Where: SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals), U (university), CoE (Centre of Excellence), CSES(Complex Social-Ecological System) & landscape/catchment/watershed: synonymous. The "Water for African SDGs" project will establish & develop the ARUA Water CoE as an effective, high-performance, hub & network of 8 African Universities' researchers & post graduate students. CoE research development will be based on understanding humans living on earth as the intricate coupling of society with the natural world - CSESs. We will forefront community engagement & knowledge sharing for sustainability. We will use research to catalyse change towards social and ecological justice and sustainability, paying attention to African community water and sanitation needs. The Water CoE has developed a systemic image of the SDGs as a planning, practice & evaluation tool. The image has SDG 6, Clean water & sanitation, at the centre, linking two primary water cycles: i) Water in a Catchment (rainfall, run-off, ground water recharge, evapo-transpiration, evaporation); & ii) Water Services - supply & sanitation (raw water from the natural resource, often in dams, pipes & pumps to water treatment works, treated potable water to households, waste water to treatment works & discharge into the natural resource). Several nodes place their water research in a climate change context (SDG 13), and acknowledge that water is integral to SDG 15 (life on land), 11 (sustainable cities & communities), & 12 (responsible consumption & production), Effective water resource management, supply and sanitation requires good water governance by strong institutions (SDG 16). The Water CoE itself embodies SDGs 17 (partnerships to reach goals), 4 (quality education) & 5 (gender equality). Each CoE node has strengths in different parts of these cycles. This project brings together strengths, so nodes can flexibly link & respond innovatively to research funding calls, & effectively apply research. Capacity-building, exchanges and mentorship will mainly be addressed through the development & delivery of a 3-day course by each node, to 14 participants from 3-5 other nodes. Participants will be doctoral students, early-, mid-career & established researchers. Nodes will host a course on their primary strength, nodes will co-develop courses out of secondary strengths. In Year 1, the hub (Rhodes U), will deliver a core foundation course to 3 delegates from each node (total 21), on Adaptive Integrated Water Resources Management (A-IWRM), including the CSES concept, transdisciplinarity and water governance. Node courses will run over Years 1 & 2, and an early identification of course areas is: Landscape restoration & catchment water use (Addis Ababa U, Ethiopia), hydrology, geohydrology & hydraulic regimes for IWRM (U Dar es Salaam, Tanzania), optimising benefit from dams (Cheikh Anta Dio U, Senegal), biodiversity, natural resource management, water-energy-food nexus (U Rwanda), urban water pollution (U Lagos, Nigeria), urban water quality design (U Cape Town, South Africa), & water in future cities (Makarere U, Uganda). Course days will include time to work on research proposals. In Year 3, activities will focus on grant applications and a Water CoE delegation attending a relevant international conference to present the outcomes of the whole project. Over the 3-year period, each node will have one opportunity to invite/visit an international specialist, & by the end of year 3 at least 3 collaborative research projects will be running, each progressing an SDG challenge-area. Spin-off companies in water & sanitation could be emerging, and each node will have community-based water and/or sanitation impact successes. At least 24 early career researchers and 24 doctoral students will be mentored through the CoE. We will demonstrate the clear emergence of an African water research cohort, addressing water-related SDGs, with positive outcomes and impact.

