The Ox-Chain project responds to specific challenges identified by global consultants McKinsey & Company for the UK based charity Oxfam that highlights how much value is lost within the existing business model, which currently sends between 70-80% of its received second hand clothes to a recycling centre. The research team propose that by using distributed ledger technology, such as the Blockchain that supports the Bitcoin digital currency, a different business model can be developed that involves the donors, the shoppers and the staff at Oxfam in identifying the value of second hand items and helping them to move to places where they will can be sold. The donation model that was developed in the 1940s by Oxfam still relies on individuals to make a judgement about the value of donated items. It is impossible for one person to know where an item can be better used or cherished - the result is that many items do not reach places within the Oxfam network where they might be resold and not recycled. Internet technologies such as distributed ledgers have the potential to turn the network of 670 Oxfam shops into an online auctioning platform, in which the collective knowledge of thousands of people can bid to keep items in the world. Such a project offers significant insights into how decentralised technologies can better support business and society as we move toward what is described as a Circular Economy. A 'Circular Economy' in one in which resources are kept in-use for as long as possible, and their maximum value extracted whilst in use followed by the recovery of materials at the end of each service life. However, if more people are to become involved in the valuation of objects and materials within the ecosystems of business, communities and charities then we have to find ways to protect them. Moving to a sharing economy in which technology helps us to move things that we no longer need to places where they will be more valued, has the potential to disrupt existing models of trust, identity and privacy. The use of distributed ledger technologies to manage permissions and privacy in such a way as to build the trust of participants offers a significant opportunity to demonstrate the potential to reshape our concepts of how our economies operate.

Adopting more sustainable patterns of consumption offers positive outcomes for improving personal wellbeing, minimising resource depletion and meeting environmental targets. However, changing consumption patterns is hard to achieve because our acquisition, use and disposal of material objects forms a central part of the cultural practices that give meaning to our lives. Our proposed research will explore how the associating of material objects, across an 'internet of things', with user-generated content can positively influence donors, shoppers, volunteers/staff and recipients of both goods and aid. The aim is not simply to provide people within the network of second hand goods with more information, but rather to foster new cultural practices with a view of instigating behavioural change around shoppers' valuation of goods leading to increased sustainability and new economic models within complex patterns of consumption. Our project will build on a prior pilot study conducted in partnership with Oxfam that adopted technology from the EPSRC Digital Economy TOTeM project. Smart phones and QR codes were configured to enable stories to be added to donated items. Stories and messages attached to secondhand goods could then be read by shoppers. Using the 'Shelflife' App to add stories added to their social and business value, resulting in donated items living on beyond their expected product cycles. Promoting sustainable living is one of Oxfam's core objectives and the pilot demonstrated that adding stories to secondhand items increased the worth, longevity and reduced the disposability of donated items. Tackling the levels of consumption has is now be identified as the primary challenged posed by population growth. The Royal Society report People and the Planet (2012) highlights the increase in global population by a further two billion people over the next 20 years, and refocuses the key question from How many people? to How are they all going to live? The report concludes that in developed and the emerging economies, consumption has reached unsustainable levels and must be immediately reduced. The report claims that the increase in population will, '...entail scaling back or radical transformation of damaging material consumption and emissions and the adoption of sustainable technologies. This change is critical to ensuring a sustainable future for all'. Whilst internationally recognised for articulating the potential for a social dimension to an Internet of Things, the Shelflife product was not tailored to the complex chains of interactions in which second hand goods flow between donors, vendors, shoppers, recipients of the goods and the aid that the sale of the goods generates. Making visible the complexity of these value chains and developing appropriate interventions so that the parties within them retain connection, is a critical step in developing more sustainable methods of consumption. Through better understanding the second hand context and developing interventions that expose its conditions we can maximise its sustainable effectiveness and extend its applicability to other business arenas.

