Our research areas

Adaptation to climate change

The group explores adaptation to climate change and other socio-economic change drivers at different scales (from local to global) and (short- to long-term). As part of this, we develop and apply novel approaches to quantify the costs and benefits of soft and hard engineering solutions, including ecosystem-based adaptation (e.g., natural flood management strategies) to inform robust climate change adaptation policies across multiple sectors and scales.

The group applies various techniques ranging from Artificial Intelligence, deep learning, and other data-driven methods and tools in solving Civil and Environmental Engineering problems, particularly related to environmental issues, water flow, and climate change.

Key expertise of the research group in these areas include understanding and quantifying the implications of extreme geo-environmental hazards (such as tsunamis, landslide-generated waves, flooding, coastal erosion), structural health of hydraulic structures (e.g., dams, flood defences) and innovative solutions to adapt to climate change.

Circular water economy

The group also concentrates on providing research solutions for recycling water and offering sustainable water resources for domestic and industrial uses. The group deploys novel processes for wastewater purification and resource recovery and data driven analytics for monitoring, control and modelling in water resource management.

In addition, the group has global reputation in research and development of solutions for Circular Economy modelling and resource recovery technologies in Water Industry. The multidisciplinary group provides models, tools and solutions for the sustainability and circularity modelling, assessment and implementation. The internationally recognised group offers quantitative measurement of the circularity performance to support decision making and apply the most sustainable, low-cost and low environmental footprint solutions for maximising the quality and sustainability of industrial processes.

The ambitious plans of our ongoing research and development activities is to create the base and corner stone of Circular Economy Modelling and Evaluation that can be replicated and scaled up for a wide range of industries (i.e. Water, Food, Construction, Manufacturing, and Energy sectors).

These research priorities are also strongly linked to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In particular, our research outputs can provide the scientific base to inform decision-making in achieving the SDG6 (Clean Water and Sanitation), SDG11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities), SDG12 (Responsible Consumption and Production), SDG13 (Climate Action), and SDG15 (Life on Land) targets.