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.

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).

Urban populations are particularly vulnerable to extreme weather events related to climate change, especially heat waves and floods. This vulnerability is caused by a combination of factors including existing inequalities, high population, and high exposure to certain types of environmental hazards. As cities emerge from smaller settlements and nearby adjacent cities, little design goes into ensuring that they are established in appropriate locations, that new infrastructure is adequately resilient to current and future extreme weather events, and that governance systems and growth take into account the specific needs of marginalised groups. Instead, urban development often appears chaotic and unplanned, locking citizens, particularly those who are most marginalised, into high states of vulnerability. If we could influence how burgeoning settlements turn into cities and megacities at the start of their growth trajectory, even marginally, the positive repercussions for resilience and wellbeing would be colossal. But just how and where do new cities emerge, and what are the opportunities for influencing their design while they expand to be resilient to extreme weather in a changing climate? African urbanization, in particular, is exploding. Decisions on how development will take place have time-limited intervention points. There are as yet no pre-determined pathways for development in Africa, providing a unique opportunity for influence. There is also a growing imperative and desire from African initiatives to develop sustainably, to support the implementation of the UN Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), particularly Goal 11 on Sustainable cities and communities. Here we will focus on setting the foundations for increasing climate resilience and sustainable urbanisation in African. U-RES brings together a rich team of academic and non-academic experts, to explore multiple aspects of the very early stages of urbanisation: Through the lenses of the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), U-RES will examine the current state of urbanisation and how this aligns, or not, with the projected increasing risks from climate change. This will be done through remote sensing and GIS analysis techniques to assess changes in land-cover. In addition, model simulations used by the IPCC to project climate change will be analysed for two risk-related climatic indices, one around heat waves and one around heavy rainfall (a driver of flood risk). This workstream will provide an overview of the patterns of urbanisation in Africa, and an initial picture of the alignment of current urbanisation with risks of extreme climatic events. Through the lenses of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), U-RES will conduct case studies of urban governance, two around Durban South Africa, and two in Isolo Kenya. These case studies will provide on-the-ground understanding into how information is gathered and used by decision makers, and provide insights into how this can be modified to better take into account the needs of marginalised groups. Through the lenses of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), U-RES will examine archaeological evidence of changing positions of human settlements over time, and how the changes related to environmental factors. This will be done by focusing on Egypt and Mesopotamia, which are a good analogues for environmental changes occurring in Africa. Analogues from the past will be used here to examine how decision-making process is influenced by complex interrelationships of opportunities and constraints afforded by a range of drivers, set against long-term societal traditions, ideologies and religion. The interview material from the governance case studies will be further used to develop narratives of good governance and to raise awareness of the importance of evidence to guide decision-making on urbanization.

This strategic network seeks to analyse and respond to three key trends in international development. First, the strong emphasis on accountability and a move towards gathering large amounts of monitoring and evaluation data. Second, the growth of digitalisation and datafication (ie the use of digital tools, technologies and processes to transform organisations and strategic decision-making to being data-driven). New digital technologies are now being used in development practice in numerous cross-cutting ways. Yet there are risks of multiple digital divides and digital exclusions which have to be counter-acted. Third, there are the issues of digital participation. Datafication and digitazation require capacity-building locally to ensure development efforts remain grounded in the priorities of countries and communities of the global South. These trends combine to form a single challenge: how might these increasingly sophisticated and powerful tools of surveillance and analysis be used to empower the marginalised? Advocates of big data and digitalisation see multiple benefits becoming possible because policies can become more data driven, and hence more accurate in their understanding of the problems they tackle. They see many opportunities to engage citizens directly. But critics warn against numerous risks including loss of privacy and the replication of invisibilities and inequalities along geographical, gender, education and class lines that these trends may enhance, rather than diminish. The primary aim of this network is to bring together leading researchers and practitioners from information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D), Data Science and participatory practice to develop an ambitious and innovative research agenda. Non-academic partners and collaborators, Oxfam Digital, UNICEF, the South African Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and the global umbrella organisation of mobile phone companies, GSMA, have together pledged over 36 person days to contribute to the co-shaping of this research agenda. They recognise that there is an urgent need for more research and collaboration with academic institutions in this area. We will convene a series of meetings and events in diverse formats to bring together members of the collective under the different priorities we have identified. Altogether some 30 participants will work in four thematic groups: 1: Big Data, "small data" and Data Science to inform progress towards the SDGs 2: Participation and value-based design of socio-technological innovation 3: Citizen participation, data science, ICT for peace building. 4: Youth participation and innovative digital methods. Our first aim for these meetings is that they will produce an overarching research agenda and several research programmes as well as research proposals that can be pursued individually or collectively by different members of the collective. The second aim is intensive capacity building. Researchers in partner countries, early career researchers, researchers from different disciplines and those researchers new to research in the global South will all get a chance to expand their research capacity and improve practice. This work fits squarely with all three aspects of compliance with ODA that the ESRC pursues. It is 'for development', because it seeks to solve development challenges faced in the global south over digital development, improving data and participation. It is 'on development', as it entails critical scrutiny of measures which are intended to improve lives and well-being. It is 'as development' as it promotes various forms of individual and institutional capacity building in collaboration with existing and new partners.