The UK Government’s recent planning reforms, announced on December 12, 2024, aim to tackle the country’s ongoing housing crisis by delivering 1.5 million new homes over the next five years. The new reforms include mandatory targets requiring councils to build 37,000 homes annually, a focus on brownfield sites for development, and revisions to greenbelt boundaries.

This signals the start of one of the largest development projects in the country’s history – an extraordinary opportunity for the UK to not only deliver much-needed housing, but to embed sustainability into every stage of the construction process.

So how do we balance the urgent need for more homes with protecting the environment and biodiversity? Construction projects often come with a high environmental impact, from high carbon emissions to resource depletion and waste generation. Now, more than ever, it’s crucial to embed circular economy (CE) practices into the planning, design, and construction of new homes. This way, we can ensure that growth doesn’t come to the detriment of the UK’s natural environment.

What is the Circular Economy?

The circular economy is a model of production and consumption where materials are kept at a higher value for longer through processes like reuse, recycling, and refurbishment[1]. It is the opposite of the linear model or “take, make, dispose”, where raw materials are extracted and eventually thrown away, without fully considering their reuse potential[2][3]. In construction, integrating CE practises could include using recycled building materials, refurbishing existing buildings, and designing homes to be adaptable and reusable at the end of their lifecycle. This can help preserve valuable resources and extend the lifespan of buildings, while reducing carbon emissions and waste.

Making the most of valuable resources  

One way to mitigate the impact of new building projects is to maximise the use of existing resources. For example, making pre-development audits mandatory in all development projects can provide an understanding of how products and materials will be reused prior to demolition or redevelopment of the site[4]. Eco-design solutions – such as lean structural elements that avoid excess material or using lighter-weight materials, and adaptable building layouts – can also reduce the environmental footprint of construction projects. At the moment, up to 20% more material is used, than is actually needed.

The UK Government can also play a key role in the development and establishment of secondary material markets (SRM), which allow existing products to “re-enter the product value chain”, thereby reducing dependency on new resources[5]. This can give businesses and customers the assurance to use these materials with confidence, knowing they meet safety and quality standards.

Consideration must also be given to repurposing of existing buildings. With over 600,000 empty homes recorded in England, there is a significant opportunity to refurbish and retrofit unused buildings, rather than constructing new ones. This approach would save valuable materials, reduce embodied carbon, and cause less disruption to local neighbourhoods and wildlife.

Protecting Biodiversity 

The UK is one of the most nature-depleted countries globally. While the Government’s reforms are focused on meeting housing targets, they risk pushing for new homes on greenbelt land – designated areas around towns and cities aimed at preventing urban sprawl[6]. To avoid negative impacts on greenbelt land, sustainable planning must prioritise protecting valuable green spaces and incorporating green infrastructure, such as parks, trees, and green roofs, into developments.

Employing Modern Methods of Construction (MMC) can be part of the solution. MMC involves off-site manufacturing of building components, which can then be rapidly assembled on-site causing less disruption to local ecosystems and habitats.

Preserving Construction Soil

As the foundation upon which all buildings are constructed, soil is essential for food production, mitigating climate change, reducing floods and droughts, and absorbing vast amount of carbon[7]. In England, over 50% of construction soil waste in England ends up in landfills, despite in many cases, being safe for reuse. The UK can preserve, not throw away, this precious resource by adopting a new Soil Reuse and Storage System. This would ensure that only soils that are irretrievably contaminated or cannot be immobilized should be considered waste. This shift would prevent valuable, inert soils from being unnecessarily disposed of, and would encourage the reuse of healthy soils.

Achieving Growth and Environmental Protection

The Government’s ambitious housing reforms present a pivotal opportunity to address both the housing crisis and the urgent need to preserve our environment. Embedding circular economy principles and approaches into the new housebuilding programme – such as refurbishing existing buildings, using MMC, and prioritising resource reuse – can significantly reduce waste and pollution while protecting the UK’s rich natural landscape.