This application seeks support for two expert meetings and other participatory events for MoHoA partners and affiliates from the Global South to coincide with and enable their attendance at the MoHoA conference titled 'Modern Heritage and the Anthropocene', organised by The Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL), The School of Architecture at Liverpool University, and the University of Cape Town. The two expert meetings will be held immediately before and after the conference to capitalise on and maximise the opportunities afforded by such an ambitious one-off event. Combined with associated UK site visits and meetings, the expert meetings will provide a unique and timely opportunity to bring together academics, practitioners, and other related professionals and stakeholders from different disciplines to strengthen global research networks engaged with decolonising, decentring, and reframing modern heritage and contribute to the completion of the Cape Town Document on Modern Heritage. This seminal document will be formally presentation to UNESCO after the conference at the second expert meeting on 29 October 2022. Research networking activities will take place during two one-day expert meetings addressing specific topics related to MoHoA's agenda including the finalisation of the Cape Town Document on Modern Heritage, as well as specific site visits / tours of partner institutions in the UK. This application will allow up to 12 international partners from the Global South to engage meaningfully with a wide range of UK participants, professionals, and organisations, including universities, museums, galleries, National Trust, and Historic England, Scotland and Wales. This process will be documented in an edited open-access book and, together with MoHoA's wider activities, compiled into a series of freely available teaching materials on MoHoA's website. MoHoA's conception coincided with the 20th anniversary of the Modern Heritage Programme, jointly initiated by UNESCO, ICOMOS, and DOCOMOMO in 2001, presenting a timely and important opportunity to reflect on the transformative cultural experiences and global consequences of the recent past that heralded the dawn of the Anthropocene and its impacts on society, culture, climate, and the planet. Since its inception, MoHoA has successfully attracted funding for discrete activities and developed a strong research network that engaged hundreds of participants across four thematic workshops with key partners including the Africa World Heritage Fund (AWHF), UNESCO, ICOMOS, ICCROM, IUCN, the Swahilipot East Africa Heritage Hub and the Getty Conservation Institute. It also hosted an international (online) conference at the University of Cape Town in Sept 2021 with over 50 papers presented. The initial phase of MoHoA was conceived within an African frame for two reasons. Firstly, the continent has been uniquely marginalised by current conceptualisations of 'modern' within heritage discourses. (Africa has just 89 cultural UNESCO World Heritage sites (less than Italy and Spain combined), compared with Europe's 439, and only one of these is exclusively categorised as 'modern heritage' - Asmara: A Modernist African City, the former Italian colonial city and capital of Eritrea). Secondly, Africa will experience the highest rates of urbanisation over the next 30 years. The heritage of our recent past therefore possesses the paradox of being of modernity and yet existentially threatened by its consequences. The diverse issues associated with this paradox, from ecological crisis to structural racism, and their lessons for researching, defining, protecting, and ascribing value to 'the modern', will be the focus of the MoHoA conference at UCL in Oct 2022 and the activities outlined in this application. If successful, this collaboration will make one of the most significant contributions to decentring heritage theory and practice in more than a generation.

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.

Tropical forests are biodiversity hotspots and important biological conservation regions. They deliver key ecosystem services such as carbon sequestration and storage, and water for electricity generation via hydropower (a large source of electricity in many tropical countries) and freshwater provision, serving the needs of millions of people and fast-growing populations in these regions. However, tropical regions have experienced the largest recent increases in heat extremes over the globe, with ongoing warming predicted to exceed the bounds of historic climate variability in the next two decades. This climate change has potentially large but poorly understood consequences for tropical forests. Recent findings suggest that these critical forests appear at substantial risk, in terms of their vulnerability and exposure to warming and its extremes. For example, extreme temperatures in lowland forest reduces tree growth and carbon storage. Furthermore, in the tropical Andes, recent warming has been associated with increased mortality of species in the warm extreme of their thermal ranges, triggering a compositional change towards warm-adapted species across all elevations. The mechanisms underpinning reduced tree growth and species compositional changes remain largely unknown. To predict species composition changes and their implications for forest function and ecosystem services, a mechanistically-informed understanding of the physiological strategies employed by thermally resilient and susceptible species is needed. At our unique warming experiments along elevation gradients in the tropics in the Colombian Andes and in Rwanda in the Albertine Ridge we obtain a range of responses to the warming treatment: some species have died, some have shown reduced growth, while others have increased their growth. Importantly, and contrary to some expectations, plant