The BES, together with the Biochemical Society, hosted another successful Policy Lunchbox at Charles Darwin House yesterday. The guest speaker was David Bott, Director of Innovation Programmes at the Technology Strategy Board (TSB) who delivered an engaging talk on the process of turning innovative ideas into real products and services. David identified a number of barriers to this progression and outlined how the TSB is working to address them.

One of the biggest issues is the significant risk involved in pursuing innovative ideas as well as a lack of long-term support for innovative projects due to a demand for immediate returns on investments. There is also a lack of long-term political planning. The UK Government does not harness its considerable market influence, which has the potential to drive innovation in its suppliers through forward-thinking procurement and regulation, alongside tax breaks to encourage investment in certain technologies. Since its creation, the TSB has developed a ‘toolbox’ of solutions to these barriers including providing coherent, long-term support to those involved in innovation and encouraging knowledge exchange, for example by hosting ‘Missions’ to introduce innovators to potential competitors, funders and collaborators, and creating _connect, an online social network.

The environment presents an important area in which innovation is key and David stated that the TSB has identified energy and food production as major markets for the coming years due to the considerable logistical challenges they pose. The need to double food production by 2050 will require significant innovation in agriculture, whilst increasing energy production without worsening damage to the environment will require novel design and planning. In response to this energy challenge, one of TSB’s ‘Catapult’ technology and innovation centres will focus on Offshore Renewable Energy. Sustainability, although a relatively small proportion of the budget, is a specific, dedicated programme within TSB and underpins all of the board’s work.

Already, TSB’s work has contributed to innovative environmental projects. A Demonstrator Project (designed to encourage further innovation in the sector) tested consumer responses to newly introduced electric cars, measuring their habits, attitudes and opinions of the vehicles when using them for a year. Another scheme – Retrofit for the Future – used innovative technologies to adapt 118 social houses to reduce their carbon emissions by 80% and found significant energy and money savings for the residents.

With the Business Secretary Vince Cable MP announcing a further Catapult Centre yesterday and a range of funding opportunities and events planned for the new year, the TSB’s valuable work in driving innovation is set to continue.

David Bott’s presentation at the Policy Lunchbox was well received by all the attendees and led to some very interesting discussion afterwards.

We would like to thank David Bott for his participation today, and everyone who attended. The TSB report ‘Concept to Commercialisation’, which discusses the work of the TSB further is available online.

The next Policy Lunchbox event on 6th March will see Beck Smith, Assistant Director of the Campaign for Science and Engineering, discuss ‘how can the Government incentivise private sector investment in research and development?’ This event is full, but to join the waiting list contact James Lush at the Biochemical Society.

Applications are now being accepted for the BES Parliamentary Shadowing Scheme. The scheme offers a fantastic opportunity for early-career ecologists to gain an insight into how ecology and the environment are addressed in policy making by spending two days shadowing a senior policy-maker. In the past, hosts have included Parliamentary-Secretaries of State at Defra, Government Ministers in Wales, Policy Advisors in Scotland and MEPs in Brussels, and previous shadowers have found their placements to be a positive, useful and interesting experience.

The scheme is open to members of the BES in the early stages of their research career. You must have finished your PhD and completed this no more than 12 years ago.

Full details on the scheme, including how to apply are available here. The closing date for applications is Wednesday 29th February.

More natural means of managing flooding are desirable and should be brought foward by the Government in a new White Paper on water. So commented Anne McIntosh MP, Chair of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (EFRA) Select Commmittee and of the All Party Group on Flood Protection, at a parliamentary event attended by the BES Policy Team yesterday evening. The well-attended meeting was organised by Oliver Pescott, the most recent BES-funded Fellow at the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST), to launch the POSTnote he authored on ‘Natural Flood Management’.

Natural flood management (NFM) is defined in the POSTnote as ‘the alteration, restoration or use of landscape features’. One of the four speakers, Dr Paul Quinn, Newcastle University, made it clear that NFM is not about taking a system back to a natural state but working with and engineering natural processes. Dr Quinn presented work in which he had been involved within the town of Belford, in which residents have faced six major flooding events within the course of seven years. During extreme events, huge amounts of rainfall can be observed running off farmland; this can be tackled effectively, Dr Quinn suggested, by ‘catchment systems engineering’, which seeks to ’slow, store and filter’ water. Farm tracks, specially engineered to store water behind them; dams which ‘leak’ slowly to control water flow; and the use of woody debris (’beaver dams’) to perform a similar function can all help to attenuate run-off.

