The EAGLO project brings together leading scientists in focused research activities and scientific exchange for a two year period. In addition to the PI and Co-I, the research will be supported by partners from leading institutions with experience in climate, limnology, economics and decision support in the African Lakes region. The project will strongly benefit from the past and present participation of project researchers nationally and internationally sponsored research in the region. Project scientists will make new developments in monitoring (in-situ and earth observation), modelling (socio-economic, biogeochemical, hydrological) and management technologies, focusing on regional trends in lake ecosystem dynamics. These tools will enable the simulation of the mutual feedbacks between socio-economic drivers, climate and regional environmental change (eg. trends in watershed and airshed conditions) and ecosystem services. Based on this new understanding of ecosystem resilience, scientists will identify new opportunities for adaptation to improve human well being and reduce regional poverty. Within the project, three linked working groups will perform activities related to research, technological development, scientific exchange and dissemination. 1. Monitoring protocol and technology development: Activities: - development of common protocols for monitoring biological, physical and chemical parameters (incl. definition of temporal and spatial scales for data acquisition). Specifically, creating a common protocol that can be used to compare conditions of lake stratification, primary production, eutrophication, carbon sequestration, trophic networks, etc. - development of regionally valid calibration algorithms for earth observation and analysis approaches for the study of spatio-temporal dynamics of high elevation African lakes using multispectral satellite data (MODIS, MERIS, SeaWiFs). - collaboration with international satellite database archive managers (ESA, NASA, NERC EODC) to increase the availability of calibrated satellite data to African researchers and planners. Expected participants: EAGLO scientists, NGOs and regional environmental agencies, Target audiences: regional scientists, national ministries, international scientific community 2. Regional lake / climate / environmental database Activities: - development of EAGLO.base, a research database protocol and database structure for African lakes data. - link the EAGLO.base protocol and structure to the EIDC Expected participants: EAGLO scientists, regional environmental agencies, EIDC scientists Target audiences: regional scientists, national ministries and policy makers, international scientific community 3. Ecosystem scenario simulation and analysis Activities: - development of scenarios (to 2050) based on trends in resource quality, ecosystem functioning, resource utilisation and climate. - interlinked dynamics will be examine using models developed in present and past projects. Expected participants: EAGLO scientists, national ministries, NGOs Target audiences: national ministries and policy makers, regional scientific community, supranational (AU) policy makers, NGOs An initial workshop, open to project partners and the regional stakeholders and policy makers will be organised in the first year. Development of specific technological and modelling aspects will be organised through a project communication platform and through short term exchanges (<1 month) of project scientists and junior researchers. Each working group (3) will hold a scientific workshop during the second year of the project to consolidate the results produced, ensure the collaborative development of these instruments with stakeholders, and indicate the requirements for further development.

Ten percent of the world's population depend on the ocean for a readily accessible source of protein and employment, with the majority (95%) living in developing countries. Poor coastal communities are at the frontier for climate change impacts, compounded by population growth and food demand, but are among the least resilient to the challenges of the future. SOLSTICE-WIO will focus on coastal communities in nine developing countries and island states in eastern Africa, interlinked culturally and ecologically and collectively known as the Western Indian Ocean (WIO) region. All nine (South Africa, Mauritius, Seychelles, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, Somalia, Madagascar, Comoros) are on the list of Official Development Aid recipients, with five identified as Least Developed Countries. In the WIO over 100 million people live within 100 km of the ocean, with a significant proportion employed in local fisheries. This leaves the region highly dependent on the ocean for economic stability, food security, and social cohesion. These coastal communities have limited adaptive capacity to cope with dramatic reductions in fish stocks caused by overfishing, habitat destruction, and increasing environmental pressures - all aggravated by climate change. The decline of WIO fisheries has had profound socio-political ramifications, from the rise of piracy to general political instability. A clear example of the devastating effect of a fish stock reduction is the collapse of the Chokka Squid fishery in South Africa. SOLSTICE-WIO will use this as a case study to demonstrate the strengths of a holistic approach to human-ecosystem-fisheries research and the potential solutions this can offer. The squid fishery was the 4th most valuable fishery in South Africa, bringing foreign currency into one of the poorest provinces. It was directly employing 5000 fishermen with 30,000 dependents. The 2013 crash had a devastating effect on the Eastern Cape, yet the underlying reasons are unknown: local fishermen believe the collapse was caused by environmental change. Until the mechanisms behind the collapse are understood, there is little potential for aiding recovery or guiding adaptation. SOLSTICE-WIO will provide this urgently needed understanding to help inform the fishery and Government as to the fate of the local ecosystem, whether it will recover, and whether the crash could have been predicted or prevented. How will SOLSTICE achieve this? The key to stability of living marine resources lies in an ecosystem approach to fisheries (EAF), which sees human-natural systems as a whole, integrated entity rather than separately considering individual target species. Simply put: you cannot manage something you don't understand, nor can you adapt to change through management improvements unless you can describe, measure and understand the changes. The core strength of SOLSTICE-WIO lies in its integral approach to food security, drawing on UK expertise in physical oceanography, marine ecology, autonomous observations, environmental economics and the human dimension,and WIO expertise in fisheries, the marine economy and regional policy development. SOLSTICE will provide the region with the state-of-the-art technology to deliver cost-effective marine research and provide the information needed to achieve maximum potential from the region's living marine resources. In the UK marine robotics, ocean models and novel data products from satellite observations have developed rapidly in the last decade, and now underpin Blue Economies and Ocean Governance in Europe. These technologies are highly agile and ready to be applied in the developing world as cost-effective ways to maximise understanding and sustainable exploitation of living marine resources. Such "technology leapfrogging" can overcome the severe lack of research ships in the WIO and save decades of effort in developing predictive modelling systems from scratch.

