CAWR Newsletter

June 2019

Our monthly newsletters are an easy way to keep up-to-date with new developments at our research centre. From successful project bids to upcoming events, our newsletter informs you on how we are 'driving innovative transdisciplinary research on resilient food and water systems.'

News

Sustainable Urban Global Initiative (SUGI) Waste FEW ULL and Brazil (Zika) projects research visit to Sao Paulo, Brazil

Professor Sue Charlesworth, Drs Jana Fried and Matthew Blackett and Masters by Research student Rebecca Lewis visited Sao Paulo for two projects funded by Newton Institutional Links (Brazil, Zika) and Belmont (SUGI WASTE FEW ULL). They were hosted by Professor Ester Dal Poz of the University of Campinas who organised a fascinating set of field visits followed by research seminars at the University. Ester is responsible for one of the 4 Urban Living Labs (ULL) which make up the focus of the SUGI project in which the nexus between Food, Energy and Water is investigated in order to close wasteful loops in terms of resource production and use.

The other 3 ULLS are located in the Western Cape, South Africa (SA), Rotterdam, the Netherlands and Bristol, UK. We hope to visit the SA ULL in August and the one in Rotterdam in September.

Click here to read more about their visit. 

Plant Alert 

Plant Alert is a new citizen science project run by CAWR in collaboration with the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland (BSBI). Plant Alert asks gardeners to report potentially invasive plants that are spreading in their gardens and difficult to control. The webpage is hosted by the BSBI to guarantee its long-term availability and the integration of data in their national plant recording scheme. The results will be used as early warning about potentially invasive plants and for risk assessments to prevent future invasions with high negative impacts on biodiversity and ecosystems. The tool was launched by Katharina Dehnen-Schmutz at the GB Non-native Species Annual Stakeholder Forum in Edinburgh on the 18th of June and was welcomed as a very useful addition to the range of options available to manage biological invasions in the UK. For further information see the webpage.

Plant Alert is also on twitter @Plant_Alert

Development of a Pesticide Risk Baseline

Professor Michael Warne has  just completed a major project for the Office of the Great Barrier Reef entitled Development of a Pesticide Risk Baseline. This involved developing a new method for estimating the toxicity of mixtures of up to 22 pesticides and then using the method to calculate the current risk posed by these pesticides in monitored catchments that discharge to the Great Barrier Reef. Relationships using land use data were then developed that could predict the toxicity of pesticide mixtures at monitored catchments and these were then scaled-up to enable prediction of the pesticide mixture toxicity for basins (which contain multiple catchments), regions (which contain multiple basins) and the entire GBR area (consisting of six regions and 35 basins). The results of the project are being adopted into the 2019 Reef Report Card and form the baseline from which all progress towards meeting the pesticide reduction target (of protecting 99% of species at the mouth of rivers) are measured against.

TRUE project 

We were pleased to welcome Alex Roberts who came to work with us from North Leamington School for a week's work experience in June. One job he helped with was potting up tomato plants that will be used in a glasshouse trial to investigate novel ways of using legumes as a source of fertility in organic protected cropping systems. This forms part of one of the Case Studies that we are responsible for within the TRUE project.

 4th  World Agroforestry Congress

In May 2019 Dr Ulrich Schmutz attended the 4th World Agroforestry Congress in Montpellier for CAWR – the first time the congress was held in Europe.

The congress has put Agroforestry firmly on the map also in Europe and the EU and new areas were explored like linking it better to Agroecology and using exclusively organic methods in Agroforestry. The contribution of Agroforestry to achieving ‘Drawdown’ (drawing down greenhouse gas pollutants already in the atmosphere) was a major part of the keynote discussions.

The Montpellier Declaration was passed stating: “we, the 1200 delegates from 100 countries, agreed that the massive degradation of our world's biodiversity documented in the recent IPBES report is principally due to poor agricultural practices. Agroforestry offers a key solution to remedy the situation…”  Source: Agroforestry2019

Five Acre Farm Podcasts

Luke Owen was featured on Five Acre Farm's podcast to discuss his Social Impact Toolkit Project. Francis Rayns has also featured on one of their podcasts discussing the work that is happening in the field here on site for Organic-PLUS and TRUE project. 

To listen to these podcasts please click here to visit the Five Acre Farm website. 

9th International Conference on Marine Pollution and Ecotoxicology

Professor Michael Warne recently gave a keynote presentation to the 9th International Conference on Marine Pollution and Ecotoxicology held in Hong Kong (June 10 – 14). His presentation was entitled "Predicting the toxicity of mixtures of up to 22 pesticides in waters discharged to the Great Barrier Reef, Australia."

 Media

One of CAWR's post-doctoral researchers, Emma Burnett, is an occasional contributor to Urban Food Futures, an online science magazine which publishes a bi-weekly article summing up key results from scientific work. Citizens, NGOs, civil servants, and social enterprises all over the world are coming up with solutions to face food challenges. And scientists regularly produce analysis that would be useful to them, but which often isn't accessible or takes too much time to trawl through. Urban Food Futures helps by making complex and rich scientific information available to practitioners in cup-of-coffee-length posts. Emma's most recent posts can be found here and here, in both English and French.

