We are pleased to announce the successful projects that will receive funding from our latest Grantham Amplification Fund (GA Fund) initiative.
From wildfire detecting drones to removing ‘forever chemicals’ from water, this diverse range of successful projects will receive the vital seed funds required to help tackle the planet’s most pressing sustainability challenges.
The fund, designed to support innovative research, knowledge exchange, and start-up initiatives with the potential to generate real-world impact, awarded projects with funding between £1,000 and £75,000.
In total, £500,000 was committed by the Grantham Centre towards the GA Fund and the Regional Readiness Fund, which is delivered in partnership with the South Yorkshire Sustainability Centre. The fund will be shared among the 14 successful projects to help kickstart sustainability research and initiatives that can provide tangible benefits both within South Yorkshire and beyond.
Tony Ryan, Co-Director of Grantham Centre for Sustainable Future, said: “We were delighted by the high quality of the applications, this made the final selection process challenging and left us wishing we could have funded more. Nevertheless, we are excited by the potential of the funded projects to deliver impactful, pioneering, real-world solutions to the critical sustainability challenges both locally and globally. Congratulations to all involved.”
Find out more about the successful projects below:
GA Fund
- Wildfire Detection with a Swarm of Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles
Project lead: Professor Lyudmila Mihaylova
Project description: A team from the University of Sheffield, led by Prof. Lyudmila Mihaylova, is developing AI-driven, vision-based algorithms for real-time wildfire detection and localisation using swarms of uncrewed aerial vehicles. Competing in the coveted XPRIZE Wildfire competition semifinals, Team AURA comprising the Universities of Sheffield and Bristol and Lancashire Fire and Rescue Service demonstrated this innovative system. University of Sheffield’s computer vision technology autonomously detects fires and smoke, while Bristol’s digital twin manages swarm control. The distributed AI-enabled UAV network enhances early wildfire detection, reduces carbon emissions, and supports firefighters. The project contributes towards impact and enhances the technology readiness level.- Development of Technology for Removing Forever Chemicals from Water
Project lead: Siddharth Patwardhan
Project description: We have developed a sustainable, scalable process to produce bioinspired mesoporous silica (BMS) with tunable pore sizes, low cost and low energy demand. BMS show strong potential for water treatment, especially removing harmful PFAS (“forever chemicals”), which are widespread, persistent and linked to serious health and environmental impacts. This project will combine market engagement, technical specification and experimental testing of BMS performance versus industry needs. It addresses two sustainability challenges: improving PFAS removal and creating greener, cheaper sorbents that are scalable compared to conventional materials. This project is inherently interdisciplinary, spanning materials science, chemistry, engineering, environmental science and business strategy to support successful market adoption.- Low-Cost Benchtop Device for Accelerated Monitoring of Carbon Capture Through Enhanced Rock Weathering
Project leads: Isabella Steeley and Matthew Clements
Project description: Enhanced Rock Weathering (EW) is a climate mitigation strategy that involves applying crushed silicate rocks to agricultural soils. As these rocks weather, atmospheric CO₂ is captured and stored. To scale EW, we must develop reliable methods to monitor carbon capture.
Magnetic separation is a novel approach using the magnetic properties of silicate rocks to recover them from the field and monitor weathering as a proxy for carbon capture. Currently, it is slow, labour-intensive, and prone to human error. This project aims to build an affordable magnetic separation machine to replace the manual process, accelerating the deployment of EW and contributing to global carbon removal efforts.- Solar Water Purification with Affordable Portable Device
Project lead: Julia Weinstein
Project description: Multiple communities world-wide have little access to clean water, with the climate crisis driving water deprivation further. UV-light disinfection is the only approved technology for final effluent disinfection, but is extremely energy intensive.This research is looking into reducing energy consumption by replacing the currently used energy-intensive UV-light (254nm) with visible light (400nm) by using a photosensitiser: a light-absorbing compound, which reacts with oxygen in water, producing bacteria-killing reactive oxygen species.
