Climate resilience is generally defined as the capacity to: (1) maintain function in the face of external stressors (i.e. climate impacts) and/or (2) adapt so as to be better prepared for future climate change impacts. Small islands are disproportionately vulnerable to climate change due to rising temperatures and sea levels, land loss, and increasing extreme weather risks, making climate resilience a major priority. Yet, while climate resilience is being practiced across multiple island states and regions, there is little scholarship that considers individual examples of impacts and adaptations in the larger context of 'islandness'. Existing scholarship tends to focus on islands within geographical (e.g. Pacific) or socio-economic (e.g. Small Island Developing States, or SIDS) groupings. By assuming that island experiences are grounded solely in shared geographical space or socio-economic contexts, rather than shared 'islandness' (grounded in states of smallness, boundedness, isolation and fragmentation), this siloed approach stymies opportunities to identify transferable practices, limiting understanding of island-related issues in climate resilience. Arguably, this stems in part from methodological deficits. Approaches used in global and regional climate impact assessments are often poorly suited to small islands and especially atolls, with climate models especially constrained in their ability to provide information on local scales. Additionally, little is known about the existing, culturally-grounded coping capacity of island communities, and to what extent these traits promote good adaptation (which, unlike coping, involves sustainable long-term responses), particularly in peripheral/rural islands where data is scarce compared to core/urban areas. Through the establishment of an international, interdisciplinary collaboration on island climate resilience, SUNRISE will address these issues. By applying their complimentary skills and expertise in a diverse set of island contexts (Scotish Isles, Mauritius, Fiji), the research team will develop new approaches that bridge the gaps around how islandness is accounted for in climate impacts research. SUNRISE will pilot new approaches through a series of focus groups and household surveys centred on perceptions of climate change impacts, informed by place-based, culturally-grounded usage of climate and environmental data. In doing so, SUNRISE will seek to situate varied, individual examples of place-based climate impacts and resilient practice within the wider context of small island experiences.

Regenerating degraded tropical forests is a key approach for mitigating future climate change and restoring essential ecosystem services, including water cycling and biodiversity conservation. The Bonn Challenge sets two key targets: to restore 150 million hectares of degraded lands by 2020 and 350 million hectares by 2030, with the aim of re-instating ecological integrity alongside human well-being into degraded areas based on the forest and landscape restoration approach. Currently, the policy environment is conducive to restoration as countries have made significant commitments to restoring their forests in order to help meet their obligations under the Paris climate change agreement and the Bonn Challenge directly. There is significant opportunity for restoring natural forests in tropical Southeast Asia; whilst they have been extensively degraded by logging, fragmentation and industrial Oil Palm cultivation, mature natural forests in SEA have a capacity to store and cycle the largest quantities of above-ground carbon per unit area in the world (Banin et al. 2014; Sullivan et al. 2016), and therefore reinstating natural forests offers substantial ecosystem service benefits if long-term restoration can be achieved (Lewis et al. 2019). However, devising successful forest restoration strategies for tropical forests involves careful, evidence-based decision-making, at various spatial scales and working with multiple stake-holders. To ensure the long-term success of restoration efforts, our project initiates a new multidisciplinary network focussing on regeneration of Southeast Asian (SEA) logged and degraded forests. Our research will be delivered through two work packages. In work package 1, project partners will provide standardised data unavailable in the literature to deliver a new published synthesis of site-level evidence providing insights into post-restoration ecological processes (carbon accumulation and community dynamics). This work will provide a basis for a sustained long-term restoration experiment network. In work package 2, we host an interdisciplinary workshop which will use the Heart of Borneo project area as a transboundary case study to (i) identify the barriers, constraints and opportunities for forest landscape restoration and (ii) develop an agenda of research and data needs for spatial prioritization for landscape-level restoration These activities will be delivered through interactive engagement between academic and practitioner stakeholders, including key policy-makers, at a workshop in Malaysia, which will contribute to our broader, long-term goal of linking ecological and social science research to policy and practice in restoration decision-making. The proposed FOR-RESTOR project will be a new collaboration between the NERC Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH), Universities of Aberdeen, Exeter, Oxford and RSPB in the UK and international partners from Australia, Italy, Sweden, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia & Singapore. The team uniquely brings together expertise in carbon cycling, functional ecology, biodiversity-ecosystem function relationships, conservation genetics, genetic resources and seed systems, ecological restoration, forest landscape restoration and forest science-policy and science-practice interfaces.

