Abrupt climate shifts or 'tipping points' can lead to irreversible changes in the Earth System, with far-reaching impacts on environments, ecosystems, and human societies. Examples include the collapse of the Greenland and West Antarctic Ice Sheets which would raise global sea levels by several metres. Recent studies suggest this may occur at 1.5-2C warming above preindustrial levels, a threshold we are rapidly approaching. Once considered "low-likelihood, high-impact outcomes", each fraction of a degree increase in global average temperature escalates the threat of such tipping points. There are, however, considerable uncertainties surrounding the future timing and magnitude of these tipping points, in part due to observational records of climate being too short (covering only the last 100-200 years) to fully understand their complex processes. A longer-term context is therefore essential to help inform our future response. Combined with evidence from climate models, 'proxy' records of past climate change from natural archives, such as sediment and ice cores, can provide insights into past mechanisms and thresholds of change, helping to plan for, or even avoid, the most dangerous impacts. Despite the importance of proxy climate records, there is an order of magnitude less data available from the Southern Hemisphere compared to the Northern Hemisphere. Recent work has highlighted the crucial role of the southern westerly winds in driving and propagating global climate changes. For example, marked shifts in these winds have been implicated in both past and recently observed West Antarctic ice melt. The scarcity of data is particularly acute in the South Atlantic, resulting in an incomplete understanding of how climate signals propagate atmospherically through this region and their potential for triggering climate tipping points. A large potential exists for developing and validating new climate proxy records to resolve the South Atlantic 'missing link', providing much needed new insights into past and future climate processes, mechanisms, and impacts. This Fellowship will pioneer the development of new proxies of wind strength and temperature records from this region, using the latest technologies and interdisciplinary techniques. This dual approach is vital: wind proxies will identify the atmospheric processes that propagate climate signals, while temperature reconstructions capture the sensitivity of the climate system to these changes. These new data will be integrated within a global network of proxy records and model simulations to generate a more comprehensive understanding of past climate dynamics in the region. Analysis will focus on key time periods over the last 18,000 years during which the Earth System experienced changes of global significance. This multi-faceted approach will characterise past atmospheric processes and their climate impacts, providing a valuable context and insights for the future. The importance of this task cannot be overstated, given the devastating implications of triggering irreversible climate tipping points. The first half of 2023 has witnessed record-high ocean temperatures, Arctic and Antarctic sea ice extent at historic lows, extreme heatwaves worldwide, devastating wildfires, and a significant slowdown in ocean circulation. These events may be signs of impending climate tipping points, underscoring the reasons for concern and the need for urgent action. This Fellowship will position me as an international research leader at the forefront of climate tipping point science. At the University of Southampton, I am uniquely supported to lead a multi-disciplinary research team, build a progressive research culture, and to transform our understanding of the mechanisms and impacts of climate tipping points. Beyond the scientific goals, the Fellowship aims to create a tangible impact on society via education, policy, and public engagement to support a climate-informed nation.

Flooding is the deadliest and most costly natural hazard on the planet, affecting societies across the globe. Nearly one billion people are exposed to the risk of flooding in their lifetimes and around 300 million are impacted by floods in any given year. The impacts on individuals and societies are extreme: each year there are over 6,000 fatalities and economic losses exceed US$60 billion. These problems will become much worse in the future. There is now clear consensus that climate change will, in many parts of the globe, cause substantial increases in the frequency of occurrence of extreme rainfall events, which in turn will generate increases in peak flood flows and therefore flood vast areas of land. Meanwhile, societal exposure to this hazard is compounded still further as a result of population growth and encroachment of people and key infrastructure onto floodplains. Faced with this pressing challenge, reliable tools are required to predict how flood hazard and exposure will change in the future. Existing state-of-the-art Global Flood Models (GFMs) are used to simulate the probability of flooding across the Earth, but unfortunately they are highly constrained by two fundamental limitations. First, current GFMs represent the topography and roughness of river channels and floodplains in highly simplified ways, and their relatively low resolution inadequately represents the natural connectivity between channels and floodplains. This restricts severely their ability to predict flood inundation extent and frequency, how it varies in space, and how it depends on flood magnitude. The second limitation is that current GFMs treat rivers and their floodplains essentially as 'static pipes' that remain unchanged over time. In reality, river channels evolve through processes of erosion and sedimentation, driven by the impacts of diverse environmental changes (e.g., climate and land use change, dam construction), and leading to changes in channel flow conveyance capacity and floodplain connectivity. Until GFMs are able to account for these changes they will remain fundamentally unsuitable for predicting the evolution of future flood hazard, understanding its underlying causes, or quantifying associated uncertainties. To address these issues we will develop an entirely new generation of Global Flood Models by: (i) using Big Data sets and novel methods to enhance substantially their representation of channel and floodplain morphology and roughness, thereby making GFMs more morphologically aware; (ii) including new approaches to representing the evolution of channel morphology and channel-floodplain connectivity; and (iii) combining these developments with tools for projecting changes in catchment flow and sediment supply regimes over the 21st century. These advances will enable us to deliver new understanding on how the feedbacks between climate, hydrology, and channel morphodynamics drive changes in flood conveyance and future flooding. Moreover, we will also connect our next generation GFM with innovative population models that are based on the integration of satellite, survey, cell phone and census data. We will apply the coupled model system under a range of future climate, environmental and societal change scenarios, enabling us to fully interrogate and assess the extent to which people are exposed, and dynamically respond, to evolving flood hazard and risk. Overall, the project will deliver a fundamental change in the quantification, mapping and prediction of the interactions between channel-floodplain morphology and connectivity, and flood hazard across the world's river basins. We will share models and data on open source platforms. Project outcomes will be embedded with scientists, global numerical modelling groups, policy-makers, humanitarian agencies, river basin stakeholders, communities prone to regular or extreme flooding, the general public and school children.

