NERC Discipline Hopping for Environmental Solutions Grants Awarded

York academics have been awarded £76,000 by the Natural Environment Research Council to ‘hop’ between disciplines and, in doing so, build new collaborations that enable an understanding of different research perspectives and methodologies that could be used to address environmental challenges beyond the more common disciplinary alliances. The projects funded enable researchers to collaborate across the arts, humanities and sciences  to consider areas where the value of different, and less explored, insights can be understood and exploited. The projects are:

Narrating Environmental Challenges 

The natural environment comprises interacting complex systems. These, combined with human actions, create our highly complicated world. Environmental challenges arising within that world require us to tease out stories that allow us to understand and communicate the problems, develop solutions, and chart pathways to the future.

Richard Walsh (English and Related Literature) explains that “ensuring these stories adequately capture complex reality is difficult because narrative form and systemic complexity are fundamentally at odds”. This proposal facilitates interdisciplinary working via ‘narrative theory’ (an approach originating in literary studies), which allows us to incorporate critical awareness of the limitations of stories into our communicative strategies. The project team also includes Prof. Lindsay Stringer (Environment and Geography), Prof. Jon Pitchford (Mathematics and Biology) and Dr Annabel Jenkins (Mathematics) and brings together key University of York interdisciplinary research centres including Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity, The Interdisciplinary Centre for Narrative Studies, and York Cross-disciplinary Centre for Systems Analysis.

The art-science interface: making York's air pollution visible 

Art can be a powerful method to contextualise scientific findings.  This project will investigate if there are any striking differences in air pollution levels and chemical composition in areas with low/high cycling infrastructure around the University of York and York St John. The project is a collaboration between Prof Jacqui Hamilton and Daniel Bryant at the Wolfson Atmospheric Chemistry Laboratories and Clare Nattress, an artist and lecturer in graphic design at York St John University. Nattress will use her bicycle as a performative tool and will cycle in urban and rural locations within York and the surrounding areas with a focus on commuter routes to and from both universities whilst carrying a miniature aerosol sampler and air quality sensor on their bike. The filters collected will be photographed, investigated under a microscope and tested by Bryant to reveal their chemical composition using high resolution mass spectrometry. This data and information will then be incorporated onto a digital map of York to reveal what compounds (including images of the filters and video snapshots) are collected on specific routes and locations. This will be a continuation of Nattress’ current work entitled Digital Smog.

A public exhibition will be held to showcase the results of this new art-science frontier pushing partnership. This interdisciplinary collaboration will also increase our understanding of environmental hazards facing cyclists and the benefits of a healthier environment through improved infrastructure.

Ensuring greener cities lead to improved urban air quality

A collaborative project, led by Dr Will Unsworth (Organic Chemistry) and Prof Jacqui Hamilton (Atmospheric Chemistry), is focused on better understanding ‘greener’ cities and the implications for urban air quality. As governments introduce policies to achieve the net zero agenda, atmospheric emissions in cities are changing and the amount of plant life in urban environments is increasing. To most people, more plant life in cities will sound like a good thing – and in many ways it is! But more plant life in cities inevitably leads to an increase in natural chemical emissions from these plants. Most plant emissions are not directly harmful to humans, but volatile plant emissions can undergo chemical reactions with man-made pollutants in our atmosphere and form particle pollution. Studying the interaction between plant emissions and pollutants is therefore critical to better understanding the air quality of evolving ‘greener’ cities, but to do so new links between organic and atmospheric chemistry need to be built.

The project will focus on the study of a group of chemical compounds called ‘nitrooxyorganosulfates’. These compounds are known to form following reactions between plant emissions and so-called ‘NOx’ pollutants in our atmosphere. Nitrooxyorganosulfates are routinely detected in urban atmospheres, but at present they are very difficult to analyse, due to a lack of authentic chemical standards. Providing access to these chemical standards, and developing the essential methods needed to prepare them, therefore has great potential in research aiming to improve our understanding of urban air quality. This in turn could influence policy on the development of green cities in the future and impact the health and wellbeing of billions of city-dwellers around the globe.

Prof Jacqui Hamilton said:

“It is important to understand the impact of urban greening and the changes in emissions from plants in urban areas over the next decade. This multidisciplinary project will allow us to quantify the effects of important biogenic – anthropogenic interactions in modern cities for the first time”

YESI will be following these exciting projects as they are carried out in the first quarter of 2022 - watch this space for updates!