Adequate public water services are not provided in, or expanded to, informal unplanned urban areas in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Explanations in the literature range from technical difficulties, weak institutional settings, and poor cadastral information. Also, urban poor tend to lack the political or economic resources to exercise power within the urban arena to change their situation; rather, they are subject to commercialisation, industrialisation and 'full cost recovery' for water access. In such cases, groundwater is turned to as an alternative, mainly through private vendors, self-supply from own or shared wells, and/or NGO-run kiosks. However, groundwater of good and safe quality is scarce, either seasonally or at different locations throughout the urban area. Also, there is very little insight in the hydrologic cycle within the urban area, including surface water and groundwater flow patterns and interactions, associated transport velocities, dynamics of pollutant transport, and the presence of recharge and discharge areas in the urban area. Therefore, it is unknown if and how long natural groundwater reserves can sustain these increasing urban groundwater demands. Social, institutional, financial and environmental conditions make the dependence of urban poor on groundwater a challenge that may lead to reduction of the quality of living, income, and life expectancy of the urban poor. It can therefore be regarded a complex and persistent societal problem, which is highly uncertain in terms of future developments and hard to manage, since it is rooted in different societal domains. Also, these problems seem impossible to solve with traditional approaches and instruments or through existing institutions. What is lacking is information, integration, coherence, and systemic thinking. The solution to the problem is likewise complex and not straight-forward; it will involve different stakeholders, it requires social learning, and arriving at the solution is uncertain and will take a long time. Hosted by Local Transitioning Teams, and focusing on parts of Kampala (Uganda), Arusha (Tanzania), and Accra (Ghana), as examples of growing mixed urban areas in Sub-Saharan Africa, including poor people in slums, who depend on groundwater, T-GroUP will first firmly root itself in cutting edge demand-led interdisciplinary social and natural research. What are current and historic multi-scale groundwater use-regimes and multi-level governance arrangements, how were and are power structures and power dynamics present in these areas, and what is how do financial and economic factors come into play? These are the more social, governance, institutional and socio-economic type of question we ask ourselves. From the environmental and natural sciences point of view, we aim to unravel complex urban groundwater flow systems and patterns in pathogen distributions in aquifers using next generation DNA sequencing techniques and qPCR techniques we recently developed. Then, our project will turn into a socio-biophysical transition experiment. These areas described above become Urban Transitioning Laboratories in which we plan to implement a Transition Management Cycle (TMC), which is able to properly deal with the complex societal problem described above, and which can convert unsustainable water use into inclusive urban groundwater management, thereby focusing on the role and the needs of the urban poor. Key components of the TMC include multi-stakeholder platforms ('Learning Alliances'), strategic planning, and small scale demonstrations to show the promise in making the transition towards sustainable groundwater management. Being designed for development impact, the TMC is also subject of research: departing from a TMC we developed earlier, we aim to arrive at a TMC tailored to groundwater use in the complex context of our study areas, which can be replicated in other cities in Sub-Saharan Africa.

STREVA will bring together researchers from universities, research institutes and volcano observatories, to explore methods for reducing the negative consequences of volcanic activity on communities. We will work both with the communities facing volcanic threats, and with those responsible for monitoring, preparing for and responding to those threats. Our main partners are volcano monitoring agencies and observatories in Colombia, the Caribbean and Ecuador, and through them, disaster managers and disaster researchers throughout the region, as well as residents of communities at risk. We will use a number of techniques to build links between the project and the wider community, including workshops, running scenario exercises, and using social media to report our results. Our aim, by working collaboratively across different disciplines, is to develop and apply a risk assessment framework that will generate better plans to reduce the negative consequences of volcanic activity on people and assets. Volcanic risk is a complex problem, which we shall understand by investigating a number of volcanoes, at-risk communities, emergencies and policy responses across the region. These case studies will help us to identify common issues in volcanic disaster risk and ultimately develop regional risk assessment processes. These will be crucial for long-term planning to reduce exposure to volcanic hazards. The countries in which we will work are all middle income and face multiple volcanic threats, often in close proximity to large towns and cities. The main focus will be on six volcanic sites across the Lesser Antilles, Ecuador and Colombia. We will begin the project by reviewing the secondary literature on three well monitored and active volcanoes, to analyse what has already been done to understand and reduce risk to the surrounding population. Through in-depth empirical research in these volcanic areas we shall begin to develop, test and apply our new risk assessment framework and methods for application. We will then take these lessons and apply them to three high-risk volcanoes where monitoring and understanding is less advanced. STREVA's work will generate improvements in: (i) methods for forecasting the start of eruptions and changes in activity during eruption; (ii) prediction of areas at-risk (the "footprint") from different volcanic hazards; (iii) understanding of the factors that make people and their assets more vulnerable to volcanic threats; (iv) understanding of institutional constraints and capacities and how to improve incentives for risk reduction By the end of the project, our new knowledge will help us to measure volcanic risk more accurately and monitor how that risk is changing. The practical results will be a strengthening in the capacity of stakeholders at different scales (staff in volcano observatories, local and national governments and NGOs) to produce risk assessments for high-risk volcanoes and use them to improve preparedness and response to volcanic emergencies and build resilience in the surrounding communities through long-term planning. In adopting this approach, STREVA will have real impacts in real places, and will significantly advance the fields of volcanic risk analysis and disaster risk reduction.

