The world is moving into an unprecedented era of dam-building with more than 3700 large dams currently planned or under construction, much of which are in DAC list countries. These projects have the potential to contribute significantly to the economic and social changes that underpin global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, past experiences show that poorly designed and planned dam projects conversely may have large negative impacts on the poor, and exacerbate political instability and environmental degradation. This proposal seeks to create the knowledge base, capacity and capability for a 'Dams 2.0' future, in which dams built in DAC list countries are selected, designed and operated to support resilient and sustainable national, regional and global development in a 2.0 degC world. This will be achieved by understanding and assessing dams as interdependent human-nexus (water-energy-food-environment) system interventions and enabling stakeholders to negotiate economic, social, political and ecological impacts despite future uncertainty. Our proposal will address this ambitious goal through unique cross- and inter-disciplinary research and capacity development partnerships between three sets of key actors. First, our project will stimulate collaboration between several UK centres of research excellence in development, water-energy engineering, economics, food security, climate change, finance and ecology (the universities of Manchester (UM), Cambridge, University College London (UCL), Surrey, Newcastle and Southampton, the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), and the International Water Management Institute (IWMI). Second, we will consolidate links with a carefully selected network of researchers and policy-makers in 4 countries/regions (The Centre for Science and Industrial (CSIR) - Water in Ghana, Technological University of Yangon in Myanmar, Jordanian Institute of Science and Technology in the Middle East region, Institute of Economic Growth in Delhi, India). Thirdly, we will seek to work collaboratively with some of the world's most influential development organisations such as The World Bank (WB), International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the International Finance Corporation (IFC), The Nature Conservancy (TNC), the International Hydropower Association (IHA), and the Climate Bond Initiative (CBI). Dams 2.0 is led by a team with a proven track record in successfully managing large consortium grants across multiple countries and disciplines that focus on applied development and policy impact challenges. Our work will provide tailored guidance and build capacity for water-energy-food systems management in each of our case studies regions. In addition, our project will create a framework and accompanying software toolkit for dam system design and training worldwide. This online software will link several open access water, energy, food, and ecological simulation models to state-of-the-art decision-making under uncertainty approaches. This software will be made accessible via an associated suite of online training materials (games & modules we plan to develop with IWMI and the World Bank) for use by dam selection/design/operation teams globally in a range of settings.

ALTER aims to demonstrate that there are real and lasting benefits for wide scale poverty alleviation, particularly for the rural poor, by tackling soil degradation at a range of spatial scales, from field to landscape, and using opportunities within agricultural as well as severely degraded land. Throughout the world, soil degradation impacts on the health, wealth and well-being of rural people in many different ways. Soils have a key supporting role in maintaining agricultural yields, water availability, water quality, resources for grazing animals and other ecosystem services. Some are perhaps less obvious but still valued such as maintaining habitats to support honey-bees and local wildlife. In Africa, soil degradation is recognised as a major constraint to alleviating poverty in rural communities. We have chosen to work in Ethiopia and Uganda where there are contrasting issues of soil degradation in mineral and organic soils are a result of agricultural land use but similar reliance in rural communities' on a range of benefits from soils. Solutions to soil degradation are not simple and require a much better understanding of how people benefit from soils, what they stand to gain if they can improve the condition of the soils that they manage whether for crops, livestock, timber production or as semi-natural areas, what they would need to do to accomplish this and what barriers may prevent this. In parallel we need to gain better insight into the likely success of different management options to improve soils. Ultimately these options will require some form of investment whether that be via money, time, resources or other mechanisms. We will investigate the relative pros and cons of these mechanisms from the perspective of local people, organisations involved with markets for Payments for Ecosystem Services and national objectives in alleviating poverty. A broader view of carbon benefits and trading is an opportunity to invest in lasting improvements in degraded ecosystems and the livelihoods of the poor that depend on these. All of this research and evidence building needs to be placed into the context of climate change. We need to establish that whatever might be suitable, acceptable and viable for tackling soil degradation now will have long-term benefits to local people and that these benefits will not be negated by the on-going changes to local climate. The ALTER project is an international consortium between The James Hutton Institute (UK), University of Aberdeen (UK), Hawassa University (Ethiopia), The Ethiopian Government's Southern Agricultural Research Institute (SARI, Ethiopia), Carbon Foundation for East Africa (CAFEA, Uganda) and the International Water Management Institute (Nile Basin & Eastern Africa Office, Ethiopia). This team brings together natural scientists, social scientists and economists to work together with rural communities and other local decision-makers and facilitators to improve our capacity to predict how human-environment linked systems respond to incentives and other drivers change. This predictive capacity is needed to be able to explore whether different options for change could result in substantive poverty alleviation.