Cities are the driver of regional, national and indeed global economies. The complex inter-relationship between urban areas and their hinterlands is a vital aspect of a city's economic success. Hinterlands supply resources such as water, food and energy; while being economically-tied to the urban area through trade. Creating resilient, sustainable, water-secure cities depends on our understanding of the potential future risks of changing hydro-hazards (floods and droughts) and our ability to increase our resilience to them. Worldwide, in 2014, hydro-hazards resulted in over $16Bn (floods) and $7.5Bn (droughts) in damages. While, in the UK over the past five years there have been significant challenges to water management posed by hydro hazards. Since 2000, flooding has caused over £5Bn worth of damage, of which £3Bn was caused by the 2007 floods, and over £1Bn from the 2013/14 winter storms, impacting households and businesses alike. Similarly direct costs (estimated at £70-165M) from the recent UK drought (2011-12) arose from impacts to urban water supplies, and industry. Projections of future climate recognise that there is an added uncertainty in temperature and precipitation trends which may exacerbate the frequency and severity of such hazards. To respond to the stated challenge of transforming our cities to be resilient, sustainable urban centres and in the context of 'adapting to and mitigating climate change', I will quantify uncertainty in future hydro-hazards and design engineering/policy interventions to increase urban resilience which informs future urban water security adaptation for cities and their hinterlands. My fellowship will: 1. quantify future urban hydro-hazard uncertainty in a warming climate using novel techniques, 2. design engineering and policy interventions to mitigate the risk arising from these uncertainties, and 3. improve urban living through enhanced resilience to hydro-hazards. I will achieve this by capturing uncertainty in hydro-hazard events and cascading this through to hazard assessment, challenging the current deterministic paradigm. I will characterise the vulnerability profile of newly exposed populations or sectors, and develop a ground breaking systems approach to ameliorate risk in order to design transformative resilience strategies. The delivery of this vision is challenging yet possible through combining advances in uncertainty quantification from a variety of fields, with my research which has consistently sought to challenge the deterministic paradigm. Awarding this fellowship will create a unique opportunity to improve our understanding of the role of climate projections on the systematic risk to urban living and how such risks can be addressed. Output will include: 1. detailed understanding of the change to hydro hazards across the UK as a result of climate projections (and associated uncertainty), communicated in the context of climate variability, 2. probabilistic frameworks to capture climate uncertainty into assessments of systematic risk posed by changing hydro hazards at the urban scale, 3. analysis of the changing urban vulnerability, the uncertainty associated with this and exploration of the newly exposed population using new, and highly discretised vulnerability metrics, 4. a systems approach to urban resilience to changing hydro hazards, and 5. resilience strategies; e.g. transformative engineering interventions.

Indigenous Peoples (IPs) are believed to be at particularly high risk from COVID, exacerbated by climate risks and socio-economic stresses. There is emerging evidence that national responses to the pandemic are compounding the vulnerability of IPs, exacerbated by little--if any--understanding on the unique pathways through which COVID will affect IPs. This project will address this knowledge and policy gap by documenting, monitoring, and examining how COVID is interacting with multiple stresses to affect the food systems of IPs globally, co-generating knowledge and capacity to strengthen resilience. Our focus on food reflects the fact that many of the risks posed by COVID stem from interactions with food systems, which for IPs are composed of a mix of traditional and modern elements. The work will be undertaken in collaboration with 24 distinct Indigenous peoples in 14 countries, and is structured around objectives which will: document the emergence of COVID and examine its impacts on food systems to-date; monitor and examine the real-time lived experiences, responses, and observations on COVIDs impact on food systems; compile and assess how COVID is being officially communicated and responded to; identify, examine, and promote interventions to strengthen resilience; and examine scalable insights for vulnerable populations across LMICs. Qualitative data collection is underpinned by a network of 'COVID Observers' within communities, in decision making roles, and researchers already located in the study regions, who will document their experiences and observations in reflective diaries over a 12 month period, capturing different stages of the pandemic and how multiple factors interact over time to create vulnerability and resilience. The global scope of the work builds upon ongoing and completed projects by team members in the study regions, leveraging considerable capacity and networks developed in work funded by DFID, UKRI, Wellcome Trust, FAO, and IDRC, among others.