Dr Wendy Kenyon, James Hutton Institute, highlighted the importance of working with land-managers if those wishing to control flooding wished to work with natural processes as stated. Dr Kenyon’s team have conducted a number of semi-structured interviews with farmers, revealing that first and foremost, farmers are concerned with the viability of their businesses. Dr Quinn had presented results showing that 10 – 20 storage ponds could make a significant difference to the peak water flow; Dr Kenyon argued that the presence of this number of ponds on agricultural land could begin to have a significant effect on the farmer’s bottom line and so the viability of this proposal would need to be considered carefully.

It is important to ensure too that farmers are able to access funding to support their efforts to implement NFM. Fifty eight percent of farmers questioned by Dr Kenyon said that they would be encouraged to introduce NFM measures if there was more funding available to do so and if it could be applied for easily. This is significant as under the Common Agricultural Policy, money is already available to support NFM but, according to Dr Kenyon, farmers have not been accessing this as a source of funds. We need, Dr Kenyon suggested, to work with farmers to find out why.

The issue of the scale at which experiments are undertaken and from which conclusions can be drawn is a highly significant one. It became clear through the presentations that there is a great deal of uncertainty concerning the robustness of conclusions which can be drawn about flood attenuation at the catchment-scale through NFM, based on small-scale experiments. Dr Neil McIntrye, Imperial College London, suggested that although strategic tree-planting can have an affect on ameliorating flooding at a local scale, this beneficial effect is likely to be marginal at regional to larger scales. The true benefits of such interventions are only likely to become apparent, Dr McIntyre suggested, once further research has been undertaken to understand catchment-scale interactions.

The case was therefore made for greater investment in field experiments and better modelling to understand the benefits of NFM. Anne McIntosh MP questioned why the science had not yet revealed these benefits, to which the scientists responded that the high cost of studying natural processes over time and the uncertainty created by extrapolating the results from one study site to another, where geomorphology and hydrology may be very different, constrain the ability to draw robust conclusions. Dr Quinn suggested that scientists would do best to measure at an appropriate scale and then build confidence in extrapolating conclusions, for example through better models.

Funding the necessary experiments and modelling approaches, alongside funding NFM interventions will be a challenge. Anne McIntosh suggested that there was little appetite in Government to pass the cost of NFM projects, including efforts to monitor the efficacy of these projects, onto the consumer through higher water bills. Ms McIntosh, and others, suggested that Payments for Ecosystem Services could be one mechanism of paying for NFM, although here the beneficiaries (presumably the consumers) would still need to pay for the NFM interventions implemented by land-managers (the providers of the ecosystem service of flood alleviation).

There should be scope to deliver NFM alongside other services as part of a framework of multi-functional land-use. Speakers did not touch on this to a great extent and it would have been interesting to have heard more from this perspective. Dr Quinn mentioned that buffer strips planted at the sides of agricultural land can slow the flow of run-off, indicating both a biodiversity and a NFM benefit. Dr Quinn also mentioned the need for multiple stakeholders to come together (eg as in Belford), including ecologists, land-managers and residents, to discuss and agree a shared vision for a catchment. South West Water is investing a great deal of money in NFM measures but for water quality reasons (eg reducing sediment load in the watercourse), with consequent benefits for river ecology. However, overall there was little discussion of the ecological benefits, or disbenefits, of NFM approaches.

In opening the meeting, Anne McIntosh informed attendees that in a meeting of the Liaison Committee (involving all Chairs of Parliamentary Select Committees), members had extracted from the Prime Minister an undertaking that a Water Bill would be published early in the next Parliamentary session. The BES will watch with interest to see whether NFM is incorporated into the Bill when drafted.

Applications for the next BES Fellowship at POST are now open and close on Thursday 5th April. If you are in the second or third year of your PhD in ecology at a UK institution, consider applying. Find out more from the BES website.

Applications can now be made to attend the ‘Workshop for Economists and Ecologists’ run by the Natural Capital Initiative. The workshop is aimed at encouraging interdisciplinary cooperation and knowledge exchange between economists and ecologists, with the goal of informing public policy. Sustainable agriculture will be used as the case study theme.

The workshop will take place on Tuesday 8th May 2012 at Charles Darwin House, London.

The day will begin with presentations outlining current ecological and economic perspectives on sustainable agriculture after which there will be a panel discussion, followed by group sessions to identify possible opportunities for interdisciplinary work.

