Asid Ur Rehman
Asid Ur Rehman is a third-year PhD researcher in the School of Engineering (Water Group) at Newcastle University. His PhD is funded by the ONE Planet Doctoral Training Partnership. Asid has an academic background in geospatial and earth observation sciences, holding an undergraduate degree in Space Science and a master’s degree in Remote Sensing and Geo-information Science. After spending about ten years with international organisations such as the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), he returned to academia in 2021 to pursue his PhD in Civil Engineering (Water Resources).
Question: What is your research about?
My research focuses on designing cost-effective and sustainable urban flood risk management approaches under diverse rainstorm conditions. Climate and weather systems are becoming increasingly erratic, with rainstorms growing more severe and frequent, and shifting in their spatial and temporal patterns. Consequently, conventional flood risk management approaches, such as subsurface drainage networks, has become ineffective in handling surface flood flux, putting urban areas and societies at unprecedented risk. To address this formidable challenge, we need sustainable alternatives like Blue-Green Infrastructure (BGI), which includes permeable surfaces, detention ponds, swales, rain gardens, and green roofs. However, designing cost-effective BGI that considers factors like feature type, size, and location for various rainstorm types poses significant challenges. My research aims to overcome these challenges by developing an automated tool that integrates an optimisation algorithm with a detailed flood simulation model to identify robust BGI deployment schemes.
So far, I have successfully developed and validated the proposed automated tool named the Cost OptimisatioN Framework for Implementing blue-Green infrastructURE (CONFIGURE). This tool identifies optimal locations and sizes for permeable surface interventions (Accepted manuscript: Multi-objective Optimisation Framework for Blue-Green Infrastructure Placement Using Detailed Flood Model). Further, I am enhancing CONFIGURE’s capabilities to optimise a broader range of BGI features, including combinations of their types, sizes, and locations, by considering various rainstorm intensities and future climate scenarios.
Question: What got you into this field of research?
Examining the geospatial aspects of rapid urbanisation and climate change on flooding during my professional career highlighted the alarming future our society may face. This realisation convinced me to pursue research in climate-induced risk management. As a first step, in 2018, I published my first research article based on my master’s thesis, which assessed the measurement accuracy of satellite-based high-resolution rainfall products for their potential use in an early flood warning system. Additionally, I collaborated with researchers on topics such as green space characterisation in urban environments. This work provided a solid foundation for my current research endeavours.
Question: What inspires you to do this work?
The automated tool I have developed has the promising capability to incorporate diverse climate-induced rainstorm complexities to devise the most cost-effective flood management solutions. I believe this tool will empower local authorities to create resilient flood risk management plans to safeguard cities and communities from future flooding. Such potential impact not only energises me in the current topic but also inspires me to explore further, considering overall societal resilience beyond flooding.
Question: Why did you choose the Tyndall Centre to do your PhD?
Being a student member, the Tyndall Centre offers outstanding multidisciplinary networking opportunities with early career researchers as well as academics. Its early-career-focused events enable me to confidently present my ideas and research work to peers at similar stages in their careers. Additionally, the Annual Tyndall Assembly provides a valuable chance to engage with established researchers and academics, gaining mentorship and guidance. While my current work focuses on flood modelling and BGI optimisation, the multidisciplinary nature of the Tyndall Centre inspires me to collaborate with researchers in policy, economics, and social science, all working together towards achieving overall societal resilience.
Question: Do you have any advise for those who want to do a PhD?
If you’re aiming to do a PhD or have just started, don’t try to be a perfectionist. It will become difficult if you get caught up in the nitty-gritty details. Think of your PhD as a puzzle. Start filling in the pieces randomly, and soon you’ll begin to see the connections among different parts. One final tip: if you’re stuck, reverse engineering often works wonders. Enjoy the journey!
