Alcohol is enjoyed by many and while it contributes to the economy, it is also a major cause of early death, illness, lost work days, violence, social problems, relationship difficulties and inequalities. Governments can reduce these harms by taking action to make alcohol less affordable (price policy) and less easily available (availability policy), and by reducing how much it is advertised and promoted (marketing policy). Across the four nations of the United Kingdom (UK), and in Republic of Ireland (ROI), there have been many recent changes in these alcohol policies which have been heavily debated by campaign groups and politicians. There is a need for research to understand the intended and unintended effects of policies, not just on health, but on social, economic and cultural aspects. As Scotland introduced several new policies from 2005 onwards, and put in place extensive structures to support studies to explore their effects, a broad community of alcohol policy researchers has been coming together. The Irish government has recently passed a world-leading set of policies to reduce alcohol harms, but currently there are fewer researchers studying these policies in ROI/NI, and little contact between those who are. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are also considering further policy changes. Whilst traditionally seen as a medical issue, it is clear that alcohol consumption and harms are affected by culture and politics. This network therefore proposes to bring together researchers from a wide range of social science and other backgrounds, and to draw others into the field, to deliver on the alcohol policy research needed in UK/ROI over the coming years. Our ACTIVITIES will focus on four themes: Availability, Marketing, Price & Politics and will include: 1) A website, blog and twitter feed; 2) A launch event with researchers and policy partners in Dublin; 3) Open seminars on each of the four themes, each hosted by a different university, with side meetings to build teams for future research; 4) Study visits for 4 selected early career researchers to spend time with more experienced colleagues; 5) A workshop to build capacity on alcohol policy research and give time for teams to develop funding applications; and 6) A UK/ROI open research symposium to which any researchers can submit abstracts to present their work, with invited speakers and free places for early career researchers. The network will be led by Prof. Joe Barry in ROI and Prof. Niamh Fitzgerald in the UK. NF is Professor of Alcohol Policy and specialises in studies drawing on expertise across different academic disciplines to better understand intended and unintended consequences of policy interventions. JB has worked in substance use for 30 years and chairs an expert group set up by the Minister for Health in ROI on which 3 academics from this proposal also sit. NF and JB are joined by 14 co-applicants from 13 institutions across the UK, from 10+ disciplines and with cross-cutting interests in the four themes. The bid will benefit from the active involvement of policy partners from government departments in NI, ROI and Scotland; and public health agencies across the UK. It will link into existing policy groups, including the UK/ROI British Irish Council, and the NI/ROI North South Alcohol Policy Advisory Group. The Institute of Public Health in Ireland, an all island body with a remit to inform public policy in both ROI and NI is an active partner and will provide administrative support to the network. We expect that the network will give rise to new research teams involving UK & ROI academics, and new alcohol policy studies focused within or across the four policy themes. With our partners, we will actively plan for the future of the network beyond the funded period.

Humans have massively altered flows of nitrogen on our planet, leading to both benefits for food production and multiple threats to the environment. There are few places on Earth more affected than South Asia, with levels of nitrogen pollution rapidly increasing. The result is a web of interlinked problems, as nitrogen losses from agriculture and from fossil fuel combustion cause air and water pollution. This damages human health, threatens biodiversity of forests and rivers, and leads to coastal and marine pollution that exacerbates the effects of climate change, such as by predisposing reefs to coral bleaching. Altogether, it is clear that nitrogen pollution is something we should be taking very seriously. The amazing thing is that so few people have heard of the problem. Everyone knows about climate change and carbon footprints, but how many people are aware that nitrogen pollution is just as significant? One reason for this is that scientists and policy makers have traditionally specialised. Different experts have focused on different parts of the nitrogen story, and few have the expertise to see how all the issues fit together. This challenge is taken up by a major new research hub established under the UK Global Challenge Research Fund. The "GCRF South Asian Nitrogen Hub" is a partnership that brings together 32 leading research organisations with project engagement partners from the UK and South Asia. All eight countries of the South Asia Co-operative Environment Programme (SACEP) are included. The hub includes research on how to improve nitrogen management in agriculture, saving money on fertilizers and making better use of manure, urine and natural nitrogen fixation processes. It highlights options for more profitable and cleaner farming for India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Bhutan