News

George Osborne announced a welcome boost of £700 million funding for flood defences and resilience in his budget yesterday. The CCRI has been actively involved in natural flood management in recent years and hopes that a large part of this new fund will be invested in natural flood defences.

CCRI soil experts, Julie Ingram and Jane Mills, recently co-authored a paper on “Management of agricultural soils for greenhouse gas mitigation: Learning from a case study in NE Spain", which was published in Environmental Science and Policy. This paper has now been made available online. It is based on data collected from the EU FP7 SmartSoil project.

We are delighted to report that a film on natural flood management, which the CCRI helped to make, has won an award. From over 2,200 films, the public had nominated their best films in seven different categories. The winning film is called “Rural Sustainable Drainage – Natural Flood Management in the Stroud Valleys”

We are very excited to launch our new-look website, which we hope you will find easier and faster to navigate. We hope you like the fresh look - please take a moment to look around the site and let us know what you think! To celebrate the launch, we are offering a FREE eBook, which is ready to download now in a choice of three different formats.

CCRI was recently successful in securing around £287,400 EU Horizon 2020 funding as part of a project called SoilCare (SoilCare for profitable and sustainable crop production in Europe). SoilCare aims to identify and evaluate site-specific, soil-improving cropping systems and agronomic techniques that have positive impacts on profitability and sustainability in Europe.

CCRI’s Chris Short gave a public lecture at the University of Gloucestershire Oxstalls Campus on the subject of natural flood management on Thursday, 25th February.

Julie Ingram is presenting a paper at an international conference at the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex University, Brighton, which is taking place on 23rd-26th February. The conference is called "Contested Agronomy: whose agronomy counts?" and is about the battlefields in agricultural research, past and present. Julie’s paper is entitled “Here, we argue that”: contested views of managing soil carbon for mitigation.

A film which the CCRI helped to make has been nominated for a Stroud Community TV Award. From over 2,200 films, the public has nominated their best films in seven different categories. Rural Sustainable Drainage – Natural Flood Management in the Stroud Valleys has been nominated as one of the best Green Films of 2015. The film relates to work that the CCRI undertook with Stroud District Council to tackle floods and help wildlife on the streams of the Stroud valleys.

Julie Ingram, Pete Gaskell and Jane Mills have been in Turin, Italy, this week attending the annual VALERIE (VALorising European Research for Innovation in agriculturE and forestry) project meeting. The CCRI team convened two sessions for the 6 case study partners.