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.

Mineral Micronutrient Deficiencies (MNDs) are widespread in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). MNDs (a.k.a. hidden hunger) have a major detrimental effect on human health which constrains economic growth and efforts to alleviate poverty. Alleviating MNDs is a major component of the second Sustainable Development Goal (SDG2), to "End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture", by 2030. This Foundation Award will focus on supporting efforts to reduce MNDs in Ethiopia and Malawi, two countries with widespread mineral nutrient malnutrition problems where dietary mineral intakes fall well below levels required for optimal nutrition. For example, zinc deficiency risks are >40% in both countries which causes high rates of child mortality and stunting. Selenium deficiency risks exceed 75% in Malawi, compromising the healthy functioning of human immune systems. Iron and iodine deficiencies are widespread and are the focus of widespread supplementation and food fortification programmes (i.e. technical 'fixes') in the region. The scientific aim of this Foundation Award is to understand how the spectral properties of tropical African soils relate to plant-availability of minerals in soils and, subsequently, to the transfer of minerals into the edible portions of staple crops and diets, and to population-level biomarkers of optimal mineral status. Achieving this aim will enable the geospatial prediction of plant-available nutrients in soils and in edible crop tissues, and thereby in downstream food systems. Spectral properties have previously been measured on a massive scale by the Africa Soils Information Service (AfSIS) programme, using X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) and Mid Infra-Red (MIR) spectroscopy. We have previously identified strong links between soil-crop-biomarkers in small-scale cross-sectional studies in Malawi. This aim will be realised through activities in three Themes. In Theme 1, a designed soil and crop sampling programme will be conducted at 500 sites in Ethiopia. Two sets of statistical models will be developed, the first will focus on predicting relationships between total (XRF) and plant-available soil mineral concentrations, using covariate data from MIR, remote sensing and legacy data (e.g. maps) sources. The second set of models will focus on relationships between plant-available soil mineral concentrations and their concentrations in crop edible portions. In Theme 2, these data will be integrated with data from published/government sources to predict dietary mineral supply (and highlight knowledge gaps). These predictions will be tested against mineral biomarker data (e.g. blood, urine) and proxies of micronutrient status (e.g. stunting) from national surveillance programmes. Outputs of Themes 1 and 2 will be delivered in the forms of maps and reports suited to communicating with policy-makers, to include the communication of uncertainty. Maps will be used to highlight those geographical areas that are at highest likely risk of MNDs. The focus of Theme 3 is interactions with policy-makers to optimise communication strategies, and to strengthen networks and capacity to conduct longer-term R&D to address knowledge gaps in the region. We have well-established networks of partners in Ethiopia and Malawi, including academics, high-level policy-makers, NGOs and industry, who will all play active roles to ensure that the Foundation Award delivers genuine impact that will be assessed using robust evaluation procedures.