Jack Heslop
Jack Heslop holds a one-year contract with the Tyndall Centre, contributing to the EU Horizon 2020 PROTECT project. The project’s main objective is to enhance our understanding of global and local sea level rise projections across various timescales – 50 years, 100 years, out ideally over multiple centuries to 2300. The main uncertainties over these long timescales relate to the response of the large ice sheets to global warming. Jack’s role within the project is to explore the implications of these new sea level rise projections on coastal communities worldwide.
Question: What is your research about?
I’m currently researching the impacts of sea level rise on global coastal communities over the next three centuries.
Question: What got you into this field of research?
I worked for 7 years as an engineering consultant, specialising in inland and coastal flood defence schemes. Over this period I always loved projects without a pre-defined approach that required a new methodology to be created. I became a go-to person for this type of work which led me to working on many interesting projects at local and strategic scales and both nationally and internationally. Some of these included: a feasibility study and master-planning of a floating city in the Arabian Gulf that, if constructed, will be the largest floating structure in the world, finding the best locations for constructing flood storage and wetland habitats in the catchment of the river Arun and helping local authorities understand where they should investigate future defences in their counties. Whilst I enjoyed my work on these project’s I often felt I couldn’t fully engage with the research required due to financial pressures from the company. I took a career break and got talking to Prof. Robert Nicholls at TYN about doing a PhD to improve my scientific thinking and approaches to research. He mentioned the sea level rise research project that was a good fit for my prior experience and I’ve been working on it ever since.~
Question: What inspires you to do this work?
I studied civil engineering at undergrad. The etymology of civil is from civilisation; I’ve always been interested in decision making at the civilisation scale. Understanding the viability of global coastal populations over the next three hundred years fits this brief perfectly; civil engineering with a capital C. Furthermore, I’m driven by the opportunity to bring further attention to those facing the most immediate implications of sea level rise and our changing climate who comparatively have contributed almost nothing to its causes. In this work, the small island states are highlighted as being disproportionately impacted by sea level rise requiring large coastal adaptation responses. It’s an engaging element of this work to bring further evidence to highlight their challenges.
Question: Why did you choose the Tyndall Centre to do your PhD?
The Tyndall center is a world-renowned climate research center.
Question: Do you have any advise for those who want to do a PhD?
I should clarify that I’m yet to start a PhD. I currently hold a research position but am planning to start a PhD with TYN in October. For those deciding whether to undertake a PhD, I’m planning to use it as an opportunity to tidy up my mind and improve my scientific thinking. An example of this is how I approach solving problems. I’ve noticed that when approaching a problem, I am quick to start working on the first idea I have, especially if it’s appears a creative solution. A more measured approach would be to draft a few options and weighing them against each other before deciding which is the best approach. The second takes more patience but shows more cognitive maturity.
Regarding advice for people doing a PhD or any relatively large project, is to spend some time thinking about the ideologies behind your project. These might be: to seek a new truth, challenge an existing paradigm, democratise information, bridge interdisciplinary gaps, provide a simple answer to a messy problems.
Remind yourself of the underlying ideologies of a project during the project can both improve decisions and final outputs and give meaning to the less enjoyable parts of your work.
Roland Smith
Roland is a Leverhulme Trust Doctoral Scholar at the University of East Anglia as part of the Critical Decade programme. His research focuses on the understanding this impact of climate change on patterns of migration and population displacement.
Roland holds an MSc Climate Change, Development and Policy from University of Sussex / Institute of Development Studies (2020), for which he was awarded a distinction. Following his degree, he worked with Fraser Risk Consulting undertaking a review of Pacific Small Island Developing States climate change data and projections.
Question: What is your research about?
The overarching theme of my research is understanding how sea-level rise will affect patterns of human migration. My focus is exploring how populations across coastal Bangladesh utilise mobility in response to the threat and experience of the environmental shocks and degradation that are expected to become more frequent and severe with rising sea levels. These will include increased coastal and riverine flooding, storm surge, erosion, salinisation and resulting reduction in access to freshwater.
