This proposal is for a project funded by Innovate UK under a Small Business Research Initiative (SBRI) competition as part of the Clean Air Strategic Priorities Fund Programme; specifically, SBRI Phase 3: 'Enhanced Clean Air Innovation Trials'. The overall challenge we are addressing is within the theme 'monitoring air pollutants or using data to create actionable insights to safeguard health'. The name of our project is **Enhancing and Trialling the Air Pollution Source Tool**. For this project we will undertake real-world implementation, testing and, together with local authorities, trialling of a highly innovative software tool for separating, for each hour, the air pollution concentration measurements from monitor/sensor networks into the component which is emitted from local sources and the component which arises from long-range transport due to more remote sources. The tool will enable policy makers, including local authorities, to determine in a straightforward way the extent to which air quality can be improved by local intervention and hence implement the most efficient mitigation measures with consequent maximum health benefits. Key pollutants to which the tool will be applied by local authorities are NO2, for which there remain exceedances of the annual average limit value, and PM2.5, for which there are new stringent targets for 2028 (interim) and 2040 (legally binding) set out in the Environment Act 2021\. The project will be led by Cambridge Environmental Research Consultants (CERC), an SME which combines a high level of expertise in atmospheric processes with extensive experience of software development. CERC have created, developed and commercially established their world leading atmospheric dispersion model ADMS (Atmospheric Dispersion Modelling System) which has hundreds of users worldwide. CERC manages and participates in commercial and research projects including recent projects with our subcontractors for this project, the University of Cambridge, integrating monitored and modelled air quality concentration data using innovative techniques.

Highways England is working towards developing the Strategic Road Network (SRN) to have minimal air pollution impact on neighbouring communities. The ADMS-Roads air quality modelling software tool is key to this goal because it is used to assess the air quality impact of SRN capital investment schemes and mitigation measures. Better assessments will enable Highways England to design and plan its developments more effectively with regard to air quality, leading to reductions in air pollution concentrations experienced by neighbouring communities. Highways England sub-contractors use ADMS-Roads to calculate air pollutant concentration levels of pollutants such as nitrogen dioxide and particulates, which arise from the dispersion of toxic emissions from vehicles on the SRN, taking into account road and building geometry, meteorological conditions, traffic flows and changes to emissions due to mitigation measures such as traffic management, speed control, use of ultra-low-emission vehicles and modal shift. The model calculates air quality at high spatial (a few metres) and temporal (hourly) resolution, allowing calculation of population exposure. In these assessments ADMS-Roads is typically used to assess the effectiveness of a range of pollution mitigation scenarios, informing a selection of cost-effective measures for implementation. Better evidence for this decision making will lead to the reduction of air pollutant concentrations in the vicinity of the SRN. Populations are most exposed to pollution from the SRN in urban areas where the road geometry often includes complex features to improve traffic flow at junctions, such as flyovers and underpasses. There is therefore an urgent need to understand the detailed local air quality impacts of these road features on neighbouring communities, but currently even state-of-the-art models such as ADMS-Roads have limitations with regard to modelling elevated sections of road. In this project, a team of expert air quality scientists at CERC, the UK SME which has created and developed ADMS-Roads over the last 20 years, will address these limitations. The team will undertake research and development leading to the release of a tool specifically designed to predict the air quality impact of elevated road sections. There are over 100 UK users of ADMS-Roads, and its sister model ADMS-Urban, so any model developments resulting from this project will benefit the whole community developing air quality mitigation measures in urban areas, including Highways England and local authority planners.

Awaiting Public Project Summary

Air pollution has major health impacts, as recognised in UN Sustainable Development Goal 11.6: ‘reduce the environmental impact of cities, with special attention to air quality.’ Air pollution in China is estimated to contribute to 1 million deaths each year, and in the Pearl River Delta, the largest urban area in the world, air pollution often reaches hazardous levels despite large investment in environmental improvement. Action to reduce air pollution requires scientific understanding to be effective. Computer models can simulate dispersion of pollution accounting for weather, urban buildings and chemical transformations. This project brings together UK and Chinese air quality experts who will, for the first time in Guangdong, combine state-of-the-art local and regional air pollution models to forecast air pollution at street level resolution with alerts via an integrated smart platform. The project will enable development of air pollution control strategies both for short-term episodes and for longer term improvements. The system will be optimised using existing air quality monitors and innovative low cost, small sensors deployed by the project. Robust pollution models require skilled local practitioners to extract value from their outputs. Collaboration and knowledge sharing is at the heart of our project, developing improved measurement and modelling capabilities at Environmental Monitoring Centres and environmental businesses in Guangdong and, making use of the transferability of our system, across China. This will grow the ‘green’ economy, enable more effective action and reduce health impacts from air pollution in Guangdong.

