Over half of global gross domestic product is dependent on nature, yet the past decades have seen unprecedented damage to ecosystems and declines in biodiversity due to adverse human activities. Financial institutions (FIs) can play an important role in securing a nature-positive future. Decisions by FIs over capital allocation and risk pricing influence structural shifts in the real economy that have profound impacts on nature. Today, opportunities to align nature and capital in ways that benefit people, nature and FIs are missed because these impacts are not accounted for. Our aim is to contribute the foundational networks, upskilling of researchers and robust, standardised methods and tools needed to integrate biodiversity and nature into financial decision making. Our focus is the scenarios used by FIs to influence risk pricing and investment decisions, alongside the relevant and suitable data and tools needed for scenario analysis, such as asset-level data and tools to assess nature-related financial risks. A further novel aspect of our proposal is the on integrated nature-climate scenarios. Scenarios and analytics for use by FIs must consider biodiversity and climate in an integrated way. Biodiversity and climate are often treated in siloes, driving potential systemic risks. Important interactions and feedbacks are not accounted for, leading to underestimation of risks and critical tipping points. An important innovation in our proposal is to bring together the IPBES, IPCC and FI scenarios communities, leaders of whom are partners to this project, to address this gap. Integrating nature and climate requires new science; our proposal is to develop the networks and co-design and pilot the frameworks to achieve this - i.e. the foundational common framework and language needed to close the gap. This will create the foundation to Phase 2 that will generate the new datasets and toolkits needed. Here we particularly target scenarios and analytics for use by Central Banks and Supervisors (CB&Ss). This is because CB&Ss are important catalysts of wider action by FIs. Supervisory expectations and regulations, e.g. disclosure, capital requirements and stress-testing, set the rules by which FIs operate, while monetary policies shape the playing field, together having a major influence on global capital flows and so nature. In developing this proposal, we have consulted with the leading CB&Ss and policy makers (e.g. Defra, HMT) that are shaping this agenda and leading work on scenarios, all of whom have agreed to join the project as project partners. This includes the European Central Bank, the Banque de France, De Nederlandsche Bank, the Network of Central Banks and Supervisors (CB&Ss) for Greening the Financial System (NGFS), and the Task Force on Nature-Related Financial Disclosures (TNFD). Phase 1 of the project will deliver several important building blocks. Firstly, it will establish and operationalise the multi-disciplinary nature-climate-finance network. Secondly, it will co-develop the framework and guidance to generate the nature-climate scenarios and analytics, alongside syntheses of evidence and gap analyses. Finally, it will deliver a demonstrator application to a CB&S use case in stress testing nature-related risks. We will capture lessons learnt through this project to inform Phase 2, as well as share them to inform the development of the wider NERC Nature Positive Futures (NPF) programme. Our goal is that the network and the analytical framework developed will ultimately catalyse shifts in financial flows that reduce systemic risks and are aligned with a nature-positive future. Through consultations, we have understood the key milestones and actors to achieve this and shaped the project accordingly. We will work closely with our project partners, and link to UKCGFI, to ensure our outputs feed into the key processes, as well as collaborate with and support the wider NPF programme goals.

Schistosomiasis, commonly known as Bilharzia, is a parasitic disease which infects over 240 million people worldwide. Over 90% of these people live in poor rural communities in sub-Saharan Africa. The disease causes anaemia, abdominal pain, stunted growth and reduced cognitive development in children, and up to 200,000 deaths per year. Over 600 million people live in areas where they are at risk of infection. The eggs of the parasite Schistosoma mansoni, are excreted in human stool, hatch in fresh water and infect snails, where they reproduce asexually to produce 1000s of larvae (called cercariae) per day. These cercariae infect humans by directly burrowing through the skin, and developing into adult worms. The life-cycle is maintained by open defecation, or inadequate containment of human faeces, enabling eggs to reach fresh water sources, followed by contact with infected water through activities such as bathing, swimming, washing clothes or fishing. Current control focuses on drug treatments given annually on a national scale to school children. However, despite over a decade of national control programmes in countries such as Uganda, high infection levels persist in hotspot areas. Drug treatment alone will not reduce the disease in these areas and additional interventions are needed. It is known that improved sanitation and access to clean safe water supplies can stop people from getting infected. However, many areas with the disease lack money and resources to improve sanitation and furthermore, when sanitation is improved, it is not always used. We do not fully understand what makes people alter water and sanitation focused behaviours even in the presence of good facilities. Therefore, the project aims to understand better how people living in endemic communities manage their risk of schistosomiasis and how they might change their behaviour if additional resources were provided. This project has two overlapping parts. In part one, we will work directly with communities who experience a lot of schistosomiasis to establish how people currently try to reduce the risk of infection for themselves and their families as well as the risk of passing those infections on through open defecation. We will work in three villages in Uganda using social science methods to observe people going about their everyday life. We will interview them in groups and individually about their understanding of the disease, its effects, how they get infected and their current and desired strategies for reducing infections in the whole community. These data will be used to build up a picture of high and low risk practices and perceptions of disease risk, and how practices and perceptions vary by gender, age, occupation and other factors. In the second part, this information will be incorporated into household surveys to measure what is needed to change an individual's behaviour. Our methodologies allow us to quantify the ways in which people currently respond to the risks posed by schistosomiasis, and how they might respond if investments in washing, sanitation and hygiene resources in their communities were made. We will also use these models to show how human behaviour is influenced by an understanding of the lifecycle of the parasite, and by knowledge of other people's behaviour. Our findings will help us identify "best bets" for investments likely to reduce transmission and re-infection which are likely to work in the long-term. Results will inform future research studies, where these interventions are tried out at village and regional levels. Together the programme of work we plan will inform us on how best to control and potentially eliminate bilharzia in given areas, helping to improve the health of children in infected communities.

