Climate change and extreme weather are increasing wildfire risk and hazard through heatwaves and drought, alongside poor soil health and reduced water. Wildfires turn topsoil from a carbon sink to a carbon source, increasing soil hydrophobicity and degradation risk. This Seedcorn work supports the PhD project of Milad Banitalebidehkordi (‘Integration of a cooling system for fire-prone regions’). The PhD has developed a realistic lab fire-testing setup with a multifunctional soil amendment incorporating a CaCl₂-crosslinked alginate hydrogel (brown seaweed) and wollastonite (CaSiO₃) to reduce fire-driven degradation while protecting soil organic (SOC) and inorganic carbon (SIC) pools. The hydrogel improves water retention, potentially reducing SOC vulnerability during heating, while wollastonite provides reactive mineral surfaces that may promote enhanced weathering and strengthen organo-mineral protection of alginate-based SOC (through Fe/Mn oxides; Xiao et al., 2023). We have validated the amendment, achieving up to 600% strength gains for soils beneath critical infrastructure. With IHRR support, we will collaborate with Dr. Elisa Lopez-Capel and UNDO to develop a Thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) workflow to test whether amendments also stabilise SOC and SIC. TGA will demonstrate carbon-stability fingerprints (labile SOC loss and SIC signals), justifying the next stage of post-fire resilience tests (soil microbiome, health and strength recovery).
The WHO and World Organisation for Animal Health identify Community-based Animal Health Surveillance (CAHS) as key to mitigating zoonotic disease risks and contributing to pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response, especially in remote areas of the Global South where shared spaces of wildlife, livestock, and people increase disease spillover risk, yet resources and capacity to monitor animal health and disease dynamics are limited. With community partners and collaborators in Zambia’s Department of Veterinary Services, CIFOR-ICRAF, and the Universities of Birmingham and Manchester, I launched a pilot CAHS system (with £5000) in southern Zambia (November 2025 – July 2026) that is already demonstrating impact in helping surveil and respond to zoonotic disease risks. The funds will support a workshop in Lusaka, Zambia to demonstrate the impact made by our CAHS pilot project to potential funders (UNFAO & CIFOR-ICRAF) and to develop collaborations and knowledge sharing to support an £800k Darwin Initiative bid aimed at scaling up our CAHS project/approach to other areas in Zambia and Kenya.
The workshop and project complements IHRR’s transdisciplinary work to support multi-sector and community-oriented approaches to proactively mitigate and respond to hazards and risks. It will strengthen IHRR’s engagement with pandemic and infectious disease-related hazard, risk, and resilience.
This project will investigate the seismic resilience of traditional Himalayan heritage structures, with particular focus on Kath-Kuni architecture in Himachal Pradesh and comparable historic buildings in Nepal. Building on our prior work on earthquake response of slopes, seismic assessment of unreinforced and confined masonry systems, and geotechnical hazards in tectonically active mountain regions, the study will integrate field documentation, structural characterisation (including non-destructive testing techniques), and advanced numerical modelling strategies to quantify how vernacular timber-stone systems respond to earthquake loading in geotechnical-hazard contexts. Kath-Kuni construction, with its alternating timber and stone layers, is widely regarded as valuable, inherently resilient cultural construction typology; however, its dynamic behaviour, load-transfer mechanisms, and failure thresholds remain insufficiently understood. The project aligns directly with the hazard, risk and resilience themes of the Institute of Hazard, Risk and Resilience by addressing seismic hazard impacts on culturally significant yet structurally vulnerable built heritage in high-risk Himalayan settings. The work will generate preliminary analytical models, vulnerability indicators, and a comparative framework for Himalayan region. Seedcorn funding will enable pilot data development, interdisciplinary engagement across engineering and heritage studies, and co-design of a larger external proposal focused on community-centred seismic risk reduction and climate-resilient conservation strategies in mountain regions.
This IHRR pilot project will setup, commission and initiate the monitoring of a functional rain garden on the Durham University campus as a living testbed for hazard, risk and resilience research in relation to surface water flooding. This project is co-leads by Estates Operations/Sustainability to support the installation and instrumentation of a ‘HydroPlanterFlex’ rain garden system to quantify its performance in managing runoff volumes, peak flows and soil moisture dynamics under real and simulated storm events. This generates a unique dataset quantifying how the rain garden attenuates flood hazard, reduces combined sewer overflow loading and delivers biodiversity/amenity co-benefits. The testbed will strengthen external funding bids (e.g., UKRI/NERC/EPSRC) by providing an on-campus testbed and build long-term capacity for IHRR-aligned impact. This funding also feeds into maintaining Durham’s QS world Sustainability ranking (24th).
The project directly addresses IHRR themes by linking hydrological hazard (intense rainfall) to risk (localised flooding and service disruption) and resilience (nature‑based infrastructure that mitigates impacts while delivering wider ecosystem services). It will underpin future external funding bids on nature‑based solutions, net‑zero resilience and SuDS performance, providing a demonstrator site for impact activities with local authorities, water companies and community groups interested in sustainable flood risk management.
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