The role of media is key to shape public understanding of humans' impact on the planet, raising awareness of environmental issues and motivating social and policy actions to tackle them. Within the field of environmental communication, and more specifically climate change communication, news media coverage has received an increasing amount of scholarly attention. However, most of the studies that delve into the practices, effects, impediments, and successful strategies to frame content about the environment are centered on the Global North. In contrast, this research (acronym ECOLA) is focused on Latin America, home to one of the most diverse ecosystems on the planet and a region particularly susceptible to the impact of climate change. Amid the widespread threat of misinformation in countries such as Brazil, this study moves beyond traditional news media enquiries to investigate how a broader range of communicators across different media and national contexts, such as reporters, photojournalists, documentary filmmakers and community leaders, are disseminating mediated discourses about the environment that can push for solutions. Understanding the debates raised by a diverse group o regional media actors is essential to build connections between global researchers, media producers and other stakeholders interested in strategic communication to facilitate society's engagement with ecological problems. Environmental communication is a growing field of research that bridges natural sciences and the humanities, crossing different disciplines such as media, journalism, cultural, social movements and urban studies. ECOLA aims to expand the interdisciplinary knowledge of the field by critically analysing the landscape and the dynamics of environmental communication in an underrepresented region and beyond large media corporations. The main research questions address the type of news stories that Latin American producers are disseminating online to inform society about ecological crises beyond "breaking news"; the extent to which they include the voices of those who are among the most affected and the main challenges of environmental coverage in a regional context of economic and political instability. The project will use semi-structured interviews with journalists and other environmental communicators across Latin America, to establish their views on their innovative practices, their perceived role, the responses from the audiences and the challenges to inform society about climate change. Their accounts will help to identify unifying aspects of their practices and to shed light on transnation obstacles such as anti-enviromental discourses driven by misinformation, political polarisation and/or economic pressure. Interviews will be combined with participant observation in Brazil and analysis of the coverage of climate change, using seminal case studies.

Modern slavery and human trafficking is estimated to affect more than 40 million people worldwide, yet despite widespread adoption of anti-trafficking legislation, sub-national policy responses are frequently fragmented and poorly implemented. 'Place-based' approaches to coordinating anti-slavery action, which focus on distinct geographical communities, towns and cities, offer the possibility of connecting law enforcement, governance, voluntary and faith responses to modern slavery in a more effective and coherent way. Although examples of this type of initiative have started to emerge, models of place-based anti-slavery action have generally been developing organically and in isolation without the benefit of wider knowledge-exchange. This proposal addresses this challenge by establishing the first global 'slavery-free cities' network. Starting with a core group of four cities spanning four different continents, we aim to establish network infrastructure by building collaboration agreements and knowledge sharing platforms, designing tools and indices for comparison, and collating thematic reports on core aspects of the local anti-slavery response, including prevention, discovery, recovery and the maintenance of sustainable freedom. The academics we are working with in Brazil, Nottingham, Bangkok and Maputo have expertise in labour exploitation and supply chains, child labour and forced marriage and sexual exploitation, amongst other topics, and this project will enable us to examine the value of a place-based approach to addressing these diverse and challenging manifestations of exploitation. This will also be the first attempt to explore in a systemic way how the concept of a slavery-free community could be developed and implemented across diverse social and economic contexts. The network will be open to further self-funding members, and outputs and virtual participation will be made widely available, through the internet without charge. We will use powerful connections with UNU-CPR and Delta 8.7 to connect our core network to anti-slavery practitioners and virtual communities worldwide. We anticipate that the network will benefit policy and practice in participating cities and states through strengthening in-country inter-agency work to address slavery. We also see huge potential for stimulating learning across different international contexts, whilst also developing knowledge and networks to inspire future research and collaboration opportunities.

