Global warming, associated with the burning of fossil fuels, is changing the world's climate, and with this, it is altering the water cycle. Future climate projections suggest hydrological extremes (floods and droughts) will become more frequent and severe - further heightening the already substantial impacts they cause to lives and livelihoods, as well as infrastructure and economies. To adapt to future changes in water availability, we need projections of future flood and drought occurrence. Numerical simulation models are used to provide such scenarios, but they are very complex and highly uncertain. To better understand and constrain these model-based projections, we need to quantify emerging trends in the water cycle. This requires long records of past hydrological observations. River flows (the volume of water flowing in rivers) are especially useful because river flows integrate climate processes over the large areas covered by drainage basins. River flows are also, in practice, one way in which climate change will most impact society and the environment: through devastating floods at one end of the spectrum to droughts at the other, causing water shortages for public supply, industry, irrigation and wildlife. Across the world, there have been many studies of long-term trends in river flow. Despite this past research, however, our confidence in observed trends remains very low - even in the major state-of-the-art IPCC reports, which have typically been cautious in their reporting of floods and droughts. The key reason is that most rivers are heavily modified by human disturbances (e.g. dams, large removals of water for irrigation, domestic or industrial consumption). These disturbances can obscure the 'signal' of climate change - that is, trends in many rivers may bear no relation to global warming and may in fact be opposing the climate trend, due to human modifications such as dam construction. To detect climate-driven trends we need to analyse river basins that are relatively undisturbed by such human impacts. Recognizing this, some countries have declared 'Reference Hydrometric Networks' (RHNs) of locations where river flows are measured, and where human impacts are absent or minimal. However, to date there have been no efforts to integrate these globally. This is a problem for global assessments like the IPCC, as countries use different methods to assess trends, which limits comparison. Members of our consortium have previously pioneered a first trans-Atlantic study in this field. With the ROBIN initiative, we are now advancing a truly worldwide effort to bring together a global RHN. As well as the network of river basins, ROBIN is the network of researchers and institutions sharing expertise. The network includes leading experts from Brazil, Chile, Malawi, South Africa, India, Thailand, New Zealand and Australia, augmenting our existing network across Europe and North America. Crucially, these new countries span a broad range of different climates and the partners also bring specific expertise (for example, unique knowledge of global datasets that can support ROBIN, or specialist analysis of 'ephemeral' rivers that often run dry). ROBIN will engage other countries to expand over the lifetime of the project and set out a pathway to a sustainable legacy for the network going into the future. In this regard, crucially, ROBIN is supported by international organisations (UNESCO, WMO and the IPCC) who will ensure sustainability following the two-year project. ROBIN will also deliver the first truly global scale analysis of trends in river flows using undisturbed catchments. This will be a novel, high impact analysis in its own right, but will also showcase the potential of the network. Taken together, these activities will help realise the vision of ROBIN that future IPCC assessments will make more confident appraisals of climate change impacts on the water cycle, including floods and droughts.

The aim of SARASWATI 2.0 is to identify best available and affordable technologies for decentralized wastewater treatment with scope of resource/energy recovery and reuse in urban and rural areas. Further, it addresses the challenge of real time monitoring and automation. The previous SARASWATI project has shown that a number of decentralized wastewater treatment plants in India do not perform properly and that there are few plants that would meet the more stringent standards as those proposed by the Indian Government in 2015. Thus, in many cases not even CATNAP (the cheapest available technology narrowly avoiding prosecution) has been applied, leading to high pollution levels. The SARASWATI project therefore proposed to adopt the principle of BAT (best available technologies) in a more flexible way, adapting the definition of BAT to the local context, based on complementing the treatment efficiency with the costs of the treatment technology and affordability, and local context in the location of application. This will allow to identify BATs with more stringent standards if required and suitable for the location. Thereby, ten pilot technologies in 7 Indian States demonstrating enhanced removal of organic pollution (BOD, TSS), nutrients (particularly Nitrogen), organic micro-pollutants and pathogens have been proposed (WP1). Further, all pilots allow for resource recovery contributing to the principles of a circular economy and will undergo a comprehensive performance assessment (WP2) complemented by an extended sustainability assessment informed by recent ISO standards (WP4). This will allow identification of BATs for the Indian context. In addition, suitable automation and control strategies will be tested and recommended, taking into account the presence of operators and their level of knowledge and expertise (WP3). Finally, WP5 is dedicated to dissemination and exploitation of results. The consortium is comprised of a well-balanced EU-Indian team of 17 partners.

The ecosystem services of deltas often support high population densities - estimated at over 500 million people globally, with important examples in south, south-east and East Asia. As noted in the IPCC AR4 Assessment, deltas are one of the most vulnerable coastal environments and their ecosystem services face multiple stresses in the coming years and decades including (1) local drivers due to development (e.g., urbanisation) within the delta, (2) regional drivers due to changes in catchment management (e.g. dam construction), and (3) global climate change, especially sea-level rise, Understanding how to sustain ecosystem services and reduce poverty and vulnerability in deltaic areas requires consideration of all these stresses and their interaction. This Partnership and Project Development Grant (PPDG) aims to develop a larger proposal that will develop methods to understand and characterise these multiple drivers of change for the Ganges-Brahmaputra delta, explore their implications for poverty and vulnerability of the delta residents, and develop management systems that are resilient in the face of the large uncertainties that exist for the 21st Century. The Ganges-Brahmaputra delta is selected as it is one of the most vulnerable deltas (embracing most of Bangladesh and West Bengal, India), but the methods that are being proposed will be transferable to the management of other delta systems in Asia, Africa and South America. This PPDG integrates across multiple scales of investigation that are often explored independently in different disciplines. Hence, integration of natural science, engineering and social science views is critical and this will be a key step which the PPDG will explore, building on existing experience in the project team such as within the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. The PPDG aims to develop a proposal that integrates all the above issues for both the baseline and future conditions, using poverty or poverty-related outcomes as the key indicators. The proposal will also consider critical intervening factors such as governance and political will in tackling both corruption and the social and economic effects of climate change and other hazards. Poverty outcomes will be considered as a much wider spectrum of wellbeing than just money metrics, which may not be relevant in this setting. We will explore the effect of the scenarios on health, education, social capital and security as well as asset poverty and nutritional levels. Previous research will be developed in order to understand the effects of differing underlying resilience and vulnerability levels among the coastal populations. Particular interest will be focussed on possible thresholds of social capital and material wellbeing, after which the multiple stresses above would have catastrophic effects, including knock on effects such as mass migration. Analysis will occur at various levels - including effects on the individual, the household, the community, the wider area and ultimately the whole nation and delta. The PPDG will develop the research consortium across three countries (UK, Bangladesh and India) and refine the research questions identified to develop a proposal for the December 2010 submission. In particular, it will allow us to embed the research in the Ganges-Brahmaputra to facilitate take-up of the policy recommendations that would emerge if the full proposal was funded.