Schools for Future Youth (SFYOUTH) is a cross-field strategic partnership to develop methods and support for improved youth participation in European school education. This proposal is a response to the need across the EU to increase educational attainment and active civic participation by European youth. It will support EU schools to meet this need by increasing their capacity to use youth participation through global citizenship.SFYOUTH is delivered by 5 organisations who run support programmes for teachers and schools to use youth participation and global citizenship. They are Oxfam GB (UK), Oxfam Italia (Italy), PAH (Poland), CARDET (Cyprus) and the Institute of Education (UK).It is based on the partners experience that when delivered effectively, these approaches help schools by:- Creating more engaging curriculum and using learner centred pedagogies: using real life global issues to inspire, and informal youth/adult methods to inform pedagogy, e.g. Future Workshops - Engaging and motivating youth: global issues interest youth (e.g. Think Global/MORI 2008), and being active change agents motivates youth- Developing transversal skills and competencies: YPGC supports skills (e.g. critical thinking, communication) and personal development (e.g. confidence, self esteem)- Increasing civic engagement: YPGC inspires youth actions for social justice locally and globally, and supports peer leadershipThe project methodology is to use the current experience of partners promoting two programmes in particular: Future Workshops (by Oxfam Italy) and Youth Ambassadors (by Oxfam GB). The project will widen and deepen youth participation through global citizenship by supporting teachers to apply these informal youth methodologies to core parts of the formal curriculum. It will also support youth to apply these methodologies more effectively by themselves in informal and formal education. It will also support school systems to better recognise and support teachers and young people to do this. Therefore the project objectives are:OBJ1: To develop innovative support for European teachers to use these approaches effectively through their core teaching OBJ2: To develop innovative support for European youth to use these approaches to support social actions through their formal and informal educationOBJ3: To influence school systems across Europe to increase opportunities for teachers and young people to use these approaches in schoolTo achieve this, SFYOUTH will work with 4 hub schools in the UK, Italy, Poland and Cyprus to develop 6 high quality intellectual outputs that are innovative and relevant for target audiences in project countries and across the EU. These include innovative online support tools for teachers and youth to use these approaches, an online sharing portal, and academic reports and policy recommendations into their effectiveness at improving educational outcomes and civic participation. The resulting outcomes will be- Teachers using these approaches for new and engaging curriculum and pedagogical methods - Young people using better quality processes for youth engagement in school, inspiring greater motivation and interest in civic participation- Increased sharing of these approaches by and young people online- Increased motivation to embed these approaches by key stakeholders in the school system, including education ministries- Increased confidence of project staff to support teachers and young people using these approaches in new waysThis will lead to the following direct impacts with 176 teachers and 4400 youth:- Improvements in teachers practice, youth motivation, transversal skills and civic engagement in project schools - Increased sharing of these approaches by staff/teachers/young people in project schools - Improved scale of support for YPGC offered by our partner organizationsThrough our dissemination activities, this will also lead to the following indirect impacts with 10,000 teachers and 250,000 youth:- Greater use of YPGC by schools, and subsequent improvements in teachers practice, youth motivation, transversal skills and civic engagement across the EU- Greater support for YPGC across the school system in our own countries and across the EU- Wider use of these approaches in these and other fields across the EUThe project will improve in the capacity of the applicants to support schools with such approaches, achieving educational improvements and improved civic participation. They will be integrated into their ongoing work programmes. Additionally, the open, online outputs will be made available to a wide range of organisations across the EU to embed and use. Furthermore, through working with hub schools locally and creating a shared online network, the project expects schools networks to use and adopt these methods themselves across the EU, leading to high levels of sustainability post project.

This project aims to investigate rock glaciers in the arid mountains of Bolivia and assess their future contribution to water supplies in the region. Mountain hydrology plays a crucial role in maintaining social and economic development in many arid regions of the world. However, climate change is leading to recession of mountain glaciers. In Bolivia mountain glaciers have undergone significant melting since the 1950s, and continued predicted warming over the 21st century will result in further glacier recession and eventual disappearance, especially where the glaciers are small. This glacier recession threatens the future water supplies for the cities of La Paz and El Alto, adversely affecting economic development and helping to drive social, political and ecological instability. However, in several of the high arid mountain regions in Bolivia considerable ice is enclosed within rock glaciers, elongate valley-bottom landforms comprising a variable mixture of rock debris and ice. These landforms are an important component of hydrological systems in many mountain systems, transporting large amounts of coarse and fine sediments to valley-bottom locations and forming extensive potential reservoirs of water. With a surface cover of rock debris, the ice content is insulated from low amplitude and high frequency temperature changes and, as a result, rock glaciers are predicted to respond more slowly than ice glaciers to climate warming. Consequently, they have the potential to play an important future role in hydrological systems under conditions of global warming, producing water supplies to mountain communities as glaciers undergo continued recession. Despite this, several obstacles stand in the way of a better understanding of the role that rock glaciers may be able to play in regulating mountain hydrology. First, there have been few systematic inventories of rock glaciers in mountain regions, despite the pressing need to assess the potential of rock glaciers to contribute to water supply. Second, while much is known of the recession of ice glaciers in response to climate change, much less is known of the rock glacier response. Third, there is as yet incomplete understanding of the amount of ice contained within rock glaciers, especially at the regional scale, and this hampers assessments of the importance of these landforms to providing water supply. As a result, this research proposal will address the first two of these problems and aims to provide a data base from which we can begin to answer the third. We will use remotely-sensed data to map the location, areal extent, and form of rock glaciers in the dry Andes of Bolivia over the last 50 years using fine spatial resolution (5 m) optical satellite data and freely available decommissioned CORONA data from the 1960s. We will use these results to assess rock glacier responses to observed climate change over this period which encompasses the time when attribution studies indicate global temperatures responded to greenhouse gas forcing (IPCC 2007).