Lax governance policies allow poor business practices which can lead to dramatic disasters and shocking fatalities. In reaction to the consequent public outcry, legislation tightens governance policies. There have been countless examples of this cycle, including laws resulting from boiler explosions, drug scams, and events such as the Johnstown flood. We must short-circuit this upward spiral so it does not require the fatalities to drive it forward. Scientifically grounded multistakeholder governance has been proposed as a scheme to accomplish this, but little empirical evidence shows it is useful, especially in the context of countervailing economic forces and entrenched interests. Despite the enhanced awareness with several recent high-profile mine tailings dam disasters, mine operators and site workers do not practice good risk management. Several factors have been proposed including a lack of trust and fear of reprisal. This is exacerbated by failed efforts to reduce the vulnerability of communities through relocation of settlements, which are usually met with suspicious protests. A general climate of fear is precipitated by the misconception that risk management is counterproductive to economic competitiveness. The project explores the beliefs of stakeholders constructed because of dominating actors, cultural factors, and the local context. Interviews will explore individual perceptions of risk and their implications for the co-development of mitigation strategies. The results will inform the multistakeholder workshops, each convened to address specific challenges relating to participatory management. Participant experience will be evaluated, as will approaches for communication and the role of science in this interaction. Sociocultural metrics for (i) risk neglect, (ii) low propensity to trust, (iii) distance to power (empowerment and social responsibility), and (iv) short-termism/commodity mentality will also be evaluated in the initial interviews and throughout the project. This creates an evidence base for the efficacy of multistakeholder governance models for mine tailings storage. Applying this across two case studies at different sites will evidence the adaptive capacity of the approach, and justification for its adoption across Brazil. A problem in participatory management is information asymmetry. Science can assuage this problem and provide a context for discussion and common decision making. The project will evaluate the effect of risk awareness on motivating near-term engineering interventions (e.g., decanting, pipe draining, etc.) and directing long-term construction and business practices of the industry that will reduce deaths and other risks suffered by economically disadvantaged vulnerable downstream populations, and preventing destruction of agricultural lands and the environment generally. The work will seek to demonstrate risk awareness does not threaten but can enhance economic competitiveness, addressing disaster management and sustainable development, even for mining operations, by sustaining mine operations, improving health of workers, reducing adverse impacts on workforce, reducing legal liabilities from dam failures and leachate releases, and forestalling legislative and regulatory strictures. The interests of mine owners and at-risk communities are not commonly seen as aligned. However, using science as the medium for identifying common interests, the project will create an evidence base addressing the efficacy of different schemes in efforts to reduce information asymmetry and, particularly, the use of scientific analysis to enhance risk awareness and communication which are fundamental to participatory management. The project's empirical results will be broadly relevant to other implementations of multistakeholder governance schemes, and its specific software developments are directly applicable to stability of water dams and landslides which are among the deadliest hazards.

Communication networks of interconnected devices lie at the core of many key future technologies such as distributed control systems for autonomous vehicles, sensor networks for structural health monitoring and for smart cities. In addition to reliability, all these applications come with strict requirements in terms of: energy efficiency, security, latency and self-optimization capabilities, and demand for innovative enabling technologies. The emerging Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm, projected to connect billions of wireless "things" (wireless sensors, wearables, biochip transponders, etc.) in a vast network with drastically different characteristics among its components, has moved from being a futuristic vision to an increasing reality over the recent years. The ELIOT project is perfectly timed to address the main challenges above. Specifically, we will focus on the following key objectives to IoT applications: 1) Energy efficient transceiver design and allocation policies: development of advanced low-energy transmit and receive techniques, including channel estimation for transceivers with coarse quantization (1-3 bits), and to exploit energy harvesting capabilities to mitigate interference and increase the device's lifespan; 2) Long-term security solutions: design of novel cross-layer security protocols based on software defined networking and physical layer security, avoiding the incremental application of existing security technologies; 3) Distributed learning, detection and resource allocation/management: development of new distributed and efficient algorithms tailored to the IoT environment and underlying network infrastructure that take into account the device mobility, their limited energy and computational power; 4) Improving the energy efficiency vs. latency tradeoff by channel coding: short-length error-correction coding schemes together with their derivatives and decoding algorithms will be designed for low-energy and low-latency IoT applications. Tackling these objectives will require a wide interdisciplinary palette of expertise ranging from signal processing, wireless communications, information theory and coding, security and cryptography, distributed and online optimization, game theory and learning. The diverse and complementary expertise of the project's team places ELIOT in an ideal position to decisively contribute to the expansion of future generations of IoT ecosystems.

The activities primarily aim at reducing problems of poverty by improving the health of Brazilian communities. The development of an advanced and dependable data analytics infrastructure will enable the effective and efficient monitoring of Dengue fever outbreaks in Brazil. Dengue is an endemic problem in many Brazilian areas where public health assistance is inefficient. The Brazilian public health system cannot meet the demands of these areas due to the resources scarcity, which calls for developing trustworthy mechanisms to support efficiently decisions about the areas that have priority on resource allocation. This software infrastructure can be reused in the future in other developing countries suffering from Dengue outbreaks. The monitoring infrastructure will provide its data analytics capabilities through a unique software architecture that can be used through several mobile platforms and social networks. This infrastructure can only be developed through collaborative research with the leading UK researchers.