Transport for London

Outdoor play benefits children’s mental wellbeing, social and cognitive development and physical activity levels. However, children’s outdoor play and physical activity have declined in recent years and barriers exist within their physical and social environment. Forest Schools (FS) can encourage outdoor play through familiarisation with local green spaces, but suitable spaces are limited in dense urban areas. The Play in Urban Spaces for Health (PUSH) intervention is a concept involving the use of primary school staff to support familiarisation of and regular play in local outdoor urban spaces for children aged 4–7 years. This could facilitate sustained behaviour change, whereby children use these sites with their families and have the capability and motivation to create opportunities for play within other outdoor urban spaces. The aim of this research study was to explore the prospective acceptability and feasibility of the school-led outdoor play intervention element of PUSH considering: (1) The acceptability of PUSH among primary school teaching staff and their perceived barriers and facilitators to implementation, and (2) The learning from people involved in strategic oversight and delivery of FS in urban areas, and perceived outcomes of FS. 18 semi-structured interviews were conducted in Bradford, Yorkshire and Tower Hamlets, London UK using co-created topic guides: eight with teachers and headteachers at primary schools near potential urban play spaces to explore acceptability, and barriers and facilitators to potential future implementation of PUSH; and ten with staff involved in strategic oversight or delivery of FS through primary schools (either primary school staff or staff from private FS providers who are commissioned by schools) to capture learning and outcomes from taking children to local green spaces for outdoor play. Interview audio files were transcribed verbatim and coded deductively to explore acceptability using the theoretical framework of acceptability and inductively drawing on whole systems thinking to explore feasibility. This was subsequently followed by generation and revision of feasibility themes. The findings were used alongside insight from the broader PUSH research and academic literature to subsequently develop a theory of change and logic model. PUSH was generally found to be acceptable. Anticipated outcomes of PUSH aligned with those perceived by participants involved in FS. Potential barriers to implementing PUSH included curriculum pressures and safety of public spaces. However, the learning from staff involved in delivering FS provided potential solutions to incorporate into the intervention design. This included linking outdoor play to the curriculum, implementing safety rules with children when at public sites, and ensuring parents are informed of where children are being taken and of the importance of outdoor play for academic learning. The findings informed the intervention theory of change and logic model for the purpose of identifying potential mechanisms of change and guiding future implementation and evaluation. This study offers preliminary evidence to support the delivery of the PUSH intervention within primary schools, which may support children’s habitual outdoor play. The findings emphasise the need to incorporate activities to ensure parent and staff buy-in prior to a pilot project.

Abstract In response to the pressing challenge of global climate change, advancing a low-carbon energy transition has emerged as a key international priority. As an integral policy instrument to guide this transition, carbon pricing is increasingly adopted by countries and regions worldwide. Drawing on a spatial panel model and covering 115 countries, this study investigates the effects of carbon pricing on carbon emission reduction and compares the outcomes between single and composite carbon pricing instruments. The spatial spillover effects of carbon pricing policies exhibit multidimensional heterogeneity. Hybrid carbon pricing policies form a cross-regional emission reduction network through regional synergistic governance mechanisms. In contrast, carbon tax and emissions trading systems (ETS) are associated with the ‘pollution paradise hypothesis’ and the ‘race to the bottom effect’, respectively. Further, it elucidates how different carbon pricing policies leverage unique economic and energy-related mechanisms to facilitate emission abatement. The findings offer important insights for policymakers aiming to optimize carbon pricing schemes that effectively support the global energy transition.

