The problem: Building climate change resilience necessarily means building urban resilience. Africa's future is dominated by a rapidly increasing urban population with complicated demographic, economic, political, spatial and infrastructural transitions. This creates complex climate vulnerabilities of critical consequence in the co-dependent city-regions. Climate change substantially complicates the trajectories of African development, exacerbated by climate information that is poorly attuned to the needs of African decision makers. Critical gaps are how climate processes interact at the temporal and spatial scales that matter for decision making, limited institutional capacity to develop and then act on climate information, and inadequate means, methods, and structures to bridge the divides. Current modalities in climate services are largely supply driven and rarely begin with the multiplicity of climate sensitive development challenges. There is a dominant need to address this disconnect at the urban scale, yet climate research in Africa is poorly configured to respond, and the spatial scale and thematic foci are not well attuned to urban problems. Most climate-related policies and development strategies focus at the national scale and are sectorally based, resulting in a poor fit to the vital urban environments with their tightly interlocking place-based systems. Response: FRACTAL's aim is to advance scientific knowledge about regional climate responses to anthropogenic forcings, enhance the integration of this knowledge into decision making at the co-dependent city-region scale, and thus enable responsible development pathways. We focus on city-region scales of climate information and decision making. Informed by the literature, guided by co-exploration with decision makers, we concentrate on two key cross-cutting issues: Water and Energy, and secondarily their influence on food security. We work within and across disciplinary boundaries (transdisciplinarity) and develop all aspects of the research process in collaboration with user groups (co-exploration).The project functions through three interconnected work packages focused on three Tier 1 cities (Windhoek, Maputo and Lusaka), a secondary focus on three Tier 2 cities (Blantyre, Gaborone and Harare), and two self-funded partner cities (Cape Town and eThekwini). Work Package 1 (WP1) is an ongoing and sustained activity operating as a learning laboratory for pilot studies to link research from WP2 and 3 to a real world iterative dialogue and decision process. WP1 frames, informs, and steers the research questions of WP2 and 3, and so centres all research on needs for responsible development pathways of city-region systems. WP2 addresses the decision making space in cities; the political, economic, technical and social determinants of decision making, and seeks to understand the opportunities for better incorporation of climate information into local decision making contexts. WP3, the majority effort, focuses on advancing understanding of the physical climate processes that govern the regional system, both as observed and simulated. This knowledge grounds the development of robust and scale relevant climate information, and the related analysis and communication. This is steered explicitly by WP1's perspective of urban climate change risk, resilience, impacts, and decisions for adaptation and development. The project will frame a new paradigm for user-informed, knowledge-based decisions to develop pathways to resilience for the majority population. It will provide a step change in understanding the cross-scale climate processes that drive change and so enable enhanced uptake of climate information in near to medium-term decision making. The project legacy will include improved scientific capacity and collaboration, provide transferable knowledge to enhance decision making on the African continent, and in this make significant contribution to academic disciplines.

This project will look at the relationship between governance, power and knowledge structures and how these influence behaviour, actions and decision taking for sustainable ecosystems. It will link several social science techniques (e.g. social network analysis and agent-based modelling) to comprehensively map all relevant social and ecological knowledge flows regarding ecosystems in two substantive areas where there is pressure on ecosystem services. With our local partners, we will look at two cases in the western Indian Ocean (Kenya) and the Bay of Bengal (Bangladesh) regarding coastal zone resource uses and management. The purpose is to generate more generic data across comparative studies about how decisions for policy and for action are taken at local levels. We will look at the networks that individuals use to help them make decisions regarding their livelihoods. These will be understood within the context of the global economy and other decision networks impacting upon the social-ecological interrelationships at the local level. Our own understanding will be framed within the literature around social-ecological complexity and complex adaptive management. The project will substantively focus on strengthening the sustainable management of coastal ecosystems with a process focus on the political economy for poverty reduction and to understand better how livelihoods can be maintained and ecosystem services valued and preserved. The project is asking for funds for two UK partners (The University of York and the Stockholm Environment Institute, Oxford) to work with six partners in Bangladesh and in Kenya in close collaboration with policy makers and practitioners there in order to develop an understanding of sustainable norms for decision making in the use of coastal ecosystem services for poverty reduction. Put most simply, we are going to talk to relevant people in Kenya and Bangladesh to see where and from whom they get information, about what, and present this as a knowledge network map. We will then work with those stakeholders to see if it is the right information for their needs (i.e. to make the decisions that they need to make). We will deepen our and their understanding of what needs to happen by the use of agent based models of the systems. This will also bring together the social understanding of the milieu within which information is passed around and used with a more technical analysis of that information itself and its utility. Our work tasks are mapped to the knowledge gaps identified in the ESPA call (page 7). However, we propose that degradation and sustainability drivers should be considered as a part of the same complex system. Little is known about the way in which multiple drivers interact, feedback upon, or balance each other so it is currently very difficult to attribute individual drivers to patterns of degradation or sustainability. To capture this complexity we propose 4 tasks: A) Investigate multiple drivers across a range of disciplines (biophysical, social, political and economic). B) Map the horizontal and vertical networks and knowledge diffusion patterns. C) Use socio-ecological models to analyse and model interactions among drivers. D) Reflectively link the impact of the WD-NACE project (see also Impact Plan). Our chosen criteria of success will be by means of an assessment of post-workshop feedback, but we shall also agree a criterion of success with each research collaborator and with our partner organisation. These criteria can then be used as the touchstone of impact. It is an expected outcome of WD-NACE that the conceptual framework linking ecosystem and livelihoods domains, knowledge networks and decision-making structures will be developed and improved. In developing such a model, we would expect that it could be applied to a range of settings such as by policy-making institutions and international development organizations as well as by more local users.