As digital technologies - the internet, web, mobile phones, social networks, 3D printers, etc - spread around the world, both work and business are changing via creation of digital economies. There has already been impact in developing countries: thousands of digital startups, millions working in the ICT sector, millions more undertaking online work for platforms like Upwork. And the potential is even greater: hundreds of millions could access online work platforms, digital businesses like Uber and Airbnb are spreading rapidly, demand for digital enterprises is high, 3D-printing could level the manufacturing playing field, etc. But problems are also arising: most digital startups and digital careers fail; most citizens are unable to participate in digital economies; the benefits of digital work and trade seem to flow more to big corporations in the global North than to workers, enterprises or governments in the global South. The speed of change means much of this is happening in a knowledge vacuum. Researchers are playing catch-up to try to understand these new trends in the global North, but very little research on digital economies looks at developing countries or is done by researchers in those countries. As a result, there are four knowledge gaps about digital economies in the global South. We don't know: - what's going on and where; - the development impact e.g. whether digital economies are increasing or reducing inequalities; - what governments, NGOs and businesses should be doing to create an effective "digital ecosystem" that works for the benefit of all. And as researchers we are not sure what concepts and methods to apply. The "Development Implications of Digital Economies" (DIODE) Strategic Network aims to help fill these knowledge gaps. It has three main objectives: - To assess the current state-of-play and identify a future research agenda around the four knowledge gaps above. - To create a research network with the capacities to implement this research agenda on digital economies and development. - To develop specific research proposals that address identified research priorities. The network consists of senior and junior researchers from the UK, developing countries and other locations around the world who - along with those working in digital economy policy and practice - will work together to fulfil these objectives. Following initial synthesis studies to understand the current state-of-play, we will meet in four workshops - two in developing countries, two in the UK - each of which will address particular knowledge gaps through presentations and working group sessions. Alongside the network itself, by the end we will have produced a final report that provides a future research agenda; a strategy brief to guide those involved in digital economy policy/practice; and a set of research proposals that can put the agenda into practice. Initially, the main beneficiaries will be network members: we will have a far better understanding of what to research next and how to research it, with stronger capacity to undertake this work, and dense contacts to ensure our research is relevant to policy and practice. We will have created research capacity within and between developing countries, so that work on this important and growing phenomenon can be driven from and undertaken in those countries. GCRF and other researchers - especially in developing countries - will benefit from having a clear sense of research priorities and tools, but also from understanding how important digital economies are becoming in the global South. Digital economy policy-makers, entrepreneurs, worker organisations and other practitioners will understand what good-practice actions to take. Through that policy/practice connection, and through the outputs from later implementing our research agenda, we will make a difference to development: helping ensure digital economies work to deliver development goals.

During 18-19 September, Category 5 Hurricane Maria devastated the small island developing state of Dominica. Sustained winds of 257 Km/h almost completely stripped the island of its forest cover and caused much destruction of buildings and infrastructure. Intense rainfall and uprooting of trees caused numerous landslides, debris flows and river floods. Debris carried by the floods jammed under bridges, exacerbating overbank flooding and damage to infrastructure. Coarse sediment and tree debris discharged to the sea were transported back onto the coastline by the storm surge, damaging shoreline infrastructure. The impact of Hurricane Maria upon the landscape of Dominica and the consequences for disaster risk reduction in Dominica are the focus of this research. This work is urgent because it must be completed before the landscape is further modified by intense rainfall events in the next hurricane season (June-November 2018). To understand how this either decreases or increases geomorphological hazards, as much survey work as possible needs to be done during the debris clearance phase of the recovery operations. We therefore aim to produce a detailed post-event survey, combining remote sensing and fieldwork, of the geomorphological changes caused by Hurricane Maria and an understanding of their effects on post-hurricane landscape instability, focusing on the damage done to critical infrastructure by flooding, debris flows and storm surge erosion. There are three phases to the project: 1) processing of satellite imagery (both optical and radar), evaluating the effectiveness of remote sensing for damage mapping; 2) Fieldwork and verification survey of slope instability features and damaged infrastructure; 3) Analysis of stakeholder perceptions of vulnerability and resilience, with collation of survey results into an assessment of future geohazards, with recommendations on improved disaster risk reduction and enhanced resilience. The project will have many applications: (i) providing a valuable baseline inventory of hurricane impacts in Dominica's landscape and the ensuing damage to infrastructure; (ii) enabling an accuracy assessment of the hurricane damage maps produced from inspection of satellite remote sensing imagery during the disaster response phase; (iii) enabling an examination of the interaction between hurricane-driven geomorphic processes and ensuing damage to critical infrastructure; (iv) improving our understanding of post-hurricane landscape instability and the DRR implications for reconstruction in Dominica.

