East Africa (EA) has one of the world's fastest growing populations, with maxima around water-bodies and rapid urbanisation. Climate change is adding to existing problems increasing vulnerability of the poorest. HyCRISTAL is driven by EA priorities. EA communities rely on rainfall for food via agriculture. EA's inland lakes are rain-fed and provide water, power and fisheries. For EA's growing cities, climate impacts on water resources will affect water supply & treatment. HyCRISTAL will therefore operate in both urban & rural contexts. Change in water availability will be critical for climate-change impacts in EA, but projections are highly uncertain for rain, lakes, rivers and groundwater, and for extremes. EA "Long-Rains" are observed to be decreasing; while models tend to predict an increase (the "EA Climate paradox") although predictions are not consistent. This uncertainty provides a fundamental limit on the utility of climate information to inform policy. HyCRISTAL will therefore make best use of current projections to quantify uncertainty in user-relevant quantities and provide ground-breaking research to understand and reduce the uncertainty that currently limits decision making. HyCRISTAL will work with users to deliver world-leading climate research quantifying uncertainty from natural variability, uncertainty from climate forcings including those previously unassessed, and uncertainty in response to these forcings; including uncertainties from key processes such as convection and land-atmopshere coupling that are misrepresented in global models. Research will deliver new understanding of the mechanisms that drive the uncertainty in projections. HyCRISTAL will use this information to understand trends, when climate-change signals will emerge and provide a process-based expert judgement on projections. Working with policy makers, inter-disciplinary research (hydrology, economics, engineering, social science, ecology and decision-making) will quantify risks for rural & urban livelihoods, quantify climate impacts and provide the necessary tools to use climate information for decision making. HyCRISTAL will work with partners to co-produce research for decision-making on a 5-40 year timescale, demonstrated in 2 main pilots for urban water and policies to enable adaptive climate-smart rural livelihoods. These cover two of three "areas of need" from the African Ministerial Council on Environment's Comprehensive Framework of African Climate Change Programmes. HyCRISTAL has already engaged 12 partners from across EA. HyCRISTAL's Advisory Board will provide a mechanism for further growing stakeholder engagement. HyCRISTAL will work with the FCFA global & regional projects and CCKE, sharing methods, tools, user needs, expertise & communication. Uniquely, HyCRISTAL will capitalise on the new LVB-HyNEWS, an African-led consortium, governed by the East African Community, the Lake Victoria Basin Commission and National Meteorological and Hydrological agencies, with the African Ministerial Conference on Meteorology as an observer. HyCRISTAL will build EA capacity directly via collaboration (11 of 25 HyCRISTAL Co-Is are African, with 9 full-time in Africa), including data collection and via targeted workshops and teaching. HyCRISTAL will deliver evidence of impact, with new and deep climate science insights that will far outlast its duration. It will support decisions for climate-resilient infrastructure and livelihoods through application of new understanding in its pilots, with common methodological and infrastructure lessons to promote policy and enable transformational change for impact-at-scale. Using a combination of user-led and science-based management tools, HyCRISTAL will ensure the latest physical science, engineering and social-science yield maximum impacts. HyCRISTAL will deliver outstanding outputs across FCFA's aims; synergies with LVB-HyNEWS will add to these and ensure longevity beyond HyCRISTAL.