It’s time to stop thinking of housing development as a choice between growth and sustainability. We can – and must – do both. By moving beyond traditional supply-centric solutions, we can instead deliver sustainable, long-lasting homes that will serve future generations while protecting our environment.

Interested in learning more? Dive deeper into how the future of construction can be transformed by reading our latest policy briefs on circular economy solutions for the construction sector – with a special focus on Biodiversity Net Gain, Strategic Supply  and Soil.

References

• [1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/topics/en/article/20151201STO05603/circular-economy-definition-importance-and-benefits#:~:text=The%20circular%20economy%20is%20a,products%20as%20long%20as%20possible
• [2] https://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/topics/circular-economy-introduction/overview
• [3] https://www.eib.org/en/stories/linear-economy-recycling#:~:text=Linear%20economy%20is%20a%20system,line%20regarding%20recycling%20or%20reuse.
• [4] https://www.sweco.co.uk/services/water-energy-industry/environmental-consultancy/pre-demolition-audits/#:~:text=Pre%2Ddemolition%2Fredevelopment%20audits%20and,or%20redevelopment%20of%20the%20site.
• [5] https://circular-cities-and-regions.ec.europa.eu/support-materials/papers-and-reports/investigating-europes-secondary-raw-material-markets
• [6] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn00934/
• [7] https://www.clientearth.org/latest/news/why-soil-matters/#:~:text=Soil%20provides%20a%20host%20of,food%20security%20without%20healthy%20soils.

Author’s note

Written by Aleyna Prokudina, Policy Advisor at the Policy Impact Unit. With thanks to Jen Reed, Head of Policy Impact Unit, for her valuable contributions.

As the new Government comes into power, the UK’s ambition to position itself as a global clean Energy Superpower has been renewed. Government has expressed the need to invest in a new industrial strategy where sustainability goals are critical to deliver economic growth and achieve clean energy by 2030. This includes investing in new jobs and technologies and exploring responsible ways to utilise the UK’s naturally available bioresources.

Seaweed (macroalgae) has a pivotal role to play in delivering ambitions on clean energy, and incubation and support for this emerging industry must feature in the future industrial strategy to unlock the transformative potential it can offer. Seaweed-derived bioproducts can be used to displace fossil fuel-derived compounds across multiple sectors, including plastics, fabrics, fuels, pharmaceuticals, and the nutraceuticals industries. Furthermore, seaweed can capture more carbon than it releases to the atmosphere (carbon sink), contributing as a natural tool to tackle climate change.

To unlock these benefits, we must scale up seaweed biorefineries in the UK, but there are several engineering, bioscience and societal challenges currently holding this back. Tackling these challenges and demonstrating the feasibility and potential of scaled-up seaweed biorefineries in the UK, is the focus of important research currently being conducted by Dr Emily Kostas at the new Manufacturing Futures Lab at UCL East. It is envisioned that this research will encourage Government to support UK seaweed aquaculture and increase the availability of this versatile and sustainable feedstock.

Despite important efforts to map and characterize opportunities for seaweed farming across the UK [1]^,[2], there has been no strong policies and support at the necessary scale to realize the ambitions set above. Numerous UK companies are, in fact, currently importing seaweed from abroad (Norway and the Faroe Islands) due to the lack of a constant supply and adequate amount of seaweed biomass that is currently available here in the UK, which clearly demonstrates that there is demand and that the market is ready for this transition.

We believe there is an opportunity to sink carbon and support green energy domestically by promoting the scale-up of seaweed-derived bioproducts, biofuels, biochemicals and biomaterials that have been manufactured from UK farmed seaweed.

Therefore, we have identified three key recommendations for policy action going forward:

• Build on existing evidence base of suitable areas for sustainable aquaculture[3] and monitor the regional landscape availability and production of native seaweed feedstocks; this would ensure a constant supply and will meet the demand for a future UK bioeconomy.
• Design and deliver a new regulatory and policy framework that promotes sustainable seaweed farming and cultivation in the UK, based on solid, sustainable and responsible planning on how to best manage marine environments[4]^,[5].
• Work with coastal communities and stakeholders to explore how to meaningfully develop a plan to create job security whilst protecting natural resources and landscape.

