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Social capital is considered important for resilience across social levels, including communities, yet insights are scattered across disciplines. This meta-synthesis of 187 studies examines conceptual and empirical understandings of how social capital relates to resilience, identifying implications for community resilience and climate change practice. Different conceptualisations are highlighted, yet also limited focus on underlying dimensions of social capital and proactive types of resilience for engaging with the complex climate change challenge. Empirical insights show that structural and socio-cultural aspects of social capital, multiple other factors and formal actors are all important for shaping the role of social capital for guiding resilience outcomes. Thus, finding ways to work with these different elements is important. Greater attention on how and why outcomes emerge, interactions between factors, approaches of formal actors and different socio-cultural dimensions will advance understandings about how to nurture social capital for resilience in the context of climate change.

In this paper, we explore how we can use catchment resilience as a unifying concept to manage and regulate catchments, using structured reviews to support our perspective. Catchments are complex systems with interrelated natural, social, and technical aspects. The exposure, vulnerability, and resilience of these aspects (separately and in combination) are the latent conditions, which, when triggered by a hydrohazard, result in catchment impacts. In complex catchment systems, resilience is the ability to bounce back, the ability to absorb, and the ability to transform. When all three abilities are accounted for, we are forced to consider the interactions of the catchment system. Six main complexity concepts can be used to frame how we approach evaluating catchment resilience. These concepts are: natural-social-technical aspects, interactions, spatial scales, time scales, multiple forms of evidence, and uncertainty. In analysing these complexity concepts, we have found that there are several gaps in current practice. Requirements for future methodological approaches are suggested. Central to any effective approach is the incorporation of a linking systems or interaction analysis, which draws together the natural-social-technical system in a meaningful way. If our approaches do not begin to acknowledge the interdependencies and interactions, we may miss substantial opportunities to enhance catchment resilience.

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted public health, the economy and society—both directly and indirectly. Few approaches exist to understand these complex impacts in a way that (1) acknowledges cross-sectoral interdependencies; (2) models how short-term shocks translate into impacts on longer-term outcomes; (3) builds in local, contextual variation; and (4) recognises a wide set of priorities. The Urban Systems Abstraction Hierarchy (USAH) is proposed as an approach with these capabilities, and applied to Edinburgh (UK) between March-October 2020 to identify city-level impacts of the pandemic and associated policy responses. Results show changing priorities in the system and suggest areas which should be targeted for future urban resilience planning in Edinburgh for both short-term shocks and long-term recovery. This makes both methodological contributions (in the form of testing a new complex systems approach) and practical contributions (in the form of city-specific results which inform different aspects of resilience) to urban science.

The logistics sector is an often forgotten force behind modern life in the UK, and it is increasingly under pressure to become more efficient, more safety-conscious, and more environmentally sustainable. This triple bottom line necessitates deep changes to the traditional way of working. As evidenced by an expert-led technology forecast, many technological and organisational interventions are on the horizon for the next 15-30 years. This rapid pace of advancement, together with the frequent assumption that workers are 'hyper-rational', echoes a worrying pattern from other sectors that have since benefited from human factors & ergonomics (HF/E) expertise. This thesis aims to apply HF/E principles and methods to both current and projected future truck-driver scenarios, in order to leverage the most agile and intelligent agent in the logistics system: the human. Despite a lack of past work at this intersection, logistics and HF/E can be drawn together by their mutual use of systems complexity concepts. This thesis proposes that logistics is a large, complex adaptive socio-technical system (CASTS), and reviews HF/E methods to determine their fit to different system scales and dynamics. From this it is determined that initial work requires a bottom-up focus on the truck-driver system. A range of methods are employed to understand the existing truck driving task and what it requires of the modern driver; identify and prioritise potentially critical system 'parts'; design new supportive technologies from scratch in a way that allows for emergent behaviour; and analytically prototype how truck-driver systems are likely to change in projected future scenarios. This work provides new practical insights for current truck-driver systems, and a map of how this may change - shedding light on potential future problems and how we might adapt to them before they occur. Not only does this thesis provide a solid empirical foundation and a 'direction of travel', it also contributes the methodological guidance necessary to strategise next steps beyond this thesis, into deeper logistics complexity. Taken together this demonstrates the power of human factors methods for logistics, and their potential for other unexplored 'complex adaptive sociotechnical systems' (CASTS).

Climate change is a product of the Anthropocene, and the human–nature system in which we live. Effective climate change adaptation requires that we acknowledge this complexity. Theoretical literature on sustainability transitions has highlighted this and called for deeper acknowledgment of systems complexity in our research practices. Are we heeding these calls for ‘systems’ research? We used hydrohazards (floods and droughts) as an example research area to explore this question. We first distilled existing challenges for complex human–nature systems into six central concepts: Uncertainty, multiple spatial scales, multiple time scales, multimethod approaches, human–nature dimensions, and interactions. We then performed a systematic assessment of 737 articles to examine patterns in what methods are used and how these cover the complexity concepts. In general, results showed that many papers do not reference any of the complexity concepts, and no existing approach addresses all six. We used the detailed results to guide advancement from theoretical calls for action to specific next steps. Future research priorities include the development of methods for consideration of multiple hazards; for the study of interactions, particularly in linking the short- to medium-term time scales; to reduce data-intensivity; and to better integrate bottom–up and top–down approaches in a way that connects local context with higher-level decision-making. Overall this paper serves to build a shared conceptualisation of human–nature system complexity, map current practice, and navigate a complexity-smart trajectory for future research.

Yersinia pestis , the causative agent of plague and a biological threat agent, presents an urgent need for novel medical countermeasures due to documented cases of naturally acquired antibiotic resistance and potential person-to-person spread during a pneumonic infection. Immunotherapy has been proposed as a way to circumvent current and future antibiotic resistance. Here, we describe the development and characterization of two affinity matured human antibodies (αF1Ig AM2 and αF1Ig AM8) that promote survival of mice after exposure to aerosolized Y . pestis . We share details of the error prone PCR and yeast display technology-based affinity maturation process that we used. The resultant matured antibodies have nanomolar affinity for Y . pestis F1 antigen, are produced in high yield, and are resilient to 37°C stress for up to 6 months. Importantly, in vitro assays using a murine macrophage cell line demonstrated that αF1Ig AM2 and αF1Ig AM8 are opsonic. Even more importantly, in vivo studies using pneumonic plague mouse models showed that 100% of the mice receiving 500 μg of IgGs αF1Ig AM2 and αF1Ig AM8 survived lethal challenge with aerosolized Y . pestis CO92. Combined, these results provide evidence of the quality and robustness of αF1Ig AM2 and αF1Ig AM8 and support their development as potential medical countermeasures against plague.