To contain COVID-19, there has been a clampdown on wildlife trade, which is a key source of livelihood and food security for hundreds of millions of people in LMICs. Wildlife markets have been closed, new bans on wildlife trade are being enforced and governments are proposing drastic changes to wildlife trade regulations. These reforms aim to safeguard global public health and global food systems, yet they disrupt wildlife supply chains that meet peoples' food security and economic needs. The clampdown on global wildlife trade also risks pushing trade underground with implications for public health, conservation and crime. The aim of this project is to develop evidence-based guidelines for regulating wildlife trade to address the risks of COVID-19 without undermining legal and sustainable wildlife trade economies. This project will use trade data, interviews and the Delphi method to: (1) track changing wildlife trade trends during the pandemic; (2) assess the impacts of these changing trends on people engaged in wildlife economies; and (3) formulate new guidelines for safe, legal and sustainable wildlife trade in the COVID-19 era. The project will be informed by evidence from Kenya and Cameroon - two LMICs with wildlife sectors that stand to be significantly impacted by COVID-19. This project will be led by an international, interdisciplinary team of wildlife trade, conservation and livelihood experts, and implemented in collaboration with CIFOR, an institute at the forefront of research on wildlife trade in LMICs. An Expert Impact Network (IUCN, IIED, TRAFFIC) has been established to realise impact.

Permanent oxygen minimum zones (OMZs) that extend to over 10 million km3 of ocean (ca. 8% of ocean volume) are expanding geographically and vertically due to climate-driven reductions in dissolved oxygen (DO). Potential impacts on marine animal distributions and abundance may be particularly significant for high-oxygen-demand apex predators, such as oceanic pelagic sharks, by reducing habitat volumes through OMZ shoaling and concentrating them further in surface waters where they become more vulnerable to fisheries. But predictions of how exploited oceanic fish actually respond to OMZ expansions are not based on mechanistic understandings, principally because direct measurements of oxygen tolerances during normal behaviour have not been determined for large predatory fish in the open ocean. The proposed research will bring about a step change in our understanding of OMZ impacts on oceanic ecology by applying our existing expertise in animal movement studies and by deploying new telemetry technologies for measuring oxygen environments actually encountered by free-living oceanic sharks moving above/within OMZs. This will enable major unknowns to be addressed concerning how oceanic sharks respond physiologically and behaviourally to OMZs, how oceanic shark habitats change with predicted OMZ expansion, and whether this will increase shark vulnerability to fishing gear. The project will achieve its objectives through linked field and modelling studies on two Red-Listed species, the warm-bodied (endothermic) shortfin mako, Isurus oxyrinchus, and the ectothermic blue shark, Prionace glauca, that are the two pelagic shark species most frequently caught in high seas fisheries. By focusing in depth on key processes underlying shark responses to DO in situ, our new modelling approaches will establish effects of future warming and OMZ shoaling on fish niches and determine how these shift distributions and alter capture risk by fisheries. The project represents a discipline-spanning approach linking physiology to ecology and oceanography, with wide-ranging outcomes for understanding global biotic responses to warming and ocean deoxygenation with direct relevance to sustainable fisheries and species conservation.

Humans have massively altered flows of nitrogen on our planet, leading to both benefits for food production and multiple threats to the environment. There are few places on Earth more affected than South Asia, with levels of nitrogen pollution rapidly increasing. The result is a web of interlinked problems, as nitrogen losses from agriculture and from fossil fuel combustion cause air and water pollution. This damages human health, threatens biodiversity of forests and rivers, and leads to coastal and marine pollution that exacerbates the effects of climate change, such as by predisposing reefs to coral bleaching. Altogether, it is clear that nitrogen pollution is something we should be taking very seriously. The amazing thing is that so few people have heard of the problem. Everyone knows about climate change and carbon footprints, but how many people are aware that nitrogen pollution is just as significant? One reason for this is that scientists and policy makers have traditionally specialised. Different experts have focused on different parts of the nitrogen story, and few have the expertise to see how all the issues fit together. This challenge is taken up by a major new research hub established under the UK Global Challenge Research Fund. The "GCRF South Asian Nitrogen Hub" is a partnership that brings together 32 leading research organisations with project engagement partners from the UK and South Asia. All eight countries of the South Asia Co-operative Environment Programme (SACEP) are included. The hub includes research on how to improve nitrogen management in agriculture, saving money on fertilizers and making better use of manure, urine and natural nitrogen fixation processes. It highlights options for more profitable and cleaner farming for India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Bhutan and the Maldives. At the same time, the hub considers how nitrogen pollution could be turned back to fertilizer, for example by capturing nitrogen oxide gas from factories and converting it into nitrate. The fact that all the SACEP countries are included is really important. It means that lessons can be shared on good experiences as well as on whether there are cultural, economic and environmental differences that prevent better management practices from being adopted. It is also important from the perspective of international diplomacy, and provides an example to demonstrate how working together on a common problem is in everyone's interest. It puts the focus on future cooperation for a healthier planet, rather than on the past. The South Asian case provides for some exciting scientific, social, cultural and economic research challenges. The first is simply to get all the researchers talking together and understanding each other. There are dozens of languages in South Asia, matching the challenge met when different research disciplines come together. This is where developing a shared language around nitrogen can really help. There are lots of nitrogen forms ranging from unreactive atmospheric nitrogen (N2), to the air pollutants ammonia (NH3) and nitrogen dioxide (NO2), to nitrate (NO3-) which contaminates watercourses, and nitrous oxide (N2O) which is a greenhouse gas. The impacts of each of these are being studied to provide a better understanding of how they all fit together. The result is an approach that aims to give a much more coherent picture of the nitrogen cycle in South Asia: What is stopping us from taking action, and what can be done about it. One of the big expectations is that the economic value of nitrogen will help. India alone spends around £6 billion per year subsidising fertilizer supply. It means that South Asian governments are strongly motivated to use nitrogen better. At which point research from the South Asian hub can provide guidance on where they might start.