This multi-country project aims to establish the health benefits of large-scale land restoration in Africa's Sahel region. We will leverage the Great Green Wall (GGW) of Africa initiative, the largest land restoration effort in the world, as a natural experimental system. Drylands host nearly 40% of the global population. The GGW and other similar land-restoration efforts currently underway around the world are set to reshape landscapes and the lived experiences of billions of people globally. Such restoration efforts are increasingly being regarded as potential 'Nature-based solutions' as the world seeks to confront and adapt to the triple challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss and food security. At present however, human health considerations play a very minor role in the design and implementation of restoration projects, including the GGW. This project aims to fill this critical gap, to ensure restoration projects can maximally serve human health alongside other objectives. We will use a novel combination of activities spanning 4 integrated work packages to do this. Briefly, WP1 will comprise a literature review and community consultations to develop an iteratively refined, gender-sensitive logic model describing the causal linkages between dryland restoration and human health. This will guide the project by helping to refine key hypotheses and identify a suitable subset of secondary health outcomes to be evaluated in subsequent WPs. In WP2 we will collate as much existing data as possible for GGW countries to conduct a Sahel-wide village-matched health impact evaluation. The primary outcome to be investigated will be weight-for-age z score (WAZ) of children (0-59 months) as a measure of acute nutritional status. A subset of secondary outcomes in children and women emerging from WP1 as of particular relevance will also be considered. We will compare health outcomes between communities with and without GGW activities to evaluate the health impacts of restoration. WP3 will be a follow-up of WPs1-2 in which we will conduct a more targeted, community-prioritised, village-matched health impact evaluation with primary data collection in three focal countries (The Gambia, Senegal, Burkina Faso). Based on our current understanding of the linkages between health and environmental restoration, these are likely to include other anthropometric measures (e.g., height-for-age z score, HAZ), and outcomes reflecting risk factors on the nutrition, infection and mental health / well-being pathways. We will again focus on children and non-pregnant women. Some secondary outcomes require collection of biological samples from children for laboratory analysis. Follow-up sampling will give information on seasonal effects and an opportunity to compare child growth over a 12-14 month period between groups with and without GGW interventions. WP4 comprises a set of integrating tasks aimed at marrying the results of the health impact evaluations with current activities guiding the design and implementation of the GGW and understanding the role of and benefits to health of completing the GGW. With an anticipated cost of around $50 billion to reach its 100 million hectare target of restored drylands by 2030, it is essential for health impacts (benefits and costs) to be brought into existing decision-support tools for applied purposes. We will do this via a combination of steps from health economic evaluation, cost-benefit and trade-off analysis, and systems and scenario modelling in the context of a changing climate. In all WPs, our Project Partners and Scientific Steering Committee will further ensure local relevance and streamline the research-to-practice pipeline, enhancing impact.

Climate change and related extremes represent one of the most significant challenges of the twenty-first century. Yet lived experiences of climate change vary, with negative impacts disproportionately felt by marginalised populations who have historically contributed the least per capita emissions. The proposed study advances understanding of an under-researched topic within this urgent context: the role of colonial power and knowledge in shaping climate adaptation and vulnerability past and present. Current analyses and practices of adaptation rarely investigate deep histories of colonialism and repeated disaster, but a historical lens is particularly vital here as there is now mounting concern that today's adaptation strategies are resurrecting ideas and initiatives propagated through colonialism, for example by undermining local adaptation strategies (Eriksen et al. 2021; Gengenbach et al. 2022). At worst, this risks reproducing rather than reducing the vulnerability of populations that are already on the frontline of the climate crisis (Schipper 2020). This research aims to build new, usable pasts of climate and society in three regions of southern Africa (southern Mozambique, western Zimbabwe, southern Malawi), where the imperative of climate change adaptation has been underscored by recent cyclone and drought disasters. Specifically, it will draw upon diverse archival collections to examine the origins and transformation of climate knowledges and adaptation practices during the 19th and early-20th centuries, when colonial rule intensified. Together with project partners and local stakeholders, it further aims to elevate this historical knowledge of climate coloniality into new interaction with climate foresight to drive equitable and sustainable adaptation. The data and findings generated from these historical deep dives will be interrogated through fresh theoretical and empirical lenses, addressing the following research questions: 1) How did climate coloniality emerge in different settings via the (re)construction of climate knowledges and imposition of material practices? 