BBC Radio 4 aired a short piece on the expansion of social supermarkets in the UK for an episode of You & Yours. They invited Lopa Saxena to contribute to the discussion as she has co-authored the first major academic study of social supermarkets in Britain funded by the British Academy-Leverhulme Trust (Saxena, L.P. and Tornaghi, C. (2018). This followed the reference to her work in an article in the Guardian newspaper on the rise of social supermarkets by Jay Rayner for which he had interviewed her. In You & Yours, Lopa explained how social supermarkets are different from food banks in offering a degree of choice and dignity to people in poverty or at risk of food poverty. Their emergence in Britain in the last six years is seen by her as an outcome of our unsustainable food system and the adverse impacts of austerity conditions (Saxena, L. P. (2018). She agreed with the presenter's concern that the easy availability of cheap ultra-processed food with high salt and sugar content and its impact on increasing existing health inequalities is a matter of great concern. As a Trustee of Feeding Coventry, a charity working towards addressing hunger and food poverty in Coventry, she continues to work on how social supermarkets can be adapted to work in the context of transformative solutions which address the root causes of food poverty and food waste. Both as a researcher and a Trustee, she is contributing to the development of an innovative Citizens Supermarket in the Foleshill area of Coventry which aims at revitalising the existing Foleshill Community Centre for the benefit of the local community. If interested in doing collaborative research on social supermarkets with her or in engaging with the Foleshill project, you can contact Lopa here.

Sue Charlesworth wrote a blog for the ELRHA on 'Designing, constructing and monitoring a SUDs demonstration site at Gawilan Refugee Camp, Iraq'.

Gender and Hydrology

Damian Lawler contributed to an important Interactive Conference hosted by Bristol University, on “Gender and Hydrology”. The aim is to follow this first event with further exploration of these themes and issues in due course.

The initial Poster prepared after the Bristol Conference and presented at the European Geosciences Union in April is here. For more information please email hydro-equality2019@bristol.ac.uk. Conference logo is available here. 

Green Health Live

On the 5th June, Geraldine Brown was an invited speaker at Green Health Live 2.  Hosted at Lambeth Palace this was a day conference focused on the health benefits of green spaces and gardening, particularly within a parish and a chaplaincy. The conference — which took place on World Environment Day — was organised jointly by the Conservation Foundation, the Guild of Health and St Raphael, and the Church Times. It was attended by, among others, chaplains, public-health experts, and healthcare professionals. Geraldine’s presentation, titled, ‘Researching the evidence’ shared key learning emerging from research she has carried out with colleagues at Coventry University looking at land-based prison and community interventions delivered by organisations working in the Third Sector.  Land-based interventions refer to a wide range of activities that involve the land, such as; gardening, food growing, beekeeping, composting and construction.  

Click here to view the Rye Hill report and here for the Conservation Foundation report. 

Welcome Anna!

Anna Bogush has joined CAWR as our new Associate Professor in Water Quality Science. Anna's research interests are in interdisciplinary areas including environmental science, geochemistry, environmental engineering, material science, analytical chemistry and biogeochemistry. It is largely directed towards understanding the fate of emerging pollutants (e.g., metals/metalloids, microplastic, pharmaceuticals) in natural-anthropogenic systems and developing environmentally friendly and cost-effective technologies for contaminated water remediation. The significant part of her research is focused on industrial symbiosis and circular economy in water sector.

Art of Collaboration: Science-Art Exchange with the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management (CIWEM), the Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience (CAWR) and Touchstones

On July 16 2019 David Gibbin from CIWEM West Midlands Branch, Martin Wilkes from CAWR, and Miche Fabre Lewin and Flora Gathorne-Hardy of Touchstones are co-hosting an exchange to explore the themes of artful science and scienceful art. The exchange includes contributions from Clive Adams of the Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World (CCANW), who co-founded the Arts and Environment Network with CIWEM.

MSc in Agroecology, Water and Food Sovereignty

Join us in September for our MSc in Agroecology, Water and Food Sovereignty. 

Modules include:

• Policies and Institutions for Food and Water Sovereignty
• Global Processes for Water Sustainability and Resilience
• Community Self-Organisation and Resilience
• Resilient Food and Water Systems in Practice
• Participation, Power, and People’s Knowledge
• Agroecological Techniques and Practices
• Gender, Food Systems and Natural Resources
• Stabilisation Agriculture 
• Global Professional Development – Consultancy 
• Project

Click here to find out more information.

Studentships 

Events 

Publications

Anderson, C.R., R. Binimelis, M. P. Pimbert and M. G. Rivera-Ferre, (2019) Critical adult education in food movements: learning for transformation in and beyond food movements—the why, where, how and the what next? Agriculture and Human Values

Murphy, K., Efremov, A., Davidson, T.A., MolinaNavarro, E., Fidanza, K., Crivelari Betiol, T.C., Chambers, P., Tapia Grimaldo, J., Varandas Martins, S., Springuel, I., Kennedy, M., Mormul, R.P., Dibble, E., Hofstra, D., Luk´acs, B.A., Gebler, D., Baastrup-Spohr, L., Urrutia-Estrada, J., (2019) World distribution, diversity and endemism of aquatic macrophytes, Aquatic Botany