The development of groundwater for safe drinking water, irrigation and other uses offers huge potential for improving the lives of many African people. Recent research showed that groundwater was present in most parts of Africa and represented a resource greater than the water available in lakes and rivers. However, a key uncertainty is how sustainable groundwater abstraction will be: is it being replenished and if so by how much and will this change in the future? This research project will bring together a team of African, European and US scientists to examine all the available evidence for groundwater recharge across Africa. The team will use these data to search for the existence of critical recharge thresholds: conditions beyond which recharge may not occur or become unreliable. They will use the datset to develop a map of observed groundater recharge volumes for Africa and look for systematic changes across the continent. The team will also use the opportunity to examine the different methods for measuring groundwater recharge and identify the most appropriate for African conditions. Together with social scientists they will use the results of the research to highlight areas and future scenarios where groundwater recharge may become a major contraint on sustainable groundwater abstraction, and where wells or boreholes may run dry, impacting particularly on the rural poor. The maps of groundwater recharge, and the quantification of critical thresholds can have many different uses: they should help quantify the risks of groundwater development and manage tradeoffs in abstraction for the benefit of the poor; for water engineers working in Africa, they should allow a first pass assessment of groundwater recharge to screen whether recharge may be a major constraint on a project, and also provide the tools for measuring recharge more accurately; for the academic community these new datasets can be used to validate global or continetal scale land surface hydrological models. Once the research is completed a workshop and webinar convened by WaterAid will help explore the implications of the research results for planning and implementing new water projects in Africa. The results of this research will be used as a springboard to design a large field programme of interdisciplinary research to examine the processes which lead to these critical recharge thresholds to allow much more reliable forecasts of where groundwater development may become unsustainable in the future and to explore how groundwater can be best managed in these critical areas.

This research will study the legacy impacts of previous authoritarian regimes on its citizens' political attitudes today. It thereby addresses important and unresolved questions of democratisation, by using a new methodological approach of cohort analysis to examine the lasting legacy of authoritarian dictatorships. Previous research has overlooked the possibility of citizens' formative experiences in non-democratic systems that might impact their political attitudes, values, and behaviour even after the existence of these regimes. We expect that these legacy impacts have important implications for the development of a democratic political culture in transitioning societies. We will hence develop a new theory of authoritarian socialization, which assumes that different authoritarian regimes vary in the way they suppress their citizens, and that this in turn will lead to distinctive beliefs and behaviour in the population. Studying the experience of whole generations (or cohorts as they are also referred to) who have been socialised under dictatorships makes it possible to investigate whether regimes differ in terms of the impact they may have on their citizens' beliefs. Further we are interested in whether and how this imprint might negatively affect the establishment of a democratic political culture. The objective of this project is to develop a typology of regime characteristics and their lasting impact on the population. We expect that this typology and an accompanying policy brief will inform the practical developmental work of organisations working in transitioning societies. This objective will be achieved by conducting a comprehensive analysis of post-authoritarian countries from different parts of the world during the entire 20th century that experienced different types and durations of suppression. This includes the military regimes in South America, but also the socialist regimes in the former Eastern block. It is not possible to study the impact of these regimes during their existence, as representative public opinion research is not possible during dictatorships. We argue, however, that this is not necessary. Instead we rely on the method of cohort analysis, developed by the principle investigator Dr. Neundorf. One of the main methodological innovations of this project is that this method allows us to identify distinct characteristics of those generations that were mainly socialised during dictatorships. To test our new theory of authoritarian socialisation, we will merge existing survey data from numerous