From developing a regional strategy for managing South Yorkshire's treescape to a collaborative project addressing the pollution and health impacts of moorland fires in and around the Peak District National Park, the five successful projects aim to respond to sustainability challenges across the region.
The fund, delivered by the University's Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures and the South Yorkshire Sustainability Centre, awarded projects with funding between £1,000 and £75,000.
Find out more about the Regional Readiness Fund
Applications for the fund are currently closed.
Successful projects 2025
Enabling Private Rented Sector Retrofit in South Yorkshire
This project, co-produced with South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority (SYMCA), will investigate, evaluate and produce key policy findings in relation to the Innovate UK-funded Let Zero project.
Through interviews, document reviews and policy analysis, this project will try to determine the key success areas as well as most significant challenges the Let Zero approach has encountered in enabling retrofit in hard-to-reach sectors.
The key findings will then be translated into recommendations to address the key challenges and barriers the project encountered.
Trees, People and Environment: A Regional Strategy for South Yorkshire's Treescape
Trees are vital to society, delivering benefits to people and the environment. Consequently, there is a policy push to increase canopy cover. However, tree management across the urban and rural landscape is complex, with individual trees and large woodlands across public and private land all forming an integral part of the regional treescape.
This project presents a coordinated approach to treescape management within South Yorkshire, operating at a landscape-scale, to deliver benefit to people and the environment. It aims to develop a pathway for sustainable treescape management in South Yorkshire, including events to engage communities across the region.
Understanding the Impact of Retrofit on Indoor Environmental Quality in Doncaster
This project, delivered in collaboration with the City of Doncaster Council (CDC), will assess how housing retrofits affect indoor air quality. By monitoring air quality before and after the retrofit, it will highlight any changes and their potential health impacts, identifying both benefits and potential drawbacks of energy efficiency upgrades.
Given the scale of retrofitting required around the UK, it is essential to understand how deep retrofits affect the indoor environmental quality and ultimately the health and well being of the occupants. If health co-benefits are found, this would create further reasons for the rapid need for retrofit. However, if this project highlighted any issues, the findings will be critical in shaping future retrofit strategies.
PeakFire: Building Evidence for Fire Pollution Alerts in South Yorkshire
PeakFire is a collaborative research project addressing the air pollution and health impacts of moorland fires in and around the Peak District National Park. It combines data from the FireUP network of low-cost air quality sensors—led by Sheffield Hallam University—with satellite imagery and community observations to detect smoke from wildfires and controlled burns that often go unnoticed. The project brings together a wide range of partners, including the Peak District National Park Authority, UK Health Security Agency, and Sheffield City Council. PeakFire aims to support early warning systems and protect communities from harmful smoke exposure through science and local engagement.
Novel Storage and Control Technologies for Decarbonisation of Domestic Heat at Scale
The project focuses on a community heat demonstrator. The team are working on approaches for integrating novel storage technologies (both thermal and electrical) and control methodologies with established low carbon heating solutions (e.g. heat pumps, solar photovoltaics) to overcome challenges linked to decarbonisation of heat. Solutions are being developed that are applicable both to individual dwellings, and to collections of dwellings served by community or district heat networks.
The project spans both the evaluation and optimisation of the performance of the technical solutions, and investigation of the social perceptions of the technologies being explored. The latter will be vital in identifying and overcoming potential social barriers to widescale uptake of the technology.