Seaweed can provide a fresh start to ignite a new UK industrial strategy and contribute to achieving the ambitious goals of delivering clean energy by 2030 and production of alternative and sustainable products. The ability to do so rests on how effectively we can bolster the UK’s aquaculture in the years ahead.

References

[1] https://thefishsite.com/articles/initiative-aims-to-take-uk-seaweed-sector-to-the-next-level

[2]  https://www.carymor.wales/seaweed/seaweed-farming-in-the-uk

[3] Identification of strategic areas of sustainable aquaculture production in English waters: Final Report

[4] https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/marine-planning-in-england

[5] https://www.gov.scot/policies/marine-planning/

As the 31st International Conference on Transdisciplinary Engineering 2024 kicks off at UCL East, over 100 engineers from around the world—including the United Kingdom, Brazil, Mexico, United States, China, Japan, Sweden, Singapore, and others—converge in London to explore how transdisciplinary engineering can drive social change and improve the world. This conference provides a platform for discussing the crucial role of engineering and science in addressing societal challenges through innovative, interdisciplinary approaches.

We already know that transdisciplinary research teams comprising engineers and others, tend to produce research that is more likely to have policy and commercial impact. Yet, with over 334 categorized research fields, there are more than 35 billion possible combinations for interdisciplinary work for teams of up to 5 researchers. Depending on the combination of researcher capabilities, some interdisciplinary teams may be better suited for disruptive science, developing patents, or informing policy. But which combinations of fields lead to which type of impact?

Supported by Elsevier and working with the Growth Lab at Harvard Kennedy School, we are applying complexity methods and machine learning on bibliometric data to understand which combination of researcher capabilities leads to high-impact research. For this blog, we’ll discuss our work within the context of the impact of interdisciplinary climate research on public policy.

To calculate interdisciplinarity, we determine the capabilities of authors based on their publication history in different fields. Each author is represented by a vector indicating the number of times they have published in each field. These author vectors are then used to calculate the disciplinary diversity (DDA) of each paper, reflecting the combined expertise and capabilities of the co-authoring team.

As a first step, we ran a series of statistical analyses and regressions to evaluate the relationship between a paper’s interdisciplinarity score and the number of policy citations it received. Preliminary results show that interdisciplinarity explains almost 15% of the variance in policy citations, making it the strongest predictor of policy impact we have identified so far. In fact, transdisciplinarity is found to be three times better at predicting policy citations than conventional metrics of research excellence, exceeding the combined effects of academic citations, journal impact factor, and author h-index.

We then aggregated our analysis at the topic level by calculating the average interdisciplinarity score of papers within each topic. The first observation is that climate change-related topics with high interdisciplinarity are less common than those with low diversity. The distribution of these topics is shown in Figure 1.

Fig 1: Distribution of paper interdisciplinarity in climate research

The second observation is that topics with higher ratios of policy citations have nearly double the average interdisciplinarity score compared to topics with relatively low policy citations. Figure 2 illustrates the difference in interdisciplinary distribution between the low and high policy relevance groups.

Figure 2: Interdisciplinary Distribution by Policy Relevance

Finally, using the paper vectors, we are developing a machine learning model to understand which combinations of author capabilities and team dynamics lead to high policy impact. The preliminary model has already found that for climate change-related research overall, teams involving researchers with expertise in economics, meteorology & atmospheric sciences, general & internal medicine, ecology, and horticulture tend to be associated with higher policy impact.

Moving forward, we are refining the model to predict the optimal team dynamics for high impact within specific policy topics. We are expanding the training data to include additional metrics and features, such as academic seniority, international collaboration, and research text. Furthermore, we will incorporate the distances between research fields to study the effects of deep interdisciplinarity, bringing together researchers from relatively less connected fields, on social impact.

As TE2024 brings together engineers and researchers from around the globe, this work exemplifies the potential of interdisciplinary collaboration in addressing global challenges and driving social change through innovative, data-driven approaches. Equipped with machine learning tools like this, researchers can develop targeted strategies to form data-informed transdisciplinary teams, optimized for maximum societal benefit and impact.