physiological responses to average site temperatures cannot predict growth patterns. Rather, preliminary evidence suggests that tree growth and survival in the North Andean region and in our experiments in Colombia and Rwanda, is related to species abilities to deal with heat stress. Multiple mechanisms may be involved in determining the ability of species to cope with heat stress, but their relative roles in different settings is unknown. In Rwanda, preliminary data suggest that the most successful species thermoregulate, cooling their leaves via high rates of evapotranspiration to cope with extreme temperature, while species that have shown reduced growth with warming reach very high leaf temperatures (ie they cannot thermoregulate). In contrast, in Colombia, the most successful species are those that emit isoprene to ameliorate heat stress suggesting enhanced thermotolerance may be a key mechanism. Overall, our results demonstrate an urgent need to understand how different tropical tree species cope with extreme rather than average temperatures. Using our experiments in Colombia and Rwanda, this project will deliver new mechanistic understanding of heat stress physiology for tropical forests and possible links to plant growth responses to warming which will inform how we understand and predict composition changes along elevation and climate gradients. We will use a holistic combination of measurements not done before in any ecosystem- thermoregulation, thermal tolerance thresholds, in situ isoprene emissions, and their thermal plasticity- to evaluate tree heat stress strategies. We will combine our experimental data with mechanistic modelling to generalise our results to other ecosystems and with data from Andean trees to determine the extent to which the new understanding of species-level heat stress strategies can explain compositional changes in Andean forest tree species. Our project will support better prediction of future biodiversity shifts and forest function, tropical forest restoration and conservation.

The impetus for this research network derives from the premise that children and youth cannot learn the skills and values of peace, in a context of violence. This context includes perspectives often missing from academic research and scholarship on post-genocide education, such as: the 'everyday' physical violence young Rwandans experience in their homes, communities and schools, often in the form of corporal punishment; the symbolic violence and social embarrassment they experience and/or reproduce through various forms of stigma related to poverty, narrowly prescribed gender and sex roles, and ongoing ethnic tensions, stereotypes and divisions; and the structural violence, experienced in schools through educational inequality, constant competition, testing, ranking, and severe consequences for failure; as well as children and young people's sense of experiencing injustices, not being listened to and having unmet emotional and psychological needs. Thus, there is a need to open-up and interrogate our understanding of 'education for prevention'; to look beyond simply the content and methodologies for teaching and learning about identity and citizenship, to the environment or context in which children and young people learn, mature and develop their identities and relationships with others. This calls for an interdisciplinary network of researchers, whose individual work may be focussed on only one aspect of childhood or schooling and from only one disciplinary perspective, to learn from and build upon one another's work, towards producing a holistic framework for defining and evaluating cultures of peace in Rwandan schools. This would include topics such as curriculum and pedagogy, but also positive discipline; pastoral care and child protection; gender; inclusion, the role of the arts and humanities in developing critical thinking skills; the school's engagement with parents and the community; methods for including children and young people's voices in school governance; and extra-curricular learning. Such themes could be looked at from the disciplines of education studies, child and educational psychology, sociology, and leadership and management studies and by researchers who use quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods. While these topics are well-explored in western contexts, the dominant paradigms shaping schooling practices in Rwanda are very different and require the development of new approaches based on local understandings and concepts. For this reason, while the network would include contributions from international scholars, it is to be Rwandan-led; underscoring the need for a network such as this, to enhance local capacity for research and dissemination of knowledge. In facilitating collaboration and knowledge sharing - between researchers in the global north and south; between researchers, practitioners and policy-makers; and between different academic disciplines - the network will strengthen individual and collective capacity to address the education, health and peace and security challenges. The network will address these various themes through five 'working groups', each of which would include researchers from Rwanda, the UK and elsewhere, as well as representatives from ministries and local government, local civil society organisations, international NGOs and any other interested stakeholders. Each of the five groups will focus on one of the following: 1) aspects of child mental health/wellbeing, personal and social development; 2) the use of cultural arts, literature and humanities to foster self-expression, respect and critical thinking; 3) issues of curriculum, pedagogy, assessment and teacher training; 4) aspects of school governance, including engagement with parents and the wider-community, and youth voice; 5) inclusion (including disabilities) and gender.