greenhouse gasses. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Biological recording is a long-established feature of amateur natural history in Britain. Phenology (the recording of seasonal events) in particular has provided scientists with important long-term data sets. These data are of increasing interest as indicators of climate change and its impacts. Most scientists treat the data as the object of interest, while less attention has been paid to the two-way process of knowledge creation, and the significance of the inner, personal part of that. Phenological recording provides an interesting window on this because it is relatively straightforward (and therefore involves a wider range of people than more technically demanding recording), and because it is linked to the climate change discourse (and therefore connected with emotional and moral framings of the situation). This paper describes the rise of popular phenology in the UK and explores these dynamically related aspects of knowledge creation by drawing on accounts in the media and by participants. It concludes that reflexivity and credibility are important aspects of both personal and interpersonal meaning-making, and suggests that attention to both subjective integration of data, and the scale of local cultures of knowledge, are important in understanding the potential for connecting networks of citizen science. Phenology therefore appears to have a particular role to play in public understanding of climate change, which extends beyond the merely extractive collection of data to a more deeply integrated connection between observation and meaning. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The paper examines drivers of change in agricultural land use in order to identify data requirements and assess data suitability. In order to assess the fitness for purpose of available data, the paper provides an overview of the sources of data for agriculture and land use in the UK, in both a contemporary and historical context. It provides a brief assessment of the state of scientific knowledge on the analysis of land use change, combined with a consideration of some of the possible advances promised by the new land use science. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The climate is changing, both globally and in the UK. To adapt effectively, engineers and planners need as much information as possible on how the climate will evolve. The UK Climate Impacts Programme (UKCIP) provided this in 2002 with UKCIP02 and the latest data UKCP09, which provides data to a resolution of 5 km square grids over the UK. Data sets from these were used in this study along with the historical measured data for three locations — Bracknell (London), Manchester and Edinburgh — to analyse critically the likely changes that may occur in the key climate variables, that is temperature, sunshine duration and solar irradiation. These parameters have an important bearing on the design and function of buildings and building services.Sunshine duration is the main variable that is used to obtain solar radiation in the UKCP09 5 km grid data. For the grids containing Bracknell, Manchester and Edinburgh, most of the UKCP09 data sets for the years 2050 and 2080 showed abnormally elongated sunshine duration, that is from sunrise to sunset, for clear days. In contrast, the latest historic measured data sets indicate only a third of the above sunshine duration. Note that the latter data are used in cooling load design calculations and for the generation of sol-air temperatures.1 Of particular note was the anomalous occurrence in UKCP09 of late evening sunshine duration. For Bracknell and Edinburgh, the sunshine duration at hour ending 20 and beyond showed substantial amount of predicted sunshine. As a result of this work, corrective action has been proposed for UKCP09 data.Furthermore, a very significant increase was also noted in solar irradiation for UKCP09. For the historic measured data for Bracknell, the clear day noon irradiation is 818 Wh/m 2. For the UKCP09 grid containing Bracknell the 2080 High Emission scenario data gives an average value of 1002 Wh/m2, an increase of 23%. The same trend occurs for Edinburgh, (a present value of 789 Wh/m 2 and the predicted value of 948 Wh/m2, an increase of 20%). Note that compounded with presently found increase of 4—5°C increase for the above locations, the substantial increase in irradiation will have a much more pronounced increase in the cooling load of buildings.An evaluation of the change in the character of solar radiation was also undertaken. This was done by noting the change in the diffuse fraction of global irradiation. For Bracknell and Edinburgh historic data and UKCP09 data 2080 High Emission data set show a drastic decrease, respectively from 0.37 to 0.13 and from 0.33 to 0.14. Diffuse fraction may be used as an indicator of the prevailing sky clarity. If the predictions come true a drastic decrease in the diffuse fraction of this magnitude signifies a radical shift in the character of solar climate for the future. The current solar climate of Bracknell is known for its above average turbidity, the latter stemming from the following factors: inland location, high-density housing, proximity to Heathrow airport and M25 London orbital motorway. Whether such an extreme shift in the sky clarity will occur within a matter of 60—70 years is open to discussion.Practical applications: To adapt effectively against the challenge posed by climate change engineers need to know the extent to which the basic climate variables such as temperature and solar radiation will change. This work has used basic data from the UKCP09 project to analyse the extent of the above change with respect to the basic and other derived data. It was shown that for Scottish and English locations a temperature rise of up to 4—5°C may occur between the present age and the year 2080 for High Emission scenario. It was also shown that the corresponding irradiation strength may increase around 22%. Furthermore, it was also found that if these predictions come true then a drastic decrease in the diffuse fraction of irradiation will produce a radical shift in ... [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]