The Palestinian liberation struggle has long been a standard-bearer for anti-colonial movements around the world. Rarely, however, have scholars investigated the historical process by which Palestinians embedded their cause within other struggles in the global south. The Palestinian Americas is the first project to document in detail how Palestinians forged such ties in a specific geographical context: that of Latin America in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Rather than assume Third World solidarities to have been produced across discrete national or regional blocs operating under Cold War logics, the project focuses on the revolutionary activism of diasporic Palestinians, emphasising forms of south-south migration and connectivity that bypassed European and North American channels. Since the early 20th century, Latin America has been home to the largest number of Palestinians in the world outside the Middle East (around 1 million), with particularly high concentrations in Central America and Chile. While these communities have long been known for their success as business entrepreneurs, significant numbers joined Latin American revolutionary movements from the 1950s onwards. Against a backdrop of rising Third World solidarity, this new generation of activists came into increasing contact with the nascent Palestinian liberation struggle as they sought to link their local activism to a global picture of anti-imperial resistance. Yet they also had to contend with hostility among fellow Palestinians in Latin America who often viewed involvement in left-wing activism as a threat to their economic interests. The project explores the complexity and specificity of these diasporic spaces, providing new insight on the struggles involved in forming south-south solidarities in the mid-20th century. From indigenous demands for land reform in El Salvador, to student movements in Chile, to the Sandinista uprising in Nicaragua, Palestinian revolutionaries in Latin America were embedded within distinctly local socio-political contexts. At the same time, their activism frequently forced them into clandestine lifestyles as they escaped persecution and sought to build new ties of solidarity. Using carefully chosen case studies, the research probes this interplay between movement, localised space and revolutionary activism through a combination of ethnographic and documentary sources, reconstructing the networks of kin and ideology that sustained diasporic Palestinians in their precarious journeys across disparate locations. The research is geared towards 3 main outputs. Firstly, an article in a leading journal of global history will look at Santiago de Chile as a hub for Palestinian revolutionary activists from across Latin America and the Middle East in order to make a broader intervention in how global historians can explore south-south solidarities in the era of Third World revolution. Secondly, an international conference and resulting special issue will establish a new, collective research agenda looking at the Arab diaspora's historic engagement with the Palestinian struggle. Thirdly, the project will digitise materials held in Chile, El Salvador and France to produce 3 new collections and 2 digital stories in the Planet Bethlehem Archive, an online resource that documents the diasporic heritage of Bethlehem - the town that produced the majority of Palestinian migration to the Americas. The project will make these outputs useful to key stakeholders beyond the academic sector through a consultative engagement programme that sees the PI partnering with archives and cultural organisations in Latin America, as well as a group of diasporic Palestinian writers and artists, to shape collectively a series of public events, educational materials and media publications. The PI will also draft a book aimed at a general readership which tells the story of Latin America's entanglement with the Palestinian struggle in the 20th century.

The Arctic is a considerable organic carbon store (~1672 Pg) and the terrestrial and aquatic processing of this C pool is essentially mediated by microorganisms. Understanding the mechanisms regulating the diversity and structure of functionally-important microbial communities is urgently required for predicting the ecological impacts of rapidly changing environments, such as a warming Arctic. All aquatic ecosystems (lakes, rivers, the oceans) contain very substantial amounts of dissolved organic matter (DOM). The amount of DOM can exceed the amount of carbon contained in living organisms (plants, animals, microbes, etc.). This accumulated organic matter is the product of photosynthesis, consumption and degradation pathways, and can contain a range of material, from compounds that are 100's of years old, and are difficult for bacteria to break down, to recently produced organic matter that may have leaked from living algal cells as they photosynthesise, which can quickly be used by bacteria and other microorganisms. This microbial action generates food for other organisms, and promotes nutrient regeneration, and recycles the organic matter back into food chains. Other DOM can stick together and become buried in sediments and locked away for geological periods of time. The huge quantities of DOM present in aquatic systems mean that understanding its characteristics and dynamics (biogeochemical cycling) is necessary to understand individual systems and to generate accurate regional carbon budgets. There is an ongoing debate in ecology as to how DOM interacts with the microbial communities that play such an important part in DOM biogeochemistry, and what aspects of DOM help shape the microbial community (e.g. is it species rich, or species poor, mainly active or mainly inactive). Understanding the relationship between species diversity and biogeochemical cycling in different ecosystems is a priority topic for NERC. New experimental approaches and methods mean these questions can now be addressed. This project is investigating these concepts in a system of lakes in West Greenland. These lakes have a range of DOM concentrations, and are being influenced by global change processes such as increased atmospheric nutrient loading and annual warming. Arctic lakes are extremely important in their regional ecology; they occupy significant land area and can act as annual carbon sinks or carbon sources, depending on their characteristics. We will characterise the different DOM components of the water columns of a set of lakes selected to provide a controlled gradient of conditions, and determine the seasonal cycles of accumulation and loss of DOM. In parallel, we will use new molecular biology tools to identify and quantify the diverse microbial communities involved in these processes. We will be able to determine the relationship between microbial community diversity and activity, and how this is influenced by the types of DOM present. We will also conduct experiments to establish which DOM are the most difficult and most easy for particular microbes to breakdown, and whether such processes are influenced by nutrients such as nitrogen. These results will help to assess how the ecology lakes in arctic regions will change over the next few decades, as well as providing important information on the relationships between DOM biogeochemistry and microbial diversity and activity that will be applicable to other aquatic systems. These new data will also contribute to the development of theories of how microbial community are structured, and whether they follow rules determined for larger organisms, or have unique characteristics.

