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Innovation process may be characterised by three separate actions: the creation of ideas; their development; and subsequent application for the benefit of industry and society. In water engineering consultancy, the processes that stimulate and manage innovation are not well established. Other organisations are capable of establishing dedicated product or commodity facilities, but the make‐up of the construction industry and its consultancy service organisations, requires a different approach. Conventional models tend to focus on product innovation in a manufacturing environment but it is also necessary to consider innovation from the perspective of the service industries. This paper aims to address this issue.

This paper describes the case of Halcrow, an international civil and environmental engineering consultancy. In 2001, Halcrow Group Ltd and Cardiff University cooperated with each other to research and innovate via a strategic collaboration which involved the sponsorship of a chair and a research team in the School of Engineering. The collaboration, whose aim is to underpin a strategic relationship between university research in various aspects of water engineering and management consultancy, is structured around five related topics, which when combined provide a collaborative framework that promotes innovation and exploitation of industry relevant research. The topics are: networking, research exploitation, skills development, knowledge transfer and dissemination. Through the collaboration, a number of activities have been promoted and these have resulted in a number of innovations, valuable in developing business. Insights from the Halcrow‐Cardiff collaboration activities and highlights of the resulting innovations are described in this paper.

The paper highlights the contribution that research work through the collaboration has made to the water industry and the anticipated benefits to society in the long term. The paper in turn describes how it has been possible to accommodate variations related to the likes of climate change and renewable energy efficiency, looking ahead to the medium and long terms.

The paper provides insight into an innovative partnership providing a framework for the creation of ideas.

Chocolate and cocoa are made from the “beans” or seeds of several small trees, natives of tropical America, of which Theobroma cacao (L.) is by far the most important. Cocoa beans were highly esteemed by the aborigines, especially the Aztecs of Mexico and Peru, who prepared from them beverages and foods. They were brought to the notice of Europeans by Cortez and other explorers, but were not extensively imported into Europe until the seventeenth century, about the time tea and coffee were introduced from the East. At present the world's supply comes chiefly from Venezuela, Guiana, Ecuador, Brazil, Trinidad, Cuba, Mexico, and other regions bordering on the Gulf of Mexico, being gathered in these regions from trees both wild and cultivated; and also to some extent from Java, Ceylon, Africa, and other parts of the Old World, where the tree has been successfully cultivated.

There is a growing awareness that philanthropy and making donations reflect forms of action that remain distant from communities and may be assumed to generate lesser impact. To this end, some companies have made visible efforts to respond to a need to reinvent their forms of interaction with society so as to ensure direct involvement, stronger both in the bonds created and the level of intervention engaged in. It is within the scope of this challenge that corporate volunteering (CV) is located.

The purpose of this paper is to present a fully conservative numerical algorithm for solving the coupled shallow water hydro-sediment-morphodynamic equations governing fluvial processes, and also to clarify the performance of a conventional algorithm, which redistributes the variable water-sediment mixture density to the source terms of the governing equations and accordingly the hyperbolic operator is rendered similar to that of the conventional shallow water equations for clear water flows.

The coupled shallow water hydro-sediment-morphodynamic equations governing fluvial processes are arranged in full conservation form, and solved by a well-balanced weighted surface depth-gradient method along with a slope-limited centred scheme. The present algorithm is verified for a spectrum of test cases, which involve complex flows with shock waves and sediment transport processes with contact discontinuities over irregular topographies. The computational results of the conventional algorithm are compared with those of the present algorithm and evaluated by available referenced data.

The fully conservative numerical algorithm performs satisfactorily over the spectrum of test cases, and the conventional algorithm is confirmed to work similarly well.

A fully conservative numerical algorithm, without redistributing the water-sediment mixture density, is proposed for solving the coupled shallow water hydro-sediment-morphodynamic equations. It is clarified that the conventional algorithm, involving redistribution of the water-sediment mixture density, performs similarly well. Both algorithms are equally applicable to problems encountered in computational river modelling.

With the diversification of modelling activities encouraged by versatile modelling tools, handling their datasets has become a formidable problem. A further impetus stems from the emergence of the real‐time forecasting culture, transforming data embedded in computer programs of one‐off modelling activities of the 1970s‐1980s into dataset assets, an important feature of modelling since the 1990s, where modelling has emerged as a practice with a pivotal role to data transactions. The scope for data is now vast but in legacy data management practices datasets are fragmented, not transparent outside their native software systems, and normally “monolithic”. Emerging initiatives on published interfaces will make datasets transparent outside their native systems but will not solve the fragmentation and monolithic problems. These problems signify a lack of science base in data management and as such it is necessary to unravel inherent generic structures in data. This paper outlines root causes for these problems and presents a tentative solution referred to as “systemic data management”, which is capable of solving the above problems through the assemblage of packaged data. Categorisation is presented as a packaging methodology and the various sources contributing to the generic structure of data are outlined, e.g. modelling techniques, modelling problems, application areas and application problems. The opportunities offered by systemic data management include: promoting transparency among datasets of different software systems; exploiting inherent synergies within data; and treating data as assets with a long‐term view on reuse of these assets in an integrated capability.