Future Youth School Forums (FYS Forums) is a global citizenship education project encouraging schools to run youth led forums on global issues for other schools in their local community. The FYS Forums model has three main phases which include pre-forum critical thinking activities on the forum’s global issue, the forum itself, and post-forum civic engagement where young people plan and take formal action on an aspect of the global issue.FYS Forums is designed to better motive and engage young people within the formal education system, support the development of young people’s traversal skills, encourage teachers to develop more inspiring, participatory and relevant practice and curricula, and to increase active citizenship and civic engagement across Europe.FYS Forums bring real life issues into the curriculum while supporting young people to understand complex global challenges. The first global issue in year one was migration under the banner of ‘People Forced to Flee’. The second global issue (as voted by young people), was gender inequality. Through the project’s participatory methodologies, young people are supported to respond to global issues and challenges by enabling them to think critically about the issue, and discuss how best to take action that is suitable and informed.The three main objectives of FYS Forums were:• To create an inclusive, sustainable, networked model of EU wide curriculum linked global citizenship youth forums that are delivered by schools for schools.• To provide teachers and young people with the tools to promote effective and inclusive youth leadership across formal and informal education through global citizenship forums.• To influence at local, national and EU levels to promote more inclusive and participatory youth led policies and opportunities within EU education systems.FYS Forums partnered with several schools who took ownership of the planning and delivery of the forums. In the first year, ‘Hub Schools’ were recruited who led on the first round of People Forced to Flee forums. There were five Hub Schools in the project – one each in Italy, Cyprus, Lithuania, the UK and Poland. The five Hub Schools stayed engaged throughout the whole project and ran forums in year 2. Additionally, in the second year, the partnership extended to ‘Trial Schools’ who were also asked to run their own forums. Trial Schools could choose which global issue they wanted to run a forum on. There were eight Trial Schools in the project – two each in Italy, Cyprus, Lithuania and the UK. All Hub and Trial Schools were responsible for inviting ‘Participating Schools’ to come to their forum and undertake pre-and post-learning activities. There was a total of 71 unique Participating Schools who attended a total of 20 forums over the three years of the project.The wealth of learning resources available on the FYS Forums website enable schools to fully engage in the forums process. These include:• A step by step interactive online toolkit leading teachers and young people through the steps to either set up and participate in a forum, or to attend another schools’ forum.• Learning resources on the global issue including 7 workshops for students who are attending a forum, short activities for the whole school to learn about the global issue, a treasure hunt, quiz and assembly presentation.• 15 Transversal skills modules to prepare young people for the forum including leadership, teamwork, decision making and time management.Through these resources, FYS Forums provide a sustainable model for schools to run their own youth-led forums and can be applied and adapted to suit a range of educational needs and contexts. While the project reached 12,251 young people aged 12-18 through post-forum actions, the materials and resources above can be adapted further for use with younger or older young people and indeed adults.The project produced several reports including:• Youth Participation and Global Citizenship: Challenges and Recommendations for Future Youth School Forums – a contextual analysis of the educational landscape and needs for the project in Italy, Cyprus, Lithuania and the UK, and provides recommendations for programme design and implementation.• Youth Participation for Active Global Citizenship: Future Youth School Forums Report – an analysis of the project’s implementation and impact. • Future Youth School Forums: External Evaluation – an external review of the impact of the project.Collectively, the resources, forums and post-action activity directly impacted 12,638 young people and teachers across five European countries, 72 key stakeholders and a further 15,000 individuals through wider dissemination activity including teacher training, seminars at conferences and participatory workshops.FYS Forums was a three-year partnership between Oxfam GB in the UK, Oxfam Italia in Italy, CARDET in Cyprus, Jaunimo Karjeros Centras in Lithuania and the University of Łódź in Poland.