The Understanding the UK environment programme will deliver integrated monitoring, modelling and data for the UK environment. This data will empower researchers, governments and businesses to tackle major environmental challenges of our time.
Understanding the UK environment
What will it achieve?
The programme focuses on four key themes:
- Hydrological extremes: Providing data, models and insights to increase our resilience to floods and droughts.
- Land use and net zero: Measuring how changes in land use impact greenhouse gas emissions, in order to support net-zero goals while protecting natural resources.
- Pollution: Analysing how pollutants affect ecosystems to inform clean air, clean water and sustainable soil strategies.
- Biodiversity: Understanding biodiversity loss on land and in water, and providing monitoring, data and models to support nature restoration.
The overarching ambition is to provide integrated data to study the environment as a whole system.
Our national role
As a strategic delivery partner for the Natural Environment Research Council, part of UK Research and Innovation, UKCEH delivers impartial environmental science to benefit the UK research community, governments, businesses, and wider society. Our science infrastructures and national capability programmes enable researchers to observe, experiment, measure, understand and predict environmental processes, inter-connection, status and change.
Together with our extensive reach and expertise, UKCEH science infrastructures and programmes provide un-matched capability to generate independent, robust, high-quality scientific evidence that informs UK and international policy and innovative solutions. The power of these infrastructures and programmes is amplified by our national and international partnerships – working with research, public, private and third-sector partners to tackle UK and global goals and challenges.
Many UKCEH science infrastructures have a combination of characteristics that make them unique in the UK, and often globally. For example, they generate some of the longest, largest and most comprehensive environmental records anywhere in the world, providing critical evidence and leadership for UK and international science, policy and environmental standards.
Long term monitoring projects
Long-term national monitoring is important for assessing the status of the environment and for helping to understand the causes of change. The following projects will be part of our latest National Capability UK programme.
Contact us
To find out more about the programme email nc-uk@ceh.ac.uk