The purpose of this paper is to present a new numerical model for shallow water flows over heterogeneous sedimentary layers. It is already several years since the single-layered models have been used to model shallow water flows over erodible beds. Although such models present a real opportunity for shallow water flows over movable beds, this paper is the first to propose a multilayered solver for this class of flow problems.

Multilayered beds formed with different erodible soils are considered in this study. The governing equations consist of the well-established shallow water equations for the flow, a transport equation for the suspended sediments, an Exner-type equation for the bed load and a set of empirical equations for erosion and deposition terms. For the numerical solution of the coupled system, the authors consider a non-homogeneous Riemann solver equipped with interface-tracking tools to resolve discontinuous soil properties in the multilayered bed. The solver consists of a predictor stage for the discretization of gradient terms and a corrector stage for the treatment of source terms.

This paper reveals that modeling shallow water flows over multilayered sedimentary topography can be achieved by using a coupled system of partial differential equations governing sediment transport. The obtained results demonstrate that the proposed numerical model preserves the conservation property, and it provides accurate results, avoiding numerical oscillations and numerical dissipation in the approximated solutions.

A novel implementation of sediment handling is presented where both averaged and separate values for sediment species are used to ensure speed and precision in the simulations.

The purpose of this study is to analyze and empirically test the impact of Economic Freedom [(EF) measured by size of the government] and inequality on environmental pollutants in addition to macroeconomic variables like per capita GDP, governance indicators, etc. along with existence of non-linear (Kuznets) postulation between economic growth and per capita emissions.

The paper examines the select Asian nations' data attributes, first qualitatively using correlation data technique, followed by empirical testing using differenced Generalized Methods of Moments (GMM). Using the data of selected Asian countries for the period from 1981 to 2016, the authors have applied a dynamic panel technique.

The key findings that emerge from the study are as follows: first, there is weak evidence for the existence of the Kuznets curve based on the empirical results; second, the results indicate that increased EF (by lower government size) could enable to contain carbon emissions; third, there is a negative relationship between democracy and environmental quality (corroborating to the existing studies on carbon emissions); and fourth, there is a strong statistical evidence that increasing income inequality pairs with greater emissions in the middle range of Gini.

The paper conforms to the universally held conviction that government interventions are essentially less productive and the desirability of a reduced size of the government in realizing sustainable green growth with equity.

In an era of liberalization and privatization, it is argued that the role of the government needs to be redefined if not necessarily truncated.

The current paper incorporates Gini (inequality measure) through its intercountry range dummies to study the differential effect of Gini on carbon emissions. Also, in some of the recent studies, distributional issues have surfaced explicitly in the discussion of income–climatic change relationship, but EF largely remains missing. The purpose of the current study is to investigate the same empirically.

This study aims to investigate two issues: (1) a nexus between climate-related financial policies (CRFP) and global value chains (GVC) and (2) the government’s policies to help countries enhance the efficient use of CRFP in improving a country’s likelihood to participate in GVC.

To investigate the connection between GVC and CRFP, the authors incorporate that backward participation is measured using foreign value-added, while domestic value-added is used to measure forward participation, quantified as proportions of gross exports. The study analyses yield significant insights across a span of 20 developing countries and 26 developed countries over the period from 2010 to 2020.

Regarding the first issue, the authors affirm the presence of a linear link between GVC and CRFP, implying that involvement in CRFP is advantageous for both backward and forward participation. Furthermore, the authors identify long-term GVC and CRFP cointegration and confirm its long-term effects. Notably, the expression of a linear relationship between GVC and CRFP appears to be stronger in developing countries.

The study findings, together with previous research, highlight the importance of financial policies relating to climate change (CRFP) in the context of economic growth. Climate change’s consequences for financial stability and GVC highlight the importance of expanded policymakers and industry participation in tackling environmental concerns.

Regarding the second issue, the study findings suggest critical policy implications for authorities by highlighting the importance of financial stability and expanded policymakers in promoting countries' participation in GVC.

This paper investigates the link between GVC performance and CRFP, offering three significant advances to previous research. Moreover, as a rigorous analytical method, this study adopts a typical error model with panel correction that accounts for cross-sectional dependency and stationarity.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of near-wall treatment approaches, which are crucial parameters in predicting the flow characteristics of open channels, and the influence of different vegetation covers in different layers.

Ansys Fluent, a computational fluid dynamics software, was used to calculate the flow and turbulence characteristics using a three-dimensional, turbulent (k-e realizable), incompressible and steady-flow assumption, along with various near-wall treatment approaches (standard, scalable, non-equilibrium and enhanced) in the vegetated channel. The numerical study was validated concerning an experimental study conducted in the existing literature.

The numerical model successfully predicted experimental results with relative error rates below 10%. It was determined that nonequilibrium wall functions exhibited the highest predictive success in experiment Run 1, standard wall functions in experiment Run 2 and enhanced wall treatments in experiment Run 3. This study has found that plant growth significantly alters open channel flow. In the contact zones, the velocities and the eddy viscosity are low, while in the free zones they are high. On the other hand, the turbulence kinetic energy and turbulence eddy dissipation are maximum at the solid–liquid interface, while they are minimum at free zones.

This is the first study, to the best of the author’s knowledge, concerning the performance of different near-wall treatment approaches on the prediction of vegetation-covered open channel flow characteristics. And this study provides valuable insights to improve the hydraulic performance of open-channel systems.