2) What was the multidirectional nature of interaction between climate knowledges, adaptation strategies and recurring climatic extremes? 3) How did Africans resist or influence climate thinking amongst Westerners despite colonial relations of power? 4) How can these climate histories be integrated into climate foresight planning and scenarios to drive equitable and sustainable climate change adaptation? The study is transdisciplinary in scope, spanning environmental and climate history, historical geography, climate foresight, African studies, historical climatology, disaster studies, climate science and the history of science; fields that will be drawn upon and integrated. The scale of the research will yield the place-based insights needed to develop geographically and culturally specific climate histories, but also the comparative understanding required to develop a theoretical framework of the emergence of climate coloniality. This mixture of approaches will create innovation in the environmental humanities, and - through its impact - help place the SHAPE (Social Sciences, Humanities and the Arts for People and the Economy/Environment) disciplines at the fore of efforts to address climate change. The working practices and theoretical framework developed through the project will have wider transferability across former colonial contexts, boosted through the project's partnerships with the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation and leading foresight planners.

There are three potential ways in which organisms can respond to changing environments: (1) they may disperse, or migrate, (2) they may evolve so that they adapt to the new environment, or (3) they may produce different phenotypes - in other words display phenotypic plasticity - as the environment changes. A contemporary example relates to understanding responses of populations to climate change. Work to date suggests that, despite the three mechanisms being non-exclusive, population responses to climate change usually involve phenotypic plasticity. Hence, understanding the evolutionary forces acting on plasticity is of central importance in our understanding of viability in the face of climate change. Understanding of phenotypic plasticity and its role in adaptation to changing environments is hampered by the fact that most studies simply correlate an average phenotype for the population with a single value for the environment, most often at the level of an entire year. This only makes sense if the environmental cues to which organisms respond are very large-scale cues, varying little from the perspective of individuals within populations. However, we know that many organisms experience only a limited part of the environment, and that the environment may vary over quite small spatial scales. Despite this, we don't understand how animals balance these small- and large-scale cues. The central aim of this research is thus to determine how the spatial scale of the environment is important in understanding the evolution of phenotypic plasticity. Our model system involves reproductive behaviour in small woodland birds - great tits, breeding in Wytham Woods near Oxford - which are under strong natural selection to time their reproduction to coincide with peaks in abundance of moth caterpillars (e.g. the winter moth) that are adapted to feed on newly emerged leaves of deciduous trees. At the population level there is a good match between the timing of birds' breeding and the peak of caterpillar abundance, but there is tremendous variation within each year in the timing of these events over quite a small spatial scale. Furthermore, we have evidence that, despite a common temperature trend, different parts of the population are responding at different rates. Hence, the population level summary statistics disguise several important levels of variation. We will use long term data on breeding behaviour and fitness, together with detailed environmental data to analyse the spatial scales at which variation in bird reproductive timing can best be explained, and to test hypotheses about the influence of scale on fitness and population dynamics. We will then supplement these data with new data collected across a regular grid of locations to determine phenology of bud-burst and caterpillar abundance, and hence characterise the extent to which birds are able to match the timing of events in their environment at different scales. Because we expect multiple scales to be important, we can make the prediction that the optimal phenotype is a balance between small- and large-scale plasticity, and hence that adaptation will not be perfect at either scale in isolation. Because the environment is patchy, we can further predict that adjusting to small- as well as large-scale cues will lead to some patches having higher productivity than others; hence the spatial scale of plasticity will lead to within population variation in population dynamics. Collecting environmental data on the ground is very time-consuming, and only limited areas can be covered; therefore we will test the extent to which satellite images can be used to estimate phenology at scales that are relevant to organisms in nature. Finally, we will carry out experimental tests of whether mis-matches in phenology between birds and the environment, which have been implicated in population declines in some species, are alleviated by being in more varied environments.