Many hazards associated with climate change have the greatest impacts in urban areas where most people and property are concentrated. Severe and extreme weather events are projected to increase losses challenging Governments and insurance systems world-wide. Communication, transfer and development of climate-related knowledge is most effective when it is sensitive to context, diversity of decision types, decision processes and the requirements of constituencies. This project will adapt carefully selected meteorological and hazard models for circumstances in Malaysia and Southeast Asia. It will test their viability and integrate them onto a common multi-hazard platform designed for managing and communicating risks and enhancing disaster resilience. Pilot studies will be conducted in Kuala Lumpur and adjacent areas to forecast flash floods & floods, landslides, sinkholes, strong winds, urban heat and air pollution at the city and neighbourhood scales. The proposed development of climate and multi-hazard forecasting capacity will greatly contribute to addressing major problems for future development in cities in Malaysia and the ASEAN region.

Decision-making and planning in rapidly growing urban centres require integrated assessment tools to determine impacts on environmental exposure, health and inequalities. However, there is a lack of integrated tools with which to determine current and future health risks and to evaluate policy options. Furthermore, despite the increasing availability of data, key datasets for such tools often have limited spatial detail since environmental monitoring is limited to a few urban sites and health microdata has restricted access, and methods for linking exposure to health have not been exploited. In the context of Glasgow with its wealth of data, this project builds on the successful QCumber system with state-of-the-art research and end-user participation, to create a unique data platform: “QCumber-envHealth” for health policy and inequality related decision-making. Innovations include: incorporating new health related behaviour data; integration of crowd sourcing and monitoring, creation of accessible synthetic health data and its integration; end-user led health risk modelling and policy scenarios.

Cambridge Environmental Research Consultants (CERC) and Algebra propose the creation of an innovative open city data platform with crowd sourcing as their response to the Future City Solutions SBRI competition Challenge 2 'Data'. It is an opportune time for the development of such a system. Historically cities have owned rich datasets; however the data have been ‘hidden’ in isolated silos so the value of the data has been unavailable to the public and often also to the city authorities. Increasingly cities are opening their data and empowering businesses and the public to create additional value from these assets. However, it is only very recently that cities are becoming ‘superconnected’ with fast broadband, dense WiFi and smart phone networks allowing the data platforms to realise their full potential and allowing fast input of new data by the public. Combining city data with crowd-sourced data shares the burden of data curation with the public, increases feedback and communication between city authorities and the citizen, and provides new channels for authorities, elected representatives and the public to communicate on the key issues confronting modern cities. The proposed system will use innovative interactive map presentations and combine public data with crowd-sourced data, integrating data across various themes including health, energy, environment and transport. Open APIs will be the basis for a thriving ecosystem of third-party apps and services based on phones, websites, smart devices, and social media, leveraging direct access to data through the APIs. Phase 1 will examine the feasibility and practicalities of such a system. Phase 2 will develop the enhanced platform, install a prototype for a test-bed city, and create pilot apps and services that will demonstrate the possibilities of the platform and foster the app ecosystem, in particular showing innovative data presentation through maps. These pilot solutions will be shaped with the partner city, analysing decisions to be made by the partner city that can be supported with innovative data use as well as different user needs (managers, assessors, citizens, app developers). The pilot solutions will build on existing tools created by the applicant organisations, such as the London airTEXT health and air quality forecasts (developed by CERC) and Q-Cumber, an innovative combination of crowd-sourcing, social networking and environmental tools, combining data from heterogeneous sources into a user-friendly query framework (developed by Algebra). The project partners CERC and Algebra are SMEs with wide experience of working with cities to maximize their data in the themes of environment, health, industry and energy, and are very well-placed to work with city authorities in this project. Q-Cumber has been adopted for crowd-sourcing by several cities in Italy and is rapidly expanding. CERC has excellent contacts with the ‘test-bed’ cities for the data challenge, in particular Cambridge and London.