For large swathes of the population of Bangladesh migration is already part of their lives – as is the case for many communities that are most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Therefore, a key part of my research is exploring the relationships between the existing influences on migration, for example demographic changes as people are drawn away from rural areas towards cities or shifts in livelihoods, with these changing environmental conditions.
Ultimately the aim is to use this insight to inform policies which will support those people who are most vulnerable, whether that is in adapting to changing environment or by improving living and working conditions at their places of destination.
Question: What got you into this field of research?
Having spent the first part of my career working in the cultural sector, I returned to academia in 2019 to study a masters in Climate Change, Development and Policy at the University of Sussex. Around this time, ‘climate migration’ was coming to the forefront of public discourse around the potential impacts of climate change, often characterised by otherwise well-informed commentators and activists as hordes of ‘climate refugees’ trying to cross the seas and climb the walls into western Europe and North America. I was aware – and increasingly uneasy – that this fearmongering was not only inaccurate but was clouding the reality of how climate change could impact on patterns of human migration.
This led me to develop my masters thesis with Prof Dominic Kniveton which employed a systems dynamic approach to exploring drivers of displacement in Pacific small island developing states. This demonstrated the potential that differing modelling approaches could have in developing our understanding of the complex relationships between the impacts of climate change with those pre-existing drivers of migration. This is necessary for us to be able to shape the policy interventions to support those communities facing increasingly severe environmental shocks and stresses so that they are able make their own decision whether to adapt in place or to pursue mobility at a time and place of their choosing.
Question: What inspires you to do this work?
Many years ago, I attended an arts leadership course where the futurist, Dr Christopher Barnatt, had outlined a bleak vision of the future under climate change. Although I considered myself to be informed and motivated by issues associated with climate change, I was sceptical about whether any of our individual actions could make any significant difference. Dr Barnatt’s responded to this by saying simply,
“That maybe the case, but at some point, you will need to look those future generations in the eye and say you did what you could to avoid the worst from happening”
That planted the seed for what would grow into my current career. This was in part shaped by fatherhood which for me heightened my awareness of the fragile legacy that we pass on to those that follow. More importantly, however, I am driven by a sense of climate justice, that it those countries who have contributed least to global emissions that are predominantly those who are most vulnerable and exposed to the impacts of climate change. Migration and displacement of people in response to environmental shocks and degradation associated with climate change is a manifestation of this injustice.
Question: Why did you choose the Tyndall Centre to do your PhD?
The Critical Decade for Climate Change programme was what initially drew me to UEA and the Tyndall Centre. The focus on transdisciplinary scholarship and the opportunity to develop a shared creative practice exploring narratives around climate change felt almost tailor-made to enable to weave together my experience in the creative industries and offer a different perspective to shaping research.
The Tyndall Centre has been such a vital component of my PhD in that it provides that rare conduit between the academic research into real world impact through engagement with policymakers and directly with society. For those of us who are driven in part by a desire to effect change this is essential. It gives your work an urgency that I don’t sense in other spheres of research. Most importantly, however, the Tyndall Centre draws together so many amazing people whose dedication and expertise is hugely inspirational.
Question: Do you have any advise for those who want to do a PhD?
Approach the decision with humility, care and respect. Be honest and clear with yourself about why you want to pursue the PhD, what you hope to achieve with it and why it is that you want to devote three or more years to this area of research.
Undertaking a PhD is unlike any other experience I have had, either professionally or in education. The work can be hugely nurturing and fulfilling, but the way that most PhDs are structured in this country, combined with the relatively meagre stipend, means that the process becomes a test of endurance, stamina and resolve. Only you can judge whether that will be worth it.
Go in with concrete goals of what you want to achieve and what you hope the PhD will lead on to. Don’t let go of those and don’t get drawn into the many distractions that you will encounter en route. Most importantly find your people, whether that is where your research is based or those at other institutions who are working in your field. Nurture those relationships as they will be those that shape your future career and be the basis of friendships that will be lifelong.