post-authoritarian countries. Today this is possible, as survey research and public opinion polls are widespread beyond established Western democracies. For example, since 1995 several Latin American countries annually take part in the Latinobarometro. Other data that will be used include the World Value Survey (1980-2012), and Asiabarometer (2001-2012) as well as all six rounds of the ESRC-funded European Social Survey (2002-2012). The different survey questions included in the diverse datasets will be harmonised so that a joint analysis is possible. This is a major task of this project and will yield a unique longitudinal, global database of individuals' political attitudes and behaviour. In order to assign the regime characteristics under which each generation grew up, we will further merge existing data sources (e.g. Polity IV and Autocratic Regime Transitions data) on authoritarian regimes to measure the distinct features of each regime. We will focus, on factors such as intra-elite structure, extent, scope and density of repression, and transition to democracy. The two datasets of individual-level survey data and regime characteristics will be jointly analysed using quantitative statistical analysis of hierarchical age, period, cohort analysis to estimate the generational differences in democratic attitudes and behaviour.

The 'Small Island Developing States' (SIDS) of the Caribbean are at the frontline of our changing environment and strategies to respond and cope with their consequences are now of paramount importance. The damage from the hurricanes of 2017 demonstrate starkly the challenge such countries face in dealing with recurrent high intensity hazards; on average the Caribbean incurs $835 million of losses from hurricanes per annum. This is in addition to the challenges posed by 'everyday' risks e.g. slope stability, water resources and the rainy season where longer term planning is blighted by the annualised expenditure subsequently incurred. Swift, strong, and inclusive recovery reduces impact on livelihoods and well-being and improves resilience towards future events. Attention to re-building strong physical infrastructure is important, but, long term benefits accumulate faster when strategies are inclusive and clearly tailored to the local cultural, social and physical environment (Hallegatte et al., 2018). This underpins the 'leave no one behind' strategy of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and demands disaster risk reduction strategies that place a strong emphasis on a wide range of knowledges as set out by the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (2015-2030). Our recent research includes three fundamental findings: (1) cultural responses to hazardous events in the Caribbean contain powerful knowledge about impacts, response and recovery and (2) the process of their transmission provides a strong mechanism to include communities in their own preparedness and recovery. (3) the historical as well as the recent past contains important knowledge that deepens understanding of how and why people place themselves in areas of high risk (problems) but reveals important strategies or moments when national and international response acted to counteract the impacts of hazardous events (solutions). The aim of this 'Follow-on-Fund' proposal is to share these findings to highlight the importance of cultural and historical knowledge in disaster risk reduction in the Caribbean. We want to put our research to work to help shape effective strategies, both directly in a country where they are responding to future hydro-meteorological risks while recovering from a geophysical disaster (Montserrat) and indirectly in the United Kingdom via agencies responsible for providing support and advice during and after hazardous events. We will create a new exhibit for communities on Montserrat, working throughout with MVO, involving the Montserrat Red Cross and Montserrat National Trust to access a wide cross-section of local views. However, we want to push this engagement further: our findings do not just map out a means for a more inclusive approach to sharing disaster risk reduction information locally, but contain positive experiences of transformation and coping that could inform policy and disaster response at an international level. Thus we also want to create an exhibit for the UK, demonstrating our findings across Dominica, St. Vincent and Montserrat aimed at those responsible for shaping response and policy in the English-speaking SIDS in the Caribbean. To do this we are working with the Overseas Development Institute, creating new partnerships with the British Red Cross, and responding to advice from the Emergency Response Team from the Department for International Development. Collectively, we will work together to understand how to create effective engagement. Finally, we will draw both elements together using a website as a digital tool to bridge between the different communities, as a means to further enhance conversations between these groups and to document and continue the process of sharing and learning, including our own.