The core intellectual aim of BIOSEC is to explore whether concerns about biodiversity protection and global security are becoming integrated, and if so, in what ways. It will do so via building new theoretical approaches for political ecology. Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary General and Executive Director of UNEP recently stated ‘the scale and role of wildlife and forest crime in threat finance calls for much wider policy attention’. The argument that wildlife trafficking constitutes a significant source of ‘threat finance’ takes two forms: first as a lucrative business for organised crime networks in Europe and Asia, and second as a source of finance for militias and terrorist networks, most notably Al Shabaab, Lord’s Resistance Army and Janjaweed. BIOSEC is a four year project designed to lead debates on these emerging challenges. It will build pioneering theoretical approaches and generate new empirical data. BIOSEC takes a fully integrated approach: it will produce a better conceptual understanding of the role of illegal wildlife trade in generating threat finance; it will examine the links between source and end user countries for wildlife products; and it will investigate and analyse the emerging responses of NGOs, government agencies and international organisations to these challenges. BIOSEC goes beyond the ‘state-of-the art’ because biodiversity protection and global security currently inhabit distinctive intellectual ‘silos’; however, they need to be analysed via an interdisciplinary research agenda that cuts across human geography, politics and international relations, criminology and conservation biology. This research is timely because in the last two years, the idea that the illegal wildlife trade constitutes a major security threat has become more prevalent in academic and policy circles, yet it is an area that is under researched and poorly understood. These recent shifts demand urgent conceptual and empirical interrogation.

There are large differences in life expectancy and the burden of ill health across the UK, both geographically and between different socioeconomic groups. In order to address health inequalities resources must be directed towards policies and programmes that not only improve health overall, but that also reduce the health gap. One of the difficulties for decision makers, however, is that they often do not know what impact a proposed programme will have on health inequalities, or indeed on overall health. This is a particular problem when the proposed programme is complex, an example being the current School Travel Plan initiative. This particular programme has many potential effects on health, both positive and negative, and these may differ in different areas and in different populations. One approach to predicting the costs and health effects of a health promoting programme is through health economic modelling. These mathematical models attempt to replicate the real world in a simplified fashion, combining evidence from diverse sources in order to estimate the outcome of a proposed course of action. This project aims to develop such a model for the school travel plan programme in order to estimate costs, health consequences and the impact on health inequality.

Making decisions amongst competing healthcare needs is important in the UK NHS. In order to make more informed decisions, information is needed on the costs and benefits of alternative treatments. We can use an economic evaluation to compare these costs and benefits. In addition to increasing length of life, many treatments have an impact on quality of life and this benfit can be combined into a single measure called the quality adjusted life year (QALY). Treatments can then be compared in terms of their cost per QALY gained. Instruments that measure this quality of life have been developed for adults and each has a set of preference weights associated with them which have been derived from interviews with the general public. These give a higher weight to more desirable health states. Instruments that measure health related quality of life for children that can be used in this way are lacking. This research is developing a new health related quality of life measure for children that can measure QALYs gained and is therefore suitable for use in economic evaluation. This should lead to better and more informed decision making in healthcare for children.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.