Park Royal is one of the largest employment sites in the UK, with 1,700 businesses, employing 40,000 people, 5.3% of West London's workforce, and producing 30% of London's food. Furthermore, the cluster contains firms that face all the technological challenges exhibited within the UK food system as a whole. Brunel has worked with its civic partner West London Business, and with its HE partner Harper Adams University, to co-create a programme of work that focusses on the innovation challenges of the food manufacturing and distribution sector in Park Royal. This has included presentations at events of the Park Royal Business Group (which is run by West London Business) and individual meetings with its members, as well as several meetings with strategic partners in West London, that helped define the focus of activities and identify the most effective delivery mechanisms. With the networks we had already established, and the key stakeholders engaged during the co-creation process, the project will drive the uptake of net-zero technologies across the estate, build projects between businesses that create circular economies and exploit industrial symbiosis, whilst acting as an exemplar and flagship for the UK food and drink sector as a whole.

Our Vision is to build national capability bridging scientific, finance, policy and third sector communities, harnessing and catalysing world-leading science to enable the greening of finance for nature and mobilisation of capital for nature recovery. The programme aligns with the 2023 UK Green Finance Strategy and Environmental Improvement Plan and is internationally relevant.?We bring together 17 research institutions, already engaging over 250 partners, into one high-impact network delivering co-designed, excellent and needs-orientated research, with activities that aim for broad-ranging impact. The programme comprises three 'flagship' initiatives, linked by a strategic coordination and integration hub. Flagship 1, Financing Green Sector Transitions, addresses the need to restore nature in the UK's agriculture sector, which accounts for over 70% of land-cover. In collaboration with the agri-food sector, investors and civil society, it will inform the development of financial tools and policies. These will be implemented at real-world sites in England and Northern Ireland to assess their impact on biodiversity. The research will also analyse the impact on habitats of international supply chains, such as tea and rubber imports. The goal is to create financial instruments and reporting mechanisms that benefit investors, land-users, nature and society, while addressing the impacts of global and UK agri-food chains on biodiversity. Flagship 2, Greening Finance for Nature, focusses on the decision-making processes of financial institutions such as banks and asset management companies. Their decisions can impact nature adversely, yet change could substantially address biodiversity loss. The focus will be on portfolio risk management, business strategy, risk disclosure and the prevention of greenwashing. The challenges include securing reliable data, addressing gaps in scientific knowledge and bridging the gap between science and finance. The goal is to revolutionise financial decision-making by incorporating nature within it. This will be driven by scientific data and guidance, and new regulatory frameworks. Flagship 3, Financing Biodiversity, tackles the challenge of financing biodiversity conservation and restoration with integrity at large-scales. It will promote best practices and coordination in biodiversity finance, and will champion the importance of between-site biodiversity and extinction risk reduction. This will ensure that conservation and restoration is effective, interconnected and extends beyond individual sites. Key stakeholders, including the Biodiversity Credit Alliance that co-designed the flagship, will help deliver a theory of change for scaling-up biodiversity finance. The goal is to define what high-integrity finance for biodiversity should look like, identify barriers and opportunities and start addressing them.

The SEED fellowship focuses on scoping and developing a new UK-China creative industries research and innovation hub through scoping sectors, engaging stakeholders, empowering participants, and developing future-focused visions and strategies. This supports the AHRCs long-standing ambition to bring together China-UK creative industry stakeholders to develop research-industry partnerships for long term collaboration. Through a programme of scoping studies including research, workshops and creative activities the fellowship aims to understand the needs of, barriers to, and opportunities for creative industry practitioners and researchers to develop cross-cultural and collaborative projects between the UK and China. This will enable us to develop a strategic vision and an evidence-informed delivery plan for the UK-China creative industries research and innovation (R&I) hub to be launched in 2024. We aim to strengthen existing partnerships and expand new R&I partnerships for the scaling up of sustained collaboration between the UK and China over the next 5-15 years. Our engagement activities will build a community of businesses, academics and industry members that are well trained and supported to enable them to build successful working relationships. The activities of the fellowship will build the foundations of a centre of excellence for creative debate, knowledge sharing, training, facilitating partnerships and accessing expertise that can be further strengthened through the future Hub's activities. Unique to this fellowship is the Empower programme which will provide seed funding for UK-China projects that produce creative outputs, generate productive connections and test the effectiveness of the resources being produced by the fellowship team. Through the development of resources, including a toolkit, we will support cross-cultural collaboration which will be showcased through mixed-media content on social media platforms and our website. The model for this fellowship draws together expertise from across the breadth of the creative industries - in academia, business, policy and skills training from both the UK and China - in working groups, an Advisory Board and partnerships to ensure diverse needs and requirements are captured and embedded in the plan of the hub. The fellowship will facilitate the launch and implementation of the hub in 2024. The research, sector knowledge and liaison with the research and innovation community are all focussed on developing a strong future UK-based Hub to support the work of the China-based Hub. The future Hub will be well equipped and fully resourced to act as a docking station for accessing knowledge and expertise; a centre of excellence for training creative entrepreneurs with cultural sensitivity; a club for intelligence gathering, creative debate and showcasing to the Hub's community and the general public, an accelerator for business research, innovation and growth, as well as business to business engagement; a facilitator of collaborative and interdisciplinary research partnerships; and a platform to create the conditions for sustained and productive partnerships between the creative industries in the UK and China.