and the Maldives. At the same time, the hub considers how nitrogen pollution could be turned back to fertilizer, for example by capturing nitrogen oxide gas from factories and converting it into nitrate. The fact that all the SACEP countries are included is really important. It means that lessons can be shared on good experiences as well as on whether there are cultural, economic and environmental differences that prevent better management practices from being adopted. It is also important from the perspective of international diplomacy, and provides an example to demonstrate how working together on a common problem is in everyone's interest. It puts the focus on future cooperation for a healthier planet, rather than on the past. The South Asian case provides for some exciting scientific, social, cultural and economic research challenges. The first is simply to get all the researchers talking together and understanding each other. There are dozens of languages in South Asia, matching the challenge met when different research disciplines come together. This is where developing a shared language around nitrogen can really help. There are lots of nitrogen forms ranging from unreactive atmospheric nitrogen (N2), to the air pollutants ammonia (NH3) and nitrogen dioxide (NO2), to nitrate (NO3-) which contaminates watercourses, and nitrous oxide (N2O) which is a greenhouse gas. The impacts of each of these are being studied to provide a better understanding of how they all fit together. The result is an approach that aims to give a much more coherent picture of the nitrogen cycle in South Asia: What is stopping us from taking action, and what can be done about it. One of the big expectations is that the economic value of nitrogen will help. India alone spends around £6 billion per year subsidising fertilizer supply. It means that South Asian governments are strongly motivated to use nitrogen better. At which point research from the South Asian hub can provide guidance on where they might start.

Data-driven innovation is transforming every sector of our digital economy (DE) into a de-centralised marketplace; accommodation (AirBnb), transportation (Uber), logistics (Deliveroo), user-generated vs. broadcast content in the creative industries (YouTube). We are witnessing an inexorable shift from classical models centred upon monolithic institutions, to a dynamic and decentralised economy in which anyone is a potential producer and consumer. A gig economy, underpinned by digital products and services co-created through shorter-lived, diverse peer-to-peer engagements. Yet, the platforms that enable this DE are increasingly built on centralised architectures. These are not controlled by society, but by large organisations making commercial decisions far from the social contexts they affect. There is an urgent need to disrupt this relationship, to deliver proper governance that empowers society to take control of the DE and enables people to assert greater agency over the vast centralised silos of data that drive these platforms. We stand on the cusp of a second wave of DE disruption, driven by bleeding edge data-driven technologies (AI) and secure, distributed data sharing infrastructures such as Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT), in which data is no longer siloed but becomes a fluid, de-centralised commodity shifting power away from tech giants to individuals and de-centralised organisations. This future Decentralised Digital Economy (DDE) enables people and organisations to work together, to trade, and ultimately to trust via frictionless digital interactions free from reliance upon centralised third parties, but often with reliance upon autonomous services. This shift in agency and power is a game changing opportunity for society to take back control over its digital economy - but we have a limited window of opportunity to get it right. We have already witnessed de-centralisation in the financial sector, where the lack of regulation and clear governance of crypto-currencies has proven a double-edged sword, allowing free exchange of value across the globe, but that is coupled with fraudulent company flotations and currency rates rigged by large mining pools. This is a consequence of technology-driven innovation unchecked by socio-economic insight; a lack of knowledge making policy makers impotent in the face of the tech giants. We are now at the tipping point of similar wide-sweeping disruption across all sectors in the DDE, a transformation that will radically redefine our models of value and how it is created, the ways in which we work, and how we use and extract value from our data. DECaDE represents a critical and timely opportunity to shape this emerging de-centralised digital economy (DDE), to develop insights that define a new 21st century model of work and value creation in the DDE, and ensure a prosperous, safe and inclusive society for all. DECaDE is a 60 month centre, comprising 21 people and building upon over 8.6 million pounds of feasibility scale UKRI/EPSRC investments in DLT and Human Data Interaction (HDI) held by the proposing team. DECaDE is a three-way partnership between the Universities of Surrey and Edinburgh, and the Digital Catapult DLT Field Labs. The latter is a full member of the consortium, through which we have co-created this research programme and with whom we will engage in further co-creation of the future DDE through diverse end-users in the public and private sector to support the competitive position of the UK

