Environmental Protection UK National Student Showcase

The Air Quality Management Resource Centre, UWE has a long standing history of working closely with the national environmental charity - Environmental Protection UK . Part of that working relationship includes hosting the Environmental Protection UK National Student Day in which students from UK institutions are given the opportunity to present their research which covers a range of environmental issues.

This years event is in Room 2L4 on Thursday 31st of July starting at 11am. Please come along if any of the topics tweaks your interest.

Speaker and topics include (this may not be the order of presentations on the day):
1) Rose Bailey (UWE) - Carbon management at the city scale: An exploration of the carbon futures for the Bristol region.
2) Simon Baldwin (UWE) - Integrating local air quality and carbon management at a local and regional governance level.
3) Aoife Grant (Bristol University) - Calculation of the deposition velocity of hydrogen and their use in regional and global climate prediction models.
4) Dotun Olowoporoku (UWE) - Managing local air quality through Local Transport Planning - are we there yet?
5) John Taylor (University of Exeter) - To what extent can geothermal resources contribute to sustainable development at the community scale?
6) Ben Williams (Portsmouth University) - The development of an empirical dust dispersion model based on sample geochemistry.

UWE now ranked third in UK for sustainability

UWE has jumped five places in People and Planet's league table for sustainable universities and is now ranked THIRD out of all (>120) UK Universities. The assessment criteria are updated every year to reflect the great improvements being made in environmental policies and performance in the UK Higher Education system, and to help drive further improvements and the turning of policies into actions.  This year the assessment was made over 9 key indicators:

Management and Policy
- Publicly available environmental policy
- Full-time environment staff
- Comprehensive environmental auditing
- Fairtrade University accreditation
- Ethical investment policy

Performance
- Energy sources
- Percentage of waste recycled
- Carbon emissions per head
- Water consumption per head

 

More information on UWE's performance

http://info.uwe.ac.uk/news/UWENews/article.asp?item=1302&year=2008

The full People and Planet league table

http://peopleandplanet.org/gogreen/greenleague2008

Air Pollution and Meteorological Data @ UWE

Following the recent installation of pollution monitors at the University, air quality and meteorological is now available online from the UWE website. Simply go to our homepage www.uwe.ac.uk/aqm and use the buttons Weather@UWE and Pollution@UWE to go to the data of your choice.

Dotun to present at TPM 2008

Dotun had his paper accepted by Planning and Transport, Research and Computation (PTRC) the organisers of the 6th annual Transport Practitioners Meeting (TPM) 2008 in Reading. Dotun will be speaking at the conference on 16th of July, 2008 to a broad range of transport engineers, planners and urban transport designers on some of the findings of his research.

Consultation - draft LAQM Policy & Technical Guidance

The New Policy Guidance and Technical Guidance on local air quality management are out for consultation. All UK local authorities are invited to comment by 26 September 2008.
Please follow this link for more information and to download the guidance documents: http://www.defra.gov.uk/corporate/consult/airqualitymanage-guidance/

Simon delivered presentation at Environment Agency Air Quality Conference - 24 June 2008

Simon gave a presentation at the annual Air Quality Conference held by the Environment Agency at Aston University, Birmingham. The presentation focused on the importance of collaboration between professionals working in the field of air quality and carbon management and presented the main conclusions of his first round of questionnaires. The presentation was well received by the audience of air quality experts and practitioners. Other presentation on the agenda included: policy updates for air quality management; dealing with air quality in major incidents; and future scenarios for climate change and air quality.

"Chatterton" in AQB Double Page Spread

Following his recent presentation to June's IAPSC meeting in London on the growth of Air Quality Management Areas, the presentation and an additional interview with AQB editor Jack Pease formed the basis of a double page feature article in July's Air Quality Bulletin (http://www.empublishing.org.uk/air/)  In the article "Chatterton" (as he is constantly referred to as) describes the problems of reporting AQMA statistics, describes the progressive growth in AQMAs and the reasons why we still keep on needing more, and makes some predictions for the future about what will happen next.....

 

AQMRC, UWE in Top 20 Consultancies

A recent ranking of UK air quality consultancies carried out by Air Quality Bulletin ( http://www.empublishing.org.uk/air/ ) has ranked AQMRC, UWE in the top 20 (of over 50 consultancies).  The rankings are based solely on self-reported numbers of "full-time equivalent people working on AQ - excluding technical and support staff" and so placings must be interpreted with caution as quantity may not necessarily relate to quantity.  We believe however that the rating demonstrates we have a strong capacity within the AQ field, yet remain compact enough to retain a personal touch and gain the benefits of working in a closely co-ordinated environment.