This article adds to the growing body of knowledge on the impact of non-financial environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors on long-term financial returns and investigates whether high portfolio ESG improves the quality of equity portfolios in terms of realized returns and risk. A best-in-class positive ESG screening method was deployed using Refinitiv ESG Scores to construct two polarised sets of portfolios, each with three portfolio ESG weightings (i.e., equal, value, and rank weightings). Fifteen years of daily returns from 2005 to end-2019 were analysed for the European continent split into seven regions based on the currency of exchange. Additionally, 2020, the abnormal COVID-19 year, was analysed as an acid test of the ESG alpha hypothesis. Overall, the tests offer empirical evidence that high portfolio ESG has the potential to enhance returns and/or reduce volatility over the long term and thereby improve the quality of portfolios. This evidence signifies the impact of the degree of equity portfolio ESG on performance. The Eurozone was a major exception to the test findings, as were the value weightings. Equal weighting stood out as the most coherent strategy for best-in-class positive ESG screened portfolios, both in terms of volatility and returns. Fama–French modelling yielded interesting region-specific insights for best-in-class positive ESG screening. The UK stood out as the most favourable region for beating the market with best-in-class positive ESG screening in the long run and passed the acid test of ESG outperformance during the identified black swan event for all three portfolio weightings in the short term.

Abstract Maritime safety faces growing challenges due to an expanding global fleet, tighter schedules, and increasingly complex stakeholder interactions. This study integrates multiple data sources to determine a more accurate representation of major marine accident causative factors in the United Kingdom. Logistic regression and data modelling are applied to Automatic Identification System data (2011–2017) and reported accidents from the Marine Accident Investigation Branch (2013–2019). Results show that larger vessels, daytime transits, service ships, winter conditions, and confined high-density areas such as ports impact accident likelihood. Interviews validate the data and emphasize the influence of port geometry and channel complexity. Among major UK ports, London, Plymouth and Milford Haven exhibit the highest accident-to-traffic densities. While maritime regulations and safety management systems in ports and vessels are seen as adequate by industry professionals, human factors require the greatest attention to improve maritime safety.

ABSTRACT Travel time use – also called “travel-based multitasking” – has been increasingly recognised as an important component of activity-travel behaviour, influencing time-use and travel-related choices. This paper discusses a taxonomy issue in the literature and is the first to provide a systematic and comprehensive overview of the state of knowledge on the effects of travel time use on different dimensions of activity-travel behaviour, namely, time-use, mode choice, value of travel time savings, travel experience, and second-order effects. Regarding the taxonomy issue, we conceptualise when it is suitable to employ the terms “travel time use” and “(travel-based) multitasking”. Particularly, we suggest employing “travel time use” as the overarching term to refer to the act of undertaking activities while travelling, while “(travel-based) multitasking” is regarded as special case of travel time use when two or more cognitively/physically demanding tasks overlap. Regarding the knowledge consolidation, considering current and future transport options, we conduct a meta-synthesis to identify prevailing hypotheses about the effects of travel time use on activity-travel behaviour and then review empirical studies to examine the extent to which the current knowledge corroborates predominant hypotheses. Considering these findings, we discuss a research agenda to appraise the effects of travel time use on activity-travel behaviour.

Achieving safety in autonomous driving through Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) is a critical yet challenging task due to non-stationarity, partial observability, and the need for effective coordination among agents. Although earlier cooperative MARL methods have aimed to improve coordination by sharing encoded state observations, we find these strategies are insufficient in safety-critical scenarios. To address this gap, we present IntNet, a novel MARL framework that enhances safety by incorporating the transmission of vehicle intent and adaptive communication scheduling into a unified end-to-end learning paradigm, jointly optimising all components for safe coordination. Central to our approach is an observation prediction module that enables agents to forecast subsequent policy outputs, which they can then share across a vehicle-to-vehicle network. Our model-free architecture employs a Graph Attention Network to process incoming messages and a scheduler component to dynamically optimise the communication graph for bandwidth efficiency. We compare IntNet against state-of-the-art communicative MARL methods in complex urban environments with both autonomous and human-operated vehicles, achieving improved coordination, lower collision rates, and reducing communication efforts by up to 60%. Through extensive experiments, we assess the framework's learning efficiency, scalability, and the balance between information sharing and bandwidth usage for collision-free trajectories.