This project addresses how environmental change affects the movement of sediment through rivers and into our oceans. Understanding the movement of suspended sediment is important because it is a vector for nutrients and pollutants, and because sediment also creates floodplains and nourishes deltas and beaches, affording resilience to coastal zones. To develop our understanding of sediment flows, we will quantify recent variations (1985-present) in sediment loads for every river on the planet with a width greater than 90 metres. We will also project how these river sediment loads will change into the future. These goals have not previously been possible to achieve because direct measurements of sediment transport through rivers have only ever been made on very few (<10% globally) rivers. We are proposing to avoid this difficulty by using a 35+ years of archive of freely available satellite imagery. Specifically, we will use the cloud-based Google Earth Engine to automatically analyse each satellite image for its surface reflectance, which will enable us to estimate the concentration of sediment suspended near the surface of rivers. In conjunction with other methods that characterise the flow and the mixing of suspended sediment through the water column, these new estimates of surface Suspended Sediment Concentration (SSC) will be used to calculate the total movement of suspended sediment through rivers. We then analyse our new database (which, with a five orders of magnitude gain in spatial resolution relative to the current state-of-the-art, will be unprecedented in its size and global coverage) of suspended sediment transport using novel Machine Learning techniques, within a Bayesian Network framework. This analysis will allow us to link our estimates of sediment transport to their environmental controls (such as climate, geology, damming, terrain), with the scale of the empirical analysis enabling a step-change to be obtained in our understanding of the factors driving sediment movement through the world's rivers. In turn, this will allow us to build a reliable model of sediment movement, which we will apply to provide a comprehensive set of future projections of sediment movement across Earth to the oceans. Such future projections are vital because the Earth's surface is undergoing a phase of unprecedented change (e.g., through climate change, damming, deforestation, urbanisation, etc) that will likely drive large transitions in sediment flux, with major and wide reaching potential impacts on coastal and delta systems and populations. Importantly, we will not just quantify the scale and trajectories of change, but we will also identify how the relative contributions of anthropogenic, climatic and land cover processes drive these shifts into the future. This will allow us to address fundamental science questions relating to the movement of sediment through Earth's rivers to our oceans, such as: 1. What is the total contemporary sediment flux from the continents to the oceans, and how does this total vary spatially and seasonally? 2. What is the relative influence of climate, land use and anthropogenic activities in governing suspended sediment flux and how have these roles changed? 3. How do physiographic characteristics (area, relief, connectivity, etc.) amplify or dampen sediment flux response to external (climate, land use, damming, etc) drivers of change and thus condition the overall response, evolution and trajectory of sediment flux in different parts of the world? 4. To what extent is the flux of sediment driven by extreme runoff generating events (e.g. Tropical Cyclones) versus more common, lower magnitude events? How will projected changes in storm frequency and magnitude affect the world's sediment fluxes in the future? 5. How will the global flux of sediment to the oceans change over the course of the 21st century under a range of plausible future environmental change scenarios?