We will develop a data science of the natural environment, deploying modern machine learning and statistical techniques to enable better-informed decision-making as our climate changes. While an explosion in data science research has fuelled enormous advances in areas as diverse as eCommerce and marketing, smart cities, logistics and transport, health and wellbeing, these tools have yet to be fully deployed in one of the most pressing problems facing humanity, that of mitigating and adapting to climate change. This project brings together world-leading statisticians, computer scientists and environmental scientists alongside an extensive array of key public and private stakeholder organisations to effect a step change in data culture in the environmental sciences. The project will develop a new approach to data science of the natural environment driven by three representative grand challenges of environmental science: predicting ice sheet melt, modelling and mitigating poor air quality, and managing land use for maximal societal benefit. In each motivational challenge, there is already an extensive scientific expertise, with intricate models of processes at multiple scales. However this sophisticated modelling of system components is usually let down by naive integration of these components together, and inadequate calibration to observed data. The consequence is poor predictions with a high level of uncertainty and hence poorly-informed policy making. As new forms of environmental data become available, and the pressures on our natural environment from climate change increase, this gap is becoming a pressing concern, and we bring an impressive team to bear on the problem. A key theme of the project is integration, developing a suite of novel data science tools which work together in a modular fashion, and with existing scientifically-informed process models. By building a team that spans the inter-disciplinary divisions between data and environmental scientists we can ensure the necessary interoperability of methods that is currently lacking. Working with the full range of stakeholder environmental organisations will enable continual co-design of the programme and training of end-user scientists to ensure a reduction of the skills gap in this area. The resultant culture shift in the data literacy of the environmental sciences will enable better decision-making as climate change places ever greater strains on our society.

The Gaelic language has acquired growing prominence in Scotland in recent decades, but there is very little evidence on public attitudes to the language, especially those of the anglophone majority. The purpose of the funding sought is to fill this gap in evidence with an academically rigorous survey source: the proposed research would insert a module of questions on attitudes to Gaelic in the annual Scottish Social Attitudes Survey of 2012, measuring views about such topics as the use of Gaelic in public areas, the place of Gaelic in education, the use of Gaelic in broadcasting, the place of Gaelic in regional, Scottish and British identities, and the future of Gaelic. The policy importance of this evidence is signalled by the financial contribution which the Scottish Government and Bord na Gaidhlig (the statutory body responsible for promoting the use of Gaelic) are making to the costs of the survey.The applicants would then use the data generated to analyse the issues and report on them. Most of the funding for the analysis and dissemination phases is not being sought here, and will be carried out as part of the inter-university Gaelic research network Soillse (in the form of 25% of the time for one year of a Research Fellow who will work under the supervision of the Principal Applicant; for further details, see 'Academic Beneficiaries'.)The topics to be addressed in that analysis are explained in full in the Case for Support, and are in summary: Like all minority languages dependent on sources of public funding, Gaelic relies on the support - or at least the acquiescence - of the non-Gaelic-speaking majority. Its position is paradoxical in several respects. On the one hand, there seems to be a great deal of goodwill towards Gaelic; on the other, particular proposals to spend public money on Gaelic (eg in broadcasting or on bilingual signage) can generate intense controversy. Gaelic is often seen as an essential part of Scottish identity, and yet is spoken by only a small minority. It has received recent encouragement through legislation and funding from the Scottish Parliament, and yet was supported also by the Conservative government in the 1980s that was firmly opposed to devolution. Thus the purpose of the analysis is to develop a better understanding of where support lies, how deep it is, what aspects of Gaelic language policy lead to controversy, and how people view its place in Scottish culture. Debates about Gaelic are one instance of a world-wide growth of interest in minority languages, some of which have achieved state encouragement in recent decades. Academic views about the future of minority languages range from support for language rights to scepticism, the latter often based on the view that being able to speak a majority language is necessary for social opportunity. The further purpose of the analysis is thus to understand attitudes to Gaelic in this wider context. The most relevant research from other countries is on attitudes to Welsh and to Irish in both parts of Ireland, and this research will pay close attention to the methods and results of these studies, advised by an expert advisory group which will be set up under the auspices of Soillse.