We thank the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) for its sponsorship of the Research Support Services project on Civil and Environmental Engineering. Ithaka S+R provides research and strategic guidance to help the academic and cultural communities serve the public good and navigate economic, demographic, and technological change. Ithaka S+R is part of ITHAKA, a not-for-profit organization that works to advance and preserve knowledge and to improve teaching and learning through the use of digital technologies. Artstor, JSTOR, and Portico are also part of ITHAKA.

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The EU Water Framework Directive aims to ensure restoration of Europe’s water bodies to “good ecological status” by 2027. Many Member States will struggle to meet this target, with around half of EU river catchments currently reporting below standard water quality. Diffuse pollution from agriculture represents a major pressure, affecting over 90% of river basins. Accumulating evidence shows that recent improvements to agricultural practices are benefiting water quality but in many cases will be insufficient to achieve WFD objectives. There is growing support for land use change to help bridge the gap, with a particular focus on targeted tree planting to intercept and reduce the delivery of diffuse pollutants to water. This form of integrated catchment management offers multiple benefits to society but a significant cost to landowners and managers. New economic instruments, in combination with spatial targeting, need to be developed to ensure cost effective solutions – including tree planting for water benefits - are realised. Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) are flexible, incentive-based mechanisms that could play an important role in promoting land use change to deliver water quality targets. The PESFOR-W COST Action will consolidate learning from existing woodlands for water PES schemes in Europe and help standardize approaches to evaluating the environmental effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of woodland measures. It will also create a European network through which PES schemes can be facilitated, extended and improved, for example by incorporating other ecosystem services linking with aims of the wider forests-carbon policy nexus.

Museums provide rich multimodal learning opportunities and long‐lasting memories for children and teachers who participate in museum excursions and outreach programs. Museum programs for preschool children embed hands‐on opportunities to engage children with new and diverse artefacts. Interactions in museum settings provide opportunities for adults and children to collaborate in learning. Our aim in this project was to explore the elements of museum programs that prove essential in engaging young children in museum education programs. Five museum presenters and 14 early childhood groups (14 teachers and 296 children) participated in the research project. Data collection included audio recordings of museum presentations, observations of child‐teacher interactions, multiliteracy observations, teacher interviews, and written reflections from the museum presenters. Coding across all datasets contributed to the five main themes in the findings, which we detail using the acronym LEARN: Learning artefacts; Embodied teaching and learning; Asking questions; Repetition: and Narrative. Multiple elements of museum education programs influence learning opportunities for young children. Both structural elements (e.g. designing a core narrative around concepts, or time for children’s individual queries during the program and hands‐on explorations with museum artefacts) and learning interactions (e.g. conversations where children and adults collaborate) contribute to engaging museum education programs for young children.

Research highlights that early childhood teachers (ECTs) hold varied opinions on the value of superhero play (SP) to young children’s learning and development. This study sought to investigate how ECTs in Victoria are responding to superhero play, and to examine the beliefs that underpin their responses. Interviews were conducted with eight ECTs from the Bayside area in Melbourne. The study revealed that while the majority of the teachers interviewed responded to children’s superhero play in a variety of ways, there were a number of barriers to supporting superhero play in early childhood education and care settings. This paper concludes by identifying the value of ECTs engaging in critical reflection to ensure that their responses to superhero play are based on professional knowledge that is informed by theory and research.