Influencing and mobilising public opinion in order to achieve change in attitudes, policies and behaviours have long been key goals of environmental organisations in the UK. Whether through grassroots initiatives, national campaigns, popular protests or policy briefings, they have sought to harness the energies of activists and communities to address the environmental challenges of our time, from climate change and biodiversity loss to pollution, sustainable food production and transport. The experience of participating in such campaigns has led generations of activists into diverse realms of politics and policy-making, shaping lives, careers and world views. That relationship between the environmental movement in the public sphere and the personal experience of generations of activists provides the starting point for the project. The project's core objective is to create an accessible and high-quality national archive of environmental activism over the last fifty years through the methods of oral history. By so doing we seek to create a valuable resource for the future, documenting the history of environmental campaigns through the words of those most intimately involved, including those whose contributions have been overlooked. The project will draw on the strengths of oral history as a research practice, especially in long-form life stories which situate the experience of activism in its biographical and social contexts, highlighting links between family, region, class, ethnicity, gender and generation. By creating a new, freely accessible national archive, the project seeks to contribute to a greater awareness of the diverse forms of engagement with environmental issues in the past, to enrich the collective memory of contemporary environmental activism and to create a lasting resource for new thinking and new forms of action in the times to come. Working closely with the British Library Sound Archive, the project will record life story interviews with 100 people involved in environmental protests, policies and practical action since the early 1970s, from direct actions at power stations, through parliamentary work, the Climate Act and UN agreements, to the promotion of city farms, cycle ways and community-owned wind farms. Interviewees will be selected after extensive consultation and will include grassroots activists and social entrepreneurs as well as radical campaigners and pioneers of major environmental groups - forgotten voices as well as leading lights. Some of these activists worked for national and global change, while others focussed on the local level. Some fought to protect their environment from destruction, others created something quite new. All have worked for what they believed in. This is a heritage that matters. The project will be delivered by a research team combining academic expertise in the study of grassroots movements with high-level professional experience in environmental organisations. Key partners include National Life Stories at the British Library, Friends of the Earth and the Royal Geographical Society. In addition to creating an entirely new archive, freely available and searchable in both audio and transcript form via the British Library website, we will convene a series of witness seminars and workshops in collaboration with our partners in England, Wales and Scotland. A freely-downloadable, Open Access book telling the story of environmental activism through the words of campaigners themselves will be produced on the basis of the research. Teaching and learning resources based on the real-world experience of environmental activists will be made available in order to inspire and inform the active citizens of the future, at both school and university levels. We will also work with partners and media organisations such as the Guardian and the BBC to make project material widely available in a variety of forms, including podcasts, blogs, profile articles and feature stories.

(1) RESEARCH CONTEXT: Following its establishment as a now-iconic warfighting tool, the drone increasingly features in domestic airspace. The domestic drone's meteoric rise is evident in the UK Government's ongoing investment. Alongside several parliamentary inquires, the Government continues to drive an increasingly buoyant drone economy (eg. Aerospace Sector Deal; Drone Pathfinder). Spurred further by regulatory changes underway, we are witnessing the drone-commercialisation of airspace. From infrastructure monitoring to goods delivery and home-security, the UK airspace regulator has granted over 6,000 permissions for commercial drone work. Further, drones are increasingly embraced in everyday policing, with 5,500 police drone deployments in the first six months of 2020 alone. Lastly, drones are readily accessible and popular consumer platforms, with an estimated 130,000 citizen flyers in the UK. While often flown for recreation, there are growing reports of accidental and deliberate drone misuse. From disrupting airports and crashing into people, to drone-capturing sensitive imagery and drone-dropping harmful materials, the Government recognises that domestic drones remain bound to both promise and risk. As drones increase in our skies, it is pressing to understand both how they are deployed in the provision of security (policing, home), and their potential to inflict harm. To this end, while repeatedly asserted that we live in a domestic drone age, there remains a lack of research into the impact of domestic drones on the UK lives increasingly subject to their gaze. This project responds with an original methodology foregrounding those who deploy, design, and live under drones, enabling unique insights about lived experience and expertise in the age of the domestic drone. (2) RESEARCH AIMS AND OBJECTIVES: The aim of Diversifying Drone Stories is to critically examine the domestic drone's growing mobilisation in, and securitisation of, day-to-day life in the UK. The objectives are to: (1) advance interdisciplinary drone scholarship through an engagement with the field of feminist geopolitics; (2) foster knowledge exchange and debate in/across drone stakeholder communities; (3) to connect social science researchers and policy-makers with the goal of influencing policy; (4) to enable career development. (3) POTENTIAL BENEFITS OF THE RESEARCH: ACADEMICS: The project pursues four-fold contribution to the academic community: (1) it contributes a new conceptual interfacing of interdisciplinary drone scholarship with the field of feminist geopolitics, enabling greater attention to the diversity of drone users, expertise and experiences; (2) it forges a novel methodology enabling a uniquely-sited and empirically-driven investigation of domestic drones in the UK; (3) it develops a distinct and accessible Mass Observation Archive directive examining drone stories, namely UK publics' understandings and experiences of drones; (4) it fosters new routes for social scientists to engage policy-makers and influence policy. It features the authoring of research articles, delivery of presentations to academic audiences, and the development of a book proposal based on grant research. PROJECT PARTNERS, PARTICIPANTS AND DRONE COMMUNITIES: The project engages and collaborates with a range of drone and aerospace communities. Through Knowledge Exchange focus groups, designed in collaboration with drone community partners, it fosters stakeholder dialogue and networking. The project will co-produce digital briefings and reports with partners, to be circulated through partner channels, enabling the fostering of wider debate. GENERAL PUBLICS: The project seeks to raise public awareness and understanding around drones, airspace security, and airborne harm. The public will have access to a distinct Mass Observation Archive 'drone stories' directive for future record/use; and an active project website, blogs, and Twitter account.