Mountains are hotspot of natural disasters, in particular those related to landslides. At the same time, scientific understanding about the natural processes that cause these disasters is lagging behind, because of the complexity of the physical environment and the difficulties facing data collection. The impact of these disasters on society is very high, especially because mountain regions often host less developed infrastructure and vulnerable populations. As a result, there is an urgent need to improve our understanding about how natural disasters in mountain regions occur, how they can be mitigated, and how people at risk can be made more resilient. This proposal will leverage recent technological and conceptual breakthroughs in environmental data collection, processing and communication to leapfrog resilience building in data-scarce and poor mountain communities in South Asia. In particular, we identify three convergent evolutions that hold great promise. First, technological developments in sensor networks and data management allow for participatory and grass-roots data collection and citizen science. Second, web- and cloud based ICT makes it possible to build more powerful analysis and prediction systems, assimilating heterogeneous data sources and tracking uncertainties. Lastly, this enables a more tailored and targeted flow of information for knowledge co-creation and decision-making. These evolutions are part of a trend towards more bottom-up and participatory approaches to the generation of scientific evidence that supports decision making on environmental processes, which is often referred to as "citizen science". We believe that a citizen science approach is particularly promising in remote mountain environments, because improving resilience and humanitarian response in these regions are inherently polycentric activities: a wide range of actors is involved in generating relevant information and scientific evidence, in decision-making and policy building, and in implementing actions both during a hazard and before and after. It is therefore paramount to strengthen the flow of information between these centres of activity, to make best use of existing knowledge, to identify the major knowledge gaps, and to allocate resources to eliminate these gaps. We will use the Karnali basin in Western Nepal as a pilot study. The Karnali basin is a remote and understudied basin that suffers from a complex interplay of natural hazards, including hydrologically-induced landslides and cascading hazards such as flooding. Over the last years, these hazards have caused serious damage to local infrastructure (e.g., roads, irrigation canals, houses, bridges) and affected livelihoods (e.g., 34760 families in the August 2014 floods). Using cost-effective sensor technologies, we will implement grass-roots monitoring of precipitation, river flow, soil moisture, and geomorphology. We will use those data to analyse meteorological extremes, and their impact on spatiotemporal patterns of landslide risk. By merging these data will other data sources such as satellite imagery, we aim to generate landslide risk maps at unprecedented resolution. At the same time, our participatory citizen science approach will enable us to design and implement a framework for bottom-up and polycentric community disaster resilience, based upon knowledge co-generation and sharing. Lastly, we will build upon the existing community-based flood early warning system implemented by our partner Practical Action Nepal, to create a comprehensive multi-hazard early warning system and knowledge exchange platform. For this, we will leverage recent developments in open-standards based, decentralized data processing and knowledge dissemination, such as mobile phones and web-interfaces.