Aerosols and clouds are important components of the Earth's atmosphere, influencing the radiation budget and chemical composition, and affecting human health. The impact of aerosols and clouds on global climate remains one of the largest single uncertainties in understanding previous climate observations and in predicting future climate change. Aerosols and clouds can scatter and absorb sunlight and terrestrial radiation, having a direct effect on climate by altering the balance of incoming solar radiation and outgoing infrared light. Aerosols also have an indirect effect on climate by influencing the albedo and lifetime of clouds, because cloud droplets form from the much smaller aerosol particle seeds on which water can condense. Changes in the number of aerosol particles in the Earth's atmosphere and their size distribution can lead to changes in the number of cloud droplets that form. This indirect effect is poorly constrained and generally counteracts the warming induced by increased levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, exerting a cooling effect on the Earth's climate. The project "Reducing the Uncertainties in Aerosol Hygroscopic Growth", to which this project is linked, seeks to quantify the microphysical properties and processes that control the formation of cloud droplets from aerosol particles in a series of laboratory measurements on single, suspended, aerosol particles using state of the art techniques. These properties can then be used, in a much simplified form, in the computer models used to simulate atmospheric air quality and climate. One of these simplified methods is the "kappa-Köhler theory" created by our international partner (in the USA) on this project. Together, we will do the following: First, we will exchange staff between the Bristol Aerosol Research Centre and the laboratory of our international partner at North Carolina State University for a short period (one focus area will be the viscosity of aerosol components). This will enable an exchange of skills: our work is mostly fundamental, and laboratory-based, whereas our international partner participates extensively in field campaigns of atmospheric measurements. These areas of interest, and associated science, are complementary. Second we will work together to provide a database of values of the aerosol parameter kappa, and web-based tools to carry out calculations that are related to the uptake of water by atmospheric aerosols and their role in the formation of clouds. These tools will be publicly accessible on the Extended Aerosol Inorganics Model website. They should provide a focus for international efforts in this area, and help to spread best practice. Third, will hold a Workshop, hosted with our international partner and with invited experts in the measurement and use of kappa and kappa-Köhler theory, to discuss current problems in the field and to recommend where future effort should be directed. One problem area is the kappa values of the organic components of atmospheric aerosols, whose behaviour and composition are both very complex, making it difficult to relate parameter kappa to composition in a direct or reliable way. The participants will also review the website tools and database, and make recommendations for future development. In addition to the scientific benefits, UK participation and leadership in international atmospheric aerosol research will be advanced by the partnership and links created in this project.

Organic semiconductors are an exciting new class of material that combine the electronic properties traditionally only associated with inorganic materials, with the mechanical properties and processibility of polymers (plastics) and small organic molecules. In particular, the ability to process active semiconductor layers through solution processing has led to the commercialisation of organic light-emitting diode-based displays. Commercial potential has also been demonstrated by organic transistors and organic solar cells, where both technologies have the advantage of low-cost processing and the ability to be incorporated into flexible architectures.However, as organic semiconductors are a relatively new class of material, there are still many fundamental questions governing key processes that affect device performance. For example, organic semiconductor films are typically less ordered than their inorganic counterparts and the influence of domain structure, molecular orientation and molecular alignment on charge transport is not fully understood. Additionally, for organic solar cells, where typically two different materials are blended together to form efficient networks for charge separation and transport, the influence of material mixing on charge separation and transport are still being discovered.Since organic semiconductors have vastly different properties compared to inorganic semiconductors, the development and application of new techniques to probe the properties of this new class of material is required. This research programme will adapt state-of-the-art microscopes and utilize advanced X-ray analytical techniques to probe structure and device action in organic devices with unprecedented precision and clarity. This further understanding of device operation will allow for the identification of physical processes that limit device performance and hence promote future device optimisation.