East Africa (EA) has one of the world's fastest growing populations, with maxima around water-bodies and rapid urbanisation. Climate change is adding to existing problems increasing vulnerability of the poorest. HyCRISTAL is driven by EA priorities. EA communities rely on rainfall for food via agriculture. EA's inland lakes are rain-fed and provide water, power and fisheries. For EA's growing cities, climate impacts on water resources will affect water supply & treatment. HyCRISTAL will therefore operate in both urban & rural contexts. Change in water availability will be critical for climate-change impacts in EA, but projections are highly uncertain for rain, lakes, rivers and groundwater, and for extremes. EA "Long-Rains" are observed to be decreasing; while models tend to predict an increase (the "EA Climate paradox") although predictions are not consistent. This uncertainty provides a fundamental limit on the utility of climate information to inform policy. HyCRISTAL will therefore make best use of current projections to quantify uncertainty in user-relevant quantities and provide ground-breaking research to understand and reduce the uncertainty that currently limits decision making. HyCRISTAL will work with users to deliver world-leading climate research quantifying uncertainty from natural variability, uncertainty from climate forcings including those previously unassessed, and uncertainty in response to these forcings; including uncertainties from key processes such as convection and land-atmopshere coupling that are misrepresented in global models. Research will deliver new understanding of the mechanisms that drive the uncertainty in projections. HyCRISTAL will use this information to understand trends, when climate-change signals will emerge and provide a process-based expert judgement on projections. Working with policy makers, inter-disciplinary research (hydrology, economics, engineering, social science, ecology and decision-making) will quantify risks for rural & urban livelihoods, quantify climate impacts and provide the necessary tools to use climate information for decision making. HyCRISTAL will work with partners to co-produce research for decision-making on a 5-40 year timescale, demonstrated in 2 main pilots for urban water and policies to enable adaptive climate-smart rural livelihoods. These cover two of three "areas of need" from the African Ministerial Council on Environment's Comprehensive Framework of African Climate Change Programmes. HyCRISTAL has already engaged 12 partners from across EA. HyCRISTAL's Advisory Board will provide a mechanism for further growing stakeholder engagement. HyCRISTAL will work with the FCFA global & regional projects and CCKE, sharing methods, tools, user needs, expertise & communication. Uniquely, HyCRISTAL will capitalise on the new LVB-HyNEWS, an African-led consortium, governed by the East African Community, the Lake Victoria Basin Commission and National Meteorological and Hydrological agencies, with the African Ministerial Conference on Meteorology as an observer. HyCRISTAL will build EA capacity directly via collaboration (11 of 25 HyCRISTAL Co-Is are African, with 9 full-time in Africa), including data collection and via targeted workshops and teaching. HyCRISTAL will deliver evidence of impact, with new and deep climate science insights that will far outlast its duration. It will support decisions for climate-resilient infrastructure and livelihoods through application of new understanding in its pilots, with common methodological and infrastructure lessons to promote policy and enable transformational change for impact-at-scale. Using a combination of user-led and science-based management tools, HyCRISTAL will ensure the latest physical science, engineering and social-science yield maximum impacts. HyCRISTAL will deliver outstanding outputs across FCFA's aims; synergies with LVB-HyNEWS will add to these and ensure longevity beyond HyCRISTAL.

MONOCLE innovates and develops sensor, platform, and data handling technologies to increase coverage and lower the cost of in situ sensors in inland and coastal water bodies. These ecosystems are particularly vulnerable to direct anthropogenic impacts but of high economic importance and crucial to sustainable food, energy, and clean water supply. At the same time, these water bodies represent areas of the weakest performance in present EO capability to date. The MONOCLE system will reduce uncertainties in Earth Observation (EO) by characterising atmospheric and water optical properties. MONOCLE will deploy new and improved sensors on autonomous platforms (buoys, ships, drones), and further fill information gaps by developing low-cost complementary solutions for citizen scientists. This will provide essential reference observations needed to further improve and grow EO-based water quality services. MONOCLE will be requirement-driven and implemented by sensor and platform developers, sensor-data infrastructure experts, and EO scientists. A service-oriented data storage, processing, and visualisation infrastructure based on open data standards will integrate MONOCLE seamlessly with existing platforms. This also allows MONOCLE to build sensor performance traceability into its core to support synergistic sensor use and data inspection to identify sensor drift and episodic events. MONOCLE will demonstrate the added value of EO and water quality oriented sensor network to Copernicus EO services, GEOSS data brokering and GEO capacity building initiatives through a number of validation campaigns and use cases, including data-poor regions where no similar infrastructure yet exists. It is expected that the evolution of system standards, new sensors and innovative use of observation platforms of MONOCLE will foster innovation and commercial opportunities for the EO commercial sector and its downstream users in domains ranging from public health to energy and food security.