Peru is one the world's worst COVID affected countries. Gaps in social welfare, poor infrastucture and living conditions and high levels of informal employment exacerbate the impact of this disease. Artisanal fisheries are an important and overlooked activity which provides employment and basic nutrition for some of the poorest in rural areas. Thousands of jobs in the seadood supply chain are affected by the pandemic. In the Piura region, the impact on fishing communities is expected to be higher due to the large number of people involved in fisheries-dependent activities and the lack of alternative economic opportunities. There has been no systematic effort to document the impact of COVID on these communities. The Regional Government has identified a need for this information in order to respond with appropiate social welfare measures and is leading an Inter-Agency Consortium (IAC) to re-establish artisanal fisheries activities. This project will support the IAC by collecting and disseminating data on the impact of COVID in fishing communities. It will assess key fisheries, rigorously estimate the impact of the pandemic througout the supply chain and look at the way that this has, or needs to adapt to become more resilient. Throught the timely provision of relevant socio-economic information through a virtual online platform, this project will support decision-making by fishers, government and society in general, By engaging stakeholders in affected communities the project will develop recommendations for a sustained re-activation of fishing and associated activities.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a universal set of goals, targets and indicators that UN member states will be expected to use to frame their agendas and policies over the next 15 years, were agreed in New York earlier this year. One of the 17 goals is to "Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification and halt and reverse land degradation, and halt biodiversity loss". According to the Global Carbon Project, carbon dioxide emissions from deforestation and other land-use change were 3.3 Gt carbon dioxide on average during 2004-2013, accounting for 8% of all emissions from human activity (fossil fuel, cement, land use change). There is a pressing need to support ongoing initiatives aimed at reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, and participatory forest management strategies to reach sustainable management of forests and enhancement of forest carbon stocks in developing countries In the context of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the international initiative "Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation" (REDD+) aims to protect carbon stocks and biodiversity in threatened ecosystems around the world. Policy makers, financiers and scientists have identified the need for robust and objective Measurement, Reporting and Verification (MRV) systems and it has been recognised that satellite technology is the only way to regularly monitor the world's forests on the timescales required. Within the context of REDD+, the University of Leicester is seeking to develop and demonstrate a prototype for a near-real-time forest cover change information service from Sentinel-1 and 2 satellite data that meets the relevant national forest definitions and is delivered directly in an easily accessible reporting format via a smartphone app to community forest associations and national agencies. Our initial focus is to address the management of tropical forests in Kenya, which has recently set out an ambitious climate change action plan. The service prototype will be delivered based on the University of Leicester's internationally renowned expertise in Earth Observation science in collaboration with a mobile technology developer in Kenya (UKALL Ltd). Market research has been conducted via a NERC Pathfinder grant to assess the potential uptake of a global near-real-time deforestation information service from satellites, commercialising the research results from the NERC CORSAR grant. This study has indicated Kenya to be a likely customer. The annual cost of climatic shocks to Kenya alone is estimated at US$ 0.5 billion (2% of GDP). If not addressed, climate change will hamper progress towards Kenya's aim of being a middle income country by 2030. A recent market visit has confirmed that Kenyan authorities have a huge interest in satellite enabled forest monitoring products/services delivered via a smartphone app with a variety of interested stakeholders, amongst which: - Ministry of Environment and Kenyan Forest Services (National level) - Community Forestry Associations (Local level) - UNEP and UN FAO / REDD+ (International level) Our objective is to develop a mobile app allowing customers in Kenya to access a near-real-time, detailed information about forest cover change for their local area of interest. The accessible provision of this service has real value at the local scale as well as the national scale. To unlock the considerable potential for this service and commercialise our know how, we will develop a prototype and demonstrate it in market. We aim to create a joint venture or spin out company in collaboration with identified commercial partners in the areas of satellite imagery and technology development.