Manufacturing has a pivotal role to play in building a thriving future UK economy which is resilient and can meet many of the increasingly pressing challenges facing UK society.  

But is this fundamental role fully understood by those outside the world of manufacturing? Attending ‘The Future of UK Manufacturing’ event earlier this month has prompted me to reflect on this question.  

Common cross-sectoral challenges and potential solutions 

Recent policy developments such as the UK’s Advanced Manufacturing Plan supported by £4.5 billion of funding for strategic manufacturing sectors, the Net Zero Strategy and the UK Net Zero Research and Innovation Framework point to the increasing awareness of the importance of manufacturing for the UK economy in recent years.  

While this is welcome, a number of challenges continue to hamper the ability of manufacturing to realise its true economic potential. 

One of the key apparent challenges is that, despite the fact that the UK is a global leader in innovation and research, this does not fully translate into economic value through industrial activity [1]. For example, in terms of number of research publications, the UK surpasses the US in per capita terms, but it lags behind in translating scientific knowledge into commercial success. A telling example is that the word ‘manufacturing’ is only mentioned once in the ‘Science and Technology Framework’, which risks creating the perception that the onus is on industry when it comes to scaling up new technologies. 

Although a constant stream of fundamental research is a crucial part of the innovation ecosystem, the ability to scale up lab-based demonstrations needs to become an equally prominent part of how research is undertaken in the UK to set the right conditions for success. Lessons can be learned from the example of the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine where the parallel research in immunology and in manufacturing, supported by the Vax-Hub, contributed to the speedy Covid-19 vaccine rollout.  

Another significant challenge for the UK manufacturing community is skills gaps, which amounts to between £7.7 and £8.3 billion in lost annual economic output [2]. Part of the difficulty in attracting talent to manufacturing careers is that manufacturing jobs are still associated with a traditional view of manufacturing roles as being manual and poorly paid. A study led by InterAct suggests that these perceptions can be changed by focusing on levers which have the potential to attract people to manufacturing careers such as flexibility and being part of the solution to many of the health-related, environmental and economic issues we are facing. 

Which leads us to one of the recurring themes that emerged from the discussions held during the event – the importance of storytelling and narrative setting. There was agreement that the UK manufacturing community should challenge outdated perceptions and create a positive narrative about the role of manufacturing that cuts across sectors and is clearly communicated to policymakers and those outside the world of manufacturing. Coalescing around a common strong narrative can support with ensuring manufacturing remains high on the policymakers’ agendas and can attract the skilled people it needs.  

So, what could this narrative be? One of the workshop sessions explored this exact question. A strong narrative should show how manufacturing can be at the forefront of creating good quality jobs and be a fundamental part of the UK’s future economic prosperity and national security.  

Early-stage R&D, which underpins manufacturing innovation, requires continued long-term funding support as businesses are often risk-averse and not incentivised to invest sufficiently at that stage. The Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) has been responding to this need through its manufacturing for the future research funding programmes, which is very welcome. I am left convinced that prioritising this type of investment is more important than ever and that, over the long term, these investments will more than pay for themselves in value returned to the UK. 

Context  

The EPSRC together with the High Value Manufacturing Catapult and the Institute for Manufacturing at the University of Cambridge organised ‘The Future of UK Manufacturing’ event in Sheffield. The event brought together academics, policymakers, innovation agencies and industry to review the current UK manufacturing landscape and to look ahead to future research and innovation priorities and opportunities. I attended this event as Policy Adviser for Vax-Hub Sustainable, one of the manufacturing research hubs funded by EPSRC and co-led by UCL Biochemical Engineering and the University of Oxford.   

Author’s note 

Written by Anca Tacu, Policy Impact Unit. With thanks to Jen Reed, Head of Policy Impact Unit, for her valuable contributions.  

