The problem: Building climate change resilience necessarily means building urban resilience. Africa's future is dominated by a rapidly increasing urban population with complicated demographic, economic, political, spatial and infrastructural transitions. This creates complex climate vulnerabilities of critical consequence in the co-dependent city-regions. Climate change substantially complicates the trajectories of African development, exacerbated by climate information that is poorly attuned to the needs of African decision makers. Critical gaps are how climate processes interact at the temporal and spatial scales that matter for decision making, limited institutional capacity to develop and then act on climate information, and inadequate means, methods, and structures to bridge the divides. Current modalities in climate services are largely supply driven and rarely begin with the multiplicity of climate sensitive development challenges. There is a dominant need to address this disconnect at the urban scale, yet climate research in Africa is poorly configured to respond, and the spatial scale and thematic foci are not well attuned to urban problems. Most climate-related policies and development strategies focus at the national scale and are sectorally based, resulting in a poor fit to the vital urban environments with their tightly interlocking place-based systems. Response: FRACTAL's aim is to advance scientific knowledge about regional climate responses to anthropogenic forcings, enhance the integration of this knowledge into decision making at the co-dependent city-region scale, and thus enable responsible development pathways. We focus on city-region scales of climate information and decision making. Informed by the literature, guided by co-exploration with decision makers, we concentrate on two key cross-cutting issues: Water and Energy, and secondarily their influence on food security. We work within and across disciplinary boundaries (transdisciplinarity) and develop all aspects of the research process in collaboration with user groups (co-exploration).The project functions through three interconnected work packages focused on three Tier 1 cities (Windhoek, Maputo and Lusaka), a secondary focus on three Tier 2 cities (Blantyre, Gaborone and Harare), and two self-funded partner cities (Cape Town and eThekwini). Work Package 1 (WP1) is an ongoing and sustained activity operating as a learning laboratory for pilot studies to link research from WP2 and 3 to a real world iterative dialogue and decision process. WP1 frames, informs, and steers the research questions of WP2 and 3, and so centres all research on needs for responsible development pathways of city-region systems. WP2 addresses the decision making space in cities; the political, economic, technical and social determinants of decision making, and seeks to understand the opportunities for better incorporation of climate information into local decision making contexts. WP3, the majority effort, focuses on advancing understanding of the physical climate processes that govern the regional system, both as observed and simulated. This knowledge grounds the development of robust and scale relevant climate information, and the related analysis and communication. This is steered explicitly by WP1's perspective of urban climate change risk, resilience, impacts, and decisions for adaptation and development. The project will frame a new paradigm for user-informed, knowledge-based decisions to develop pathways to resilience for the majority population. It will provide a step change in understanding the cross-scale climate processes that drive change and so enable enhanced uptake of climate information in near to medium-term decision making. The project legacy will include improved scientific capacity and collaboration, provide transferable knowledge to enhance decision making on the African continent, and in this make significant contribution to academic disciplines.

This fellowship will develop a new generation of analysis and decision making tools required for engineers to respond to the challenges of intensifying global change. Consumption of energy and other resources is widely acknowledged to be unsustainable at today's rates. The world is therefore faced with the challenge of designing and implementing the transition to a more sustainable situation, a state in which greenhouse gas emissions and resource consumption (e.g. energy, water, materials) are drastically reduced and our society is well adapted to the impacts of climate change. Infrastructure systems such as water, energy, transportation and waste are the array of physical assets (and associated processes) responsible for moving the goods and services that ensure the safety, health and wealth of cities and their inhabitants. Thus, design and management of infrastructure has implications in terms of vulnerability and resource consumption (e.g. denser cities use less energy per capita on private transport, but can aggravate flooding and heat stress). However, effective management of infrastructure systems is challenging because they (a) vary in space, (b) are highly interconnected, (c) interact strongly with an ever-changing environment and population, and, (d) deteriorate with age. Nowhere is this more evident than cities, where over half the global population live and more than three quarters of global resources are consumed. As cities adapt in response to global pressures such as climate change, it is crucial to understand the implications of these adaptations in terms of resource requirements to avoid confounding parallel sustainability initiatives. Whilst the vulnerability of the built environment to climate impacts is to some extent understood, resource flows, such as energy, waste and water within cities are currently poorly-understood and are generally considered in terms of gross inputs and outputs to the urban area. The relationship between urban form, function and these resource flows has only been established from observational evidence e.g. relating population density directly to total transport energy demand. This provides insufficient evidence to appraise, plan and design specific adaptations as it does not account for crucial properties of the urban system such as land use, human activity, or the topology and attributes of the infrastructure systems that mediate this, and other, relationships (for example, land use and flood risk). To plan and design adaptations in urban areas requires a capacity to analyse the behaviour of whole cities over timescales of decades, to simulate and test the effectiveness of alternative management options and to monitor and modify the system performance. The capacity to adequately understand and model processes of change within the coupled technological, human and natural systems that comprise cities does not yet exist. This fellowship will address this priority area, through the development of a novel coupled systems simulation model of urban dynamics, climate impacts and resource flows within cities. This systems integrated assessment model will be used to analyse the relationship between the spatial configuration of cities and their infrastructure systems, resource consumption and vulnerability to climate change impacts. Working closely with key stakeholders in industry and local government I shall develop, demonstrate and apply decision analysis methods to show how long term planning strategies can be developed for re-engineering cities from their 'traditional' form into more sustainable configurations.In doing this, I shall provide the evidence to underpin more sustainable engineering and policy decisions and reduce the harmful impacts of unmitigated global change in urban areas.

Population without access to electricity is set to increase again in 2020 after 6 years of decline in Africa. The number of people gaining access to electricity in Africa has increased greatly: the number of people without access to electricity dropped from almost 860 million in 2018 to 770 million in 2019, a record low in recent years . Nonetheless, past progress is being reversed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. In order to tackle this, the present proposal will demonstrate innovative, reliable and adapted sustainable energy solutions based on the valorization of biomass wastes from agriculture and the food industry through biomass gasification. REFFECT AFRICA will adapt and optimize these technologies to a wide variety of biomass wastes: olive mill residues, almond hulls and husks, millet, rice, sorghum or peanut wastes and sugarcane bagasse, among others locally available. Three full- scale demonstrators will be built in Morocco, Ghana and South Africa to consider both urbanized and rural contexts in Africa, on- and off-grid solutions, as well as different socio-economic backgrounds. The project will carry out comprehensive LCA and LCC of each supply chain and will consider the climate adaptation and mitigation potential of this technology compared to other technologies and solutions in the African social, economic and environmental contexts. REFFECT AFRICA will tackle the development of renewable energy sources, providing solutions for on-grid and off-grid communities, and their integration into the existing energy system. It will consider the generation of renewable energy, the transmission, and the use of storage systems.With the aim to closing all water- energy-food links, the project will work on obtaining biochar from the gasifier, and will be improved to provide a valuable fertilizer to local farmers. The demonstrators will include a robust but reliable water laboratory to provide their location with basic but often lacking testing services.