If you would like to participate, please register by sending a summary of up to 150 words of how you would benefit from attending the event, as well as your position in any organisation you are affiliated with, and send to secretariat@naturalcapitalinitiative.org.uk by the 31st January 2012.

Interested in discussing the challenges facing Scotland’s biodiversity to 2020 and helping to inform the development of Scotland’s draft Biodiversity Strategy? Come along to a meeting in Edinburgh on 8th – 9th March 2012. BES members can attend for FREE (but must register in advance).

The BES is working with the British Society of Soil Science and the Scottish Government’s Biodiversity Science Group to organise a one-day conference (9th March), an evening lecture, reception and dinner (8th March) at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. The meeting will:

•Introduce the science community in Scotland to the revision of Scotland’s Biodiversity Strategy;
•Explore the scale of the challenges facing the implementation of an ecosystem approach in Scotland;
•Provide an opportunity for the science community to find out about the needs of policy-makers;
•Provide an opportunity for networking between the science and policy communities.

The evening reception will celebrate the launch of the BES Scotland Policy Group, a new initiative from the Society that aims to link members of the Society in Scotland who are interested in informing policy development and through this to assist the Society’s policy team in doing the same.

Confirmed speakers for the 9th of March include: Colin Moffatt, Head of Science at Marine Scotland; Ken Norris, biodiversity theme leader at NERC and biodiversity chapter lead in the National Ecosystem Assessment; Helaina Black, James Hutton Institute; and Chris Quine, Forest Research.

Poster abstracts are invited upon registration. We particularly welcome registration by students to this meeting and will be offering a prize for the best poster.

Full details of the programme and how to register are available from the BES website.

Applications are now invited for the 2012 BES Fellowship at the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST). All second and third year PhD students of an ecological subject, based in a UK institution, are invited to apply.

The deadline for applications is Thursday 5th April and interviews will be held in London on Monday 23rd April.

Full details are available from the Grants Pages of the BES website.

Professor Charles Godfray, immediate past President of the BES, is to give evidence to the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee on Wednesday 14th December as part of the Committee’s inquiry into ‘Greening the Common Agricultural Policy‘.

Professor Godfray will give evidence at 16.00 and the session will be available to watch live on Parliament TV.

Oliver Pescott, current BES Fellow at the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, has published a POSTnote on ‘Natural Flood Management’. This will be available shortly on the BES website.

Flood risk management today uses a range of approaches to reduce risk, including structural works, such as hard flood defences, and non-structural approaches, such as improving flood warning systems and land-use planning. The restoration, alteration and use of natural landscape features are also receiving attention as potentially cost-effective ways of reducing flood risk that can provide other environmental benefits, such as water quality improvements or carbon storage.

The POSTnote will be launched formally in Parliament on Tuesday 17th January, from 4 – 6pm. The event will be chaired by Anne Macintosh MP, Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Flood Protection and Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee. Presentations from a number of speakers will discuss key issues in Natural Flood Management:

– Martin Whiting, Chartered Institute of Water and Environmental Management, Rivers & Coastal Group Chair
- Dr Neil McIntyre, Reader in Surface Water Hydrology, Imperial College London
- Dr Paul Quinn, Senior Lecturer in Catchment Hydrology, Newcastle University
- Dr Wendy Kenyon, Senior Researcher, James Hutton Institute (Land and Natural Resource Use Research)

To register your interest in attending, please email postevents@parliament.uk or call 020 7219 8377.

The launch of the next POSTNote authored by a BES POST Fellow will take place on Tuesday 17th January. The topic of the POSTNote is ‘Natural Flood Management’. The launch will be held at the Houses of Parliament, Westminster, from 16.00 – 18.00. Further details about how to register for a place will be available shortly and will be posted on the blog.

Our current BES Fellow at POST (the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology) is PhD student Oliver Pescott. The Fellowship scheme is open to all second and third year PhD students of ecology based at a UK university. The next round of applications, for a Fellowship to begin in the autumn of 2012, will open in the New Year. If you are interested in applying, please visit the BES website to find out more about this fantastic opportunity.

The report of the joint British Ecologcial Society – UK Biodiversity Research Advisory Group (BRAG) meeting on the future of the UK National Ecosystem Assessment and Intergovernmental Science – Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) is now available. The session was held as part of the BES Annual Meeting at the University of Sheffield, on 13th September.