References 

[1] Cambridge Industrial Innovation Policy. 2024. UK Innovation Report 2024. Available at: https://www.ciip.group.cam.ac.uk/innovation/the-uk-innovation-report-2024/  

[2] Policy Connect. 2023. Upskilling Industry: Manufacturing productivity and growth in England. Available at: https://www.policyconnect.org.uk/research/upskilling-industry-manufacturing-productivity-and-growth-england  

Earlier this month the Government announced a £3billion+ package to update fragmented and outdated IT systems across the NHS and transform the use of data to ease administrative burdens. That same week, the Policy Impact Unit (PIU) hosted a roundtable on digital health in the UK, bringing together colleagues from across UCL (see co-authors) as well as visiting researchers from the FioCruz Oswaldo Cruz Foundation in Brazil.

FioCruz is a federal public research foundation working with academic autonomy under the Ministry of Health of Brazil which was responsible for coordinating the COVID-19 vaccination campaign. The Brazilian delegation were keen to hear about UK experiences on health digitisation, challenges and opportunities, as well as developing a deeper understanding of the context and evaluation of several commitments agreed under the Brazil-UK High-Level Strategic Dialogues from 2020, some of which focussed on health cooperation and were funded by the Official Development Assistance (ODA) [1].

The main challenges discussed in the meeting, in relation to the digitalisation of the NHS, were systems’ interoperability, training and workforce capacity. Although there has been a push towards the adoption of federated data platforms (FDP), which will sit across NHS trusts and integrated care systems allowing them to connect data they already hold in a secure and safe environment, these are still disjointed and connecting them relies on platform providers talking to each other, which often does not happen.

Common challenges: interoperability, training and workforce capacity

The adoption of new digital health approaches is also reliant on having trained healthcare professionals to understand the power of data and new technologies. Particularly in primary care and GPs it is essential to have digitally literate colleagues that can engage communities, be clear and transparent about how health data is used and input it correctly to build FDPs that can be further used for research and to invest on the health of the nation[2]. Programmes like the NHS “Developing healthcare workers’ confidence in artificial intelligence” and inclusive digital healthcare are important, because there is a risk that ambitions to digitise the NHS, which are well intended, could exacerbate existing health inequalities and exclude some groups.

Incidentally, there is still a lack of progress to de-identify General Practice data and address low levels of confidence in new technologies among diverse communities – such as highlighted in the Health and Social Care Committee’s recent evaluation. Trust can be undermined as is the societal buy-in needed to deliver on ambitions for a more digital NHS.

Opportunities and way forward: innovation in regulatory mechanisms

On the flipside, there is an opportunity to bring people in early on to discussions on how AI tools are being used in medical devices, and how to properly manage the balance of risk and benefits such technologies may bring. The recent launch of the UK Regulatory Science and Innovation Networks was discussed, as well as the launch of a MHRA roadmap to create a framework for medical devices in the UK. Patients, researchers and industry representatives being included in this process, and being clear about how data can be used for the purposes of research, poses a great opportunity to bring real impact to clinical practice in terms of diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring of diseases.

Including other global partners in this conversation is essential given the importance of sharing learnings in different contexts, but also given the increasingly important role of international recognition in the medical domain as a factor to evidence impact. Specifically for global issues such as AI and post-market surveillance, where it is very difficult for regulators to know how new tools will perform before they are deployed, there is now a chance to have new standards emerge to shape digital health strategies across countries. We hope that visits like this inspire colleagues to work collaboratively and look forward to hearing from FioCruz how their visit is supporting Brazilian policy decisions on the development of digital health strategies.

Authors Note

Written by Dr. Luís Lacerda, Policy Impact Unit and co-authored by Professor Amitava Banerjee, UCL Institute of Health Informatics, Professor Derek Hill, UCL Dept of Medical Physics & Biomedical Engineering and Professor Patty Kostkova, UCL Institute for Risk & Disaster Reduction.

References

[1] For a list of projects funded under the scheme, please visit https://devtracker.fcdo.gov.uk/

[2] A particular good example was the COVID-19 registry where data such as vaccination rates, long-covid reports were put together in the same place and from different countries.