Most people interested in science are aware that the last decade has witnessed dramatic advances in genomics tools and techniques. Excitingly, these new technologies are not limited to humans or classical model organisms like fruitflies and yeasts, but can now be applied to organisms which have long interested ecologists but which, until now, lacked genetics tools. We have taken advantage of the opportunities afforded by so-called next generation sequencing to develop genomics resources for the great tit. Great tits (Parus major) are one of the most widely studied invertebrates because they are common and readily breed in artifical nest boxes. As a result a number of long term studies of great tit populations have been conducted across Europe, some of which have been ongoing for more than 50 years and include data on tens of thousands of individual birds. These long-term datasets are rich resources for studying important ecological questions such as: How organisms adapt to climate change, How organisms allocate resources to breeding and other activities, How species evolve in the face of natural selection. Using funds won from the European Research Council (ERC) and the Netherlands government, we have begun to map genes responsible for variation in life history and morphological traits in two of the most intensively studied populations - at Wytham Woods in the UK and de Hoge Veluwe in The Netherlands. By working as a UK-Dutch collaboration we have pooled genomics resources and developed a tool called a SNP chip which allows us to type more than 9000 genetic markers in each of our study populations. We have now typed more than 2000 Dutch birds and 2700 UK birds with this chip. In this proposal, we request funds to type a further 16 great tit populations (50 birds per population). Why do we want to do this? The main reason is that by typing the same genetic markers in lots of different populations we can characterise genetic variation across the entire species range in order to learn more about the species evolutionary history. Projects of this nature are sometimes called HapMap Projects because they involve the mapping of markers linked along a chromosome (HAPlotypes). The best known HapMap project has been conducted in humans and has led to great insight into how our species colonised the world after migrating from Africa, how different populations are related to each other, and how genes have enabled us to adapt to e.g. different environmental conditions, novel challenges such as emerging diseases, changes in diet etc. By carrying out a Great Tit HapMap Project we can address similar questions in this widely studied ecological model organism. This also means we can extend the findings from the Wytham and de Hoge Veluwe populations to ask fundamental questions about evolutionary genetics. For example: Do the same genes explain adaptation in different populations? Do beneficial genes that arise in one population rapidly spread to other populations? Do the genes that explain variation within a population also explain differences between populations? Does migration between populations play a major role in maintaining genetic diversity? Does this gene flow help or hinder local adaptation? There is perhaps no other vertebrate for which multiple long-term ecological datasets and such extensive genomics resources are available. Therefore, the great tit is an ideal organism in which to perform the first 'natural population' HapMap Project.

This world-leading Centre for Doctoral Training in Bioenergy will focus on delivering the people to realise the potential of biomass to provide secure, affordable and sustainable low carbon energy in the UK and internationally. Sustainably-sourced bioenergy has the potential to make a major contribution to low carbon pathways in the UK and globally, contributing to the UK's goal of reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050 and the international mitigation target of a maximum 2 degrees Celsius temperature rise. Bioenergy can make a significant contribution to all three energy sectors: electricity, heat and transport, but faces challenges concerning technical performance, cost effectiveness, ensuring that it is sustainably produced and does not adversely impact food security and biodiversity. Bioenergy can also contribute to social and economic development in developing countries, by providing access to modern energy services and creating job opportunities both directly and in the broader economy. Many of the challenges associated with realising the potential of bioenergy have engineering and physical sciences at their core, but transcend traditional discipline boundaries within and beyond engineering. This requires an effective whole systems research training response and given the depth and breadth of the bioenergy challenge, only a CDT will deliver the necessary level of integration. Thus, the graduates from the CDT in Bioenergy will be equipped with the tools and skills to make intelligent and informed, responsible choices about the implementation of bioenergy, and the growing range of social and economic concerns. There is projected to be a large absorptive capacity for trained individuals in bioenergy, far exceeding current supply. A recent report concerning UK job creation in bioenergy sectors concluded that there "may be somewhere in the region of 35-50,000 UK jobs in bioenergy by 2020" (NNFCC report for DECC, 2012). This concerned job creation in electricity production, heat, and anaerobic digestion (AD) applications of biomass. The majority of jobs are expected to be technical, primarily in the engineering and construction sectors during the building and operation of new bioenergy facilities. To help develop and realise the potential of this sector, the CDT will build strategically on our research foundation to deliver world-class doctoral training, based around key areas: [1] Feedstocks, pre-processing and safety; [2] Conversion; [3] Utilisation, emissions and impact; [4] Sustainability and Whole systems. Theme 1 will link feedstocks to conversion options, and Themes 2 and 3 include the core underpinning science and engineering research, together with innovation and application. Theme 4 will underpin this with a thorough understanding of the whole energy system including sustainability, social, economic public and political issues, drawing on world-leading research centres at Leeds. The unique training provision proposed, together with the multidisciplinary supervisory team will ensure that students are equipped to become future leaders, and responsible innovators in the bioenergy sector.