Health is a critical aspect of human wellbeing, interacting with material and social relations to contribute to people's freedoms and choices. Especially in Africa, clusters of health and disease problems disproportionately affect poor people. Healthy ecosystems and healthy people go together, yet the precise relationships between these remain poorly understood. The Dynamic Drivers of Disease in Africa Consortium will provide a new theoretical conceptualisation, integrated systems analysis and evidence base around ecosystem-health-wellbeing interactions, linked to predictive models and scenarios, tools and methods, pathways to impact and capacity-building activities geared to operationalising a 'One Health' agenda in African settings. Ecosystems may improve human wellbeing through provisioning and disease regulating services; yet they can also generate ecosystem 'disservices' such as acting as a reservoir for new 'emerging' infectious disease from wildlife. Indeed 60% of emerging infectious diseases affecting humans originate from animals, both domestic and wild. These zoonoses have a huge potential impact on human societies across the world, affecting both current and future generations. Understanding the ecological, social and economic conditions for disease emergence and transmission represents one of the major challenges for humankind today. We hypothesise that disease regulation as an ecosystem service is affected by changes in biodiversity, climate and land use, with differential impacts on people's health and wellbeing. The Consortium will investigate this hypothesis in relation to four diseases, each affected in different ways by ecosystem change, different dependencies on wildlife and livestock hosts, with diverse impacts on people, their health and their livelihoods. The cases are Lassa fever in Sierra Leone, henipaviruses in Ghana, Rift Valley Fever in Kenya and trypanosomiasis in Zambia and Zimbabwe. Through the cases we will examine comparatively the processes of disease regulation through ecosystem services in diverse settings across Africa. The cases are located in a range of different Africa ecosystem types, from humid forest in Ghana through forest-savanna transition in Sierra Leone to wooded miombo savanna in Zambia and Zimbabwe and semi-arid savanna in Kenya. These cases enable a comparative exploration of a range of environmental change processes, due to contrasting ecosystem structure, function and dynamics, representative of some of the major ecosystem types in Africa. They also allow for a comparative investigation of key political-economic and social drivers of ecosystem change from agricultural expansion and commercialisation, wildlife conservation and use, settlement and urbanisation, mining and conflict, among others. Understanding the interactions between ecosystem change, disease regulation and human wellbeing is necessarily an interdisciplinary challenge. The Consortium brings together leading natural and social scientific experts in the study of environmental change and ecosystem services; socio-economic, poverty and wellbeing issues, and health and disease. It will work through new partnerships between research and policy/implementing agencies, to build new kinds of capacity and ensure sustained pathways to impact. In all five African countries, the teams involve environmental, social and health scientists, forged as a partnership between university-based researchers and government implementing/policy agencies. Supporting a series of cross-cutting themes, linked to integrated case study work, the Consortium also brings together the University of Edinburgh, the Cambridge Infectious Diseases Consortium and Institute of Zoology (supporting work on disease dynamics and drivers of change); ILRI (ecosystem, health and wellbeing contexts); the STEPS Centre, University of Sussex (politics and values), and the Stockholm Resilience Centre (institutions, policy and future scenarios).