The presence of plastic leaking into the environment is a system failure of monumental proportion that threatens the marine ecosystem and causes physical and chemical contamination at a global scale. It is estimated that 12 million tonnes of plastic enters the oceans each year and this has rapidly become a global concern. The economic damage of this plastic pollution amounts to around USD13 billion per annum due to degraded environments, loss of revenue from tourism, and costs of clean up and repair. This is a particular issue in the Eastern Pacific rim countries of Ecuador and Peru which host seas of great ecological, economic and conservation importance with high levels of endemic species, including fish, reptiles, birds and mammals, found nowhere else on earth. The health of this unique biodiversity is important to one of the world's key fishing areas and a growing tourism industry, supporting a variety of livelihoods and food security for the coastal people, many very poor. The total amount of plastic produced and used in Latin America represents 4% of the plastic produced globally. It has been estimated that 45% of this is inadequately managed, generating around 1 million tonnes of mismanaged plastic waste annually, and predicted to double by 2025 if no action is taken. This challenge requires a regional scale approach that allows environmental, economic, technical and social disciplines to come together to build understanding of the many factors contributing to the problem, its impacts and how it can be solved. Over the last three years we have established an enthusiastic and engaged network across the region committed to designing and implementing solutions for lasting change in Ecuador, Peru and Chile. Our network has strong relationships with Research Institutions, National Park managers and Environment Ministries in each country. Our vision is to reduce plastic leakage in the Eastern Pacific region, supporting development of a sustainable, circular economic system for plastics. We propose an integrated, multidisciplinary project with three core aims. We will establish the sources and drivers of plastic pollution including the mapping of waste flows across the region and life cycle assessments of materials used in key industries. Secondly, we will identify the key economic, ecological and health and wellbeing impacts of the current plastic pollution that pervades this region. Thirdly, we will implement and test interventions to mitigate and reduce plastic pollution and help progress the region to circular approaches to plastic. As we are already working with stakeholders in the region, we have some co-designed interventions ready to test immediately. These innovations range from helping streamlining the monitoring of novel-technology based clean-up operations to trialling an innovative community-based scheme to recycle fishing nets. As part of an exciting region-wide educational campaign to develop targeted awareness-raising for inland and coastal schools and communities, students will be invited to design interventions to minimise urban plastic leakage. We will test the scalability and effectiveness of these ideas. The evaluation of these, in addition to data generated in Theme 1 and Theme 2 will support the design and testing of further social, environmental and technical innovations. To ensure the research achieves the maximum impact, the consortium partners include South American government agencies and departments, NGOs and business with extensive experience of engaging coastal communities in the region and equal partnerships between UK and South American universities to develop local research capacity through collaboration and training.

The research proposed here aims to help us understand year-to-year variations in climate around the world. This includes the occurrence of floods and droughts, of heat waves and cold spells. To do this, we are going to examine the largest source of year-to-year climate variability on Earth, namely, El Niño. The El Niño is a warm ocean current that appears off the coast of NW South America every 3-5 years, and it is a result of a much larger scale phenomenon involving changes to the winds, rainfall, temperature and ocean currents across the whole of the tropical Pacific. The larger scale phenomenon is known as the El Niño Southern Oscillation, a name which reflects the fact that it involves a natural cycle in the circulation of both the atmosphere and the surface ocean and how they interact. Although we know that ENSO originates in the tropical Pacific, it has near world-wide impacts because of the way it affects the circulation of the atmosphere, and hence the winds and transport of moisture from the tropics to the extra-tropics. Floods and droughts and changed incidence of storminess from El Niño directly affect the lives and livelihoods of well over a billion people, and major El Niño events are associated with tens of thousands of human deaths, billions of pounds of damage, and devastation to some natural ecosystems such as coral reefs. Even Europe experiences changed weather patterns associated with ENSO! Although we now understand quite well the basic mechanisms behind the ENSO cycle, some major questions remain. In particular, we do not understand why some El Niño events are much stronger than others, why some decades show much stronger El Niño activity, or how ENSO will respond to climate change. To help answer some of these questions, we will reconstruct changes in ENSO over the past 5,000 years by analysing growth rings in the skeletons of old dead ('fossil') corals that lived in the Galápagos. The Galápagos Islands experience extreme changes in weather associated with El Niño (warmer and wetter during events), and these changes are recorded in the chemistry of the skeletons of corals living in the surrounding ocean. Some of these corals live for up to a hundred years, or longer, laying down layers of skeleton a bit like tree rings. We will collect cores through old dead corals, including some that lived thousands of years ago. Then, by analysing the chemistry of their growth bands we will be able to reconstruct the changes in climate, and ENSO, that the corals experienced during their life time. By combining the records from many such corals we will build up a picture of the natural variability in ENSO, helping us see how often major events occurred, and how much decade-to-decade variability in ENSO occurred. These coral records can let us reconstruct the history of past changes in ENSO, but on their own they do not help us to understand the causes of the changes. Were they due to changes in the sun's radiation? Or due to the cooling effects of major volcanic eruptions? Or were they simply random variations that we should expect without any sort of trigger? To answer these questions, we need to use climate models. The same models that we now use to predict future climate can be used to research changes in ENSO. In our work, we will use the most up-to-date climate models to see if they can correctly replicate the observed changes in ENSO over the past few thousand years as defined by our coral records. We can also see what the effects are of changing volcanic eruptions, solar radiation and greenhouse gases in these models. By comparing the model results with the coral records we will get a better understanding of the nature and causes of changes in ENSO, and the skill of the models at predicting this. In this way we will make a significant contribution to helping predict the likely range of ENSO-related climate events for the coming decades.