Postgraduate opportunities within the Centre for Water, Communities and Resilience (CWCR)

• Land use planning for sustainable water management 
• Sustainable agriculture water uses in ecohydrology 
• Urban water hazards  
• Spatiotemporal modelling for hydrological extremes 
• Machine-learning theories and approaches for hydroclimate 
• High-Performance Computing (HPC) in digital water management 

Contact: Dr Kwok Chun (Kwok.Chun@uwe.ac.uk)

• Energy infrastructure and risk management
• Sustainable energy demand modelling systems
• Ocean and coastal climate variability and impact on coastal flood and erosion risk
• Coastal Numerical Modelling applications under extreme weather events

Contact: Dr Antonia Chatzirodou (Antonia.Chatzirodou@uwe.ac.uk)

• Intersectionalities of water, energy and housing poverty in Bristol (in collaboration with Resource West, a consortium of West of England Utilities)
• Using the Household Water Insecurity Experiences (HWISE) Scale for assessing progress towards Sustainable Development Goal 6: Clean water and sanitation

Contact: Professor Chad Staddon (Chad.Staddon@uwe.ac.uk)

• ‘Hidden wisdom’ behind climate resilient infrastructure: Professional narratives on coping and adapting to risks, uncertainty and climate change

Contacts: Dr Deepak Gopinath (Deepak.Gopinath@uwe.ac.uk) and Dr Andrew Holmes (Andrew4.Holmes@uwe.ac.uk)

• Ways in which young people experience their environments, and how this influences their understandings’, values and actions
• Ways of addressing the growing concern about young people’s climate anxiety and the importance of hope in climate futures
• Environmental and climate education and its role in both formal and informal learning
• Young people’s learning for sustainability and for resilience
• The role of empathy in young people’s response and action to a changing climate 

Contact: Dr Sara Williams (Sara3.Williams@uwe.ac.uk)

• Community resilience to flooding and compound risks
• Community water risk education
• Narratives of the flood- drought continuum: implications for community resilience

 Contact: Professor Lindsey McEwen (Lindsey.McEwen@uwe.ac.uk)

• Citizenship, (social/spatial) mobility and justice in global cities
• (Re-)framing youth-led master plans for transformative urban development projects
• Urban leadership and communication of risk for disaster-prone communities

Contact: Dr Deepak Gopinath (Deepak.Gopinath@uwe.ac.uk)

• Rethinking allotments, water use and community resilience to climate change

Contact: Professor Lindsey McEwen (Lindsey.McEwen@uwe.ac.uk)

• Impact of drought and water scarcity of mycorrhizal colonisation of pasture grasses

Contact: Dr Sarah Ayling (Sarah.Ayling@uwe.ac.uk) or Dr Jackie Rogers (Jackie.Rogers@uwe.ac.uk)

I carried out an internship with the Centre for Water, Communities and Resilience and Tewkesbury Nature Reserve from March-August 2021. This involved collaborating with professionals, volunteers, and trustees to create 20 x A5 educational panels, including information surrounding local flora, fauna, and environmental management techniques to engage the local community with the nature found at the reserve. This internship was perfect for me, as I want to pursue a career in environmental education. I feel as though I have developed and improved many skills including communication, presentation skills, graphic design and research skills, and have also improved my understanding of wildlife and environmental management. I received a lot of support throughout my internship from my supervisor, who responded quickly to emails and regularly checked in on me. As well as the personal benefits, this internship has contributed to my degree, providing me with a sound project for my work-based learning module.

I have just started an internship with the VIP-CLEAR team – researching the impact of the pandemic on children. Despite being only a short way into the experience, I am already gaining value from it.  In the first week of my internship I have created an infographic and two short videos helping to explain the research process. With one of these videos already being used in schools, this internship is showing me that I can produce useful work on short deadlines. Moving forward, I am going to be more involved with the data handling side of the project – something that I am really looking forward to as it links heavily with my course.  It is encouraging and satisfying to use the skills from my course on a project that is so current and important. My internship with VIP-CLEAR is developing the skills I already had; and providing hands-on experience that will give me a head start as I build my career.

My internship at the Centre for Water, Communities and Resilience was for a project that aimed for a better understanding of the impact of regional weather conditions on cereal yield in the UK. I looked at the yield of cereals in the UK and correlated these with information about different weather conditions. Finally, I drew a conclusion based on my calculations and analysis on the relationships between different weather conditions at different times of year and cereal crop yields.The mode of work was mostly virtual with a few in-person meetings with my supervisor. This internship gave me the opportunity to use and apply various functions of a spreadsheet, do regression analysis of different variables and find relations between environmental factors to assume the likely impacts of those on crop yields. These learnings surely enhanced my ability of critical analysis with amplifying my expertise on using a powerful data analysis programme named Excel.

As an MSc Sustainable Development in Practice student, I was delighted to undertake my work placement with the Challenging the Climate Crisis: Children’s Agency to Tackle Policy Underpinned by Learning for Transformation project (CCC-CATAPULT). I wished to gain experience of working in research and it was a privilege to be able to see ‘behind the scenes’ of an international research project, and to witness how the approaches of the four universities intersected in the creation of the research. My own contribution to the project involved exploring the co-production research approach that was to be used. I undertook a review of literature on co-production which also formed the backbone of the article I wrote for the CCC-CATAPULT website. However, it was through discussions with my supervisors, Professor Lindsey McEwen and Dr Rosamund Portus, that I learnt the most. As they shared valuable insights into working in research, this helped me to begin developing better ways of working.