The team is constructing a small prototype device capable of disinfecting treated wastewater to industry standards and aims to complete a version of the device for household water purification.
- Perceived vs Real Risk: Reconciling Community Perspectives with Tangible Climate Disruptions
Project lead: Giuliano Punzo
Project description: Rare but highly disruptive events which are a consequence of extreme climate change (ECC) can shape people's risk perception and awareness. People’s perception is also moved by visible infrastructure investments too which reduce actual risk exposure. This research seeks to clarify the relationship between perceived and actual risk exposure to climate change informed by the Lloyds Register Foundation (LRF) World Risk Poll and major infrastructural interventions for adaptation. It will examine the data in both a cross-sectional way and longitudinally, looking at how major events (e.g. extreme droughts) or visible infrastructure change (e.g. dam construction) influence the climate change risk perception and awareness. This project is looking at near future collaboration with LRF aimed at understanding, hence reducing climate change related risk.- FORGE: Forest Governance through AI-enabled Evaluation of Species Mapping in the Peruvian Amazon
Project lead: Jefersson A. dos Santos
Project description: The FORGE project will evaluate the effectiveness of algorithms in real-world forestry applications in collaboration with OSINFOR, the Peruvian institute responsible for supervising forest concessions. Using drone-based imagery and validated field data, the team will assess how well the models can support large-scale forest inventories, identify endangered species, and contribute to the monitoring of logging activities.- Foundations for Care Quality and Operational Resilience: A Pilot Study of Sustainable Heat Adaptation with Sheffield Teaching Hospitals
Project lead: Dr. Chengzhi Peng
Project description: Extreme heat poses an urgent threat to NHS care delivery, with approximately 90% of hospital buildings in England vulnerable to overheating. This risk jeopardises patient safety, disrupts services, and strains infrastructure not designed for rising temperatures.
This foundational pilot study, co-designed with Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, aims to achieve three objectives:
1. Robust, data-intensive building energy and thermal comfort modelling.
2. To run co-production focus groups for qualitative assessment.
3. Industry-led feasibility studies on implementing sustainable ventilative cooling solutions in specialist and general NHS hospitals.- Negotiating Sustainable AI: Policies and Lived Experiences of the Socio-Ecological Impacts of AI Infrastructures in India and Mexico
Project leads: Dr. Preeti Raghunath and Dr. Itzelle Aurora Medina-Perea
Project description: This project examines the societal and ecological implications of AI infrastructure development in India and Mexico, focusing on AI policies, and the lived experiences of individuals and communities living amidst the development of data centres. The research will pose the following questions:How does social and ecological sustainability feature in AI policy initiatives in India and Mexico?
What are the lived experiences of individuals and communities who are affected by the material and social infrastructures of AI (e.g. land acquisition, water availability, environmental clearances and labour laws) in India and Mexico?
- “Water Blew Up Everything” - An Urban History of Climate Disasters in Buenos Aires’ Informal Settlements
Project lead: Adriana Laura Massidda
Project description: This project seeks to understand the ways in which urban poverty and ecological vulnerability intersect in cities from the vantage point of urban environmental history. Focusing on local experience, the project addresses a specific event — the 1967 flood — and an area strongly affected by it — the Buenos Aires floodplains, Argentina — to carefully reconstruct the intertwined narratives that emerge from residents’ accounts in contrast to official discourse.The exhibition engages a wide array of sources including oral history, press coverage, government documents and grassroots photography repositories. It is structured across key themes that emerge from these sources, articulated through residents’ voices.
Regional Readiness Fund
- Enabling Private Rented Sector Retrofit in South Yorkshire
Project lead: Silvija Speciuviene - Moffatt
Project description: 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
Project lead: Jill Edmondson
Project description: 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
Project lead: Carolanne Vouriot
Project description: 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
Project lead: Maria Val Martin
Project description: 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
Project lead: Rob Barthorpe
Project description: 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.