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.

Trees take in carbon from the atmosphere as they grow, but this is eventually released when they die. The sheer number of trees in tropical forests means that small changes in these rates of growth and death, and the resulting change in the balance of carbon taken in or released, can have a big effect on the climate. While a lot of research has focused on how changes in temperature and rainfall affects the growth and death of tropical forest trees, the potential effects of lightning have been largely neglected. A study tracking lightning strikes in Panama found that they caused more than half of all deaths of large trees, a previously undocumented effect despite being in one of the most intensively studied forests in the world. This project will provide important steps towards assessing whether this strong impact of lightning is a more widespread phenomenon. Forests in Africa are characterised by a greater dominance of large trees than elsewhere in the tropics, so based on results from Panama they would be expected to be more vulnerable to lightning. Alternatively, the high frequency of lightning in Africa may have selected for trees that are better able to withstand its effects. Knowing whether or not lightning has a consistent effect across continents is important for determining whether future work should focus on understanding the causes of variation in the impact of lightning, or can instead explore the wider implications these effects. The new international collaborator (Evan Gora) has developed an approach for detecting lightning damage from drone surveys and follow-up investigation on foot that allows large areas of forest to be surveyed. We will apply this at four sites along a dramatic gradient of lightning frequency in the Albertine Rift (on the boundary of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda and Uganda) to (1) test whether trees at different sites in Africa are more or less vulnerable to being killed by lightning than those in Panama, (2) determine how forest structure varies with lightning frequency and (3) use these observations to assess the potential effect of lightning on carbon stocks and dynamics. The project team will have regular online meetings throughout the project, will all meet in Rwanda to receive training from Gora in how to detect lightning damage, and a subset of the team will also meet in the UK after fieldwork. Collectively, these meetings provide considerable space to share ideas as the project develops, culminating in a five-year plan for future collaboration. We will seek wider input from scientist and stakeholders through a regular series of seminars and roundtable discussions, and will hold online training workshops to build capacity in monitoring the effects of lightning on tropical forests.

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.

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.

Africa is a continent blessed with immense human potential, but it faces a lot of complex and stubborn developmental challenges. Home-grown solutions to these challenges are slow to emerge as there is a drastic shortage of researchers on the continent, which means that there are not enough academics to do the research required nor are there enough academics to train the next generation of young researchers who need to do this research in future. On top of these constraints, tackling problems dealing with development is a complex and nuanced issue which needs the input from a lot of different scientific disciplines, but getting different disciplines to work together effectively on a common goal is a problem in itself. The project sets out to tackle the shortage in research capacity in Africa by developing a set of training and research activities aimed at bringing young researchers on board, and by creating the opportunity for experienced researchers to also participate in research groups that span different scientific disciplines. The training of researchers will happen in two ways, (i) by a set of very targeted courses aimed at developing the skills required to plan and do good research, and to make the results useful to other groups of people who may want to use the results, and (ii) through setting up research groups around a particular problem, where the research groups will contain a mixture of young and experienced researchers, and researchers that look at the problem from different perspectives e.g. from engineering, agricultural or human and social perspectives. In this way, the development of young researchers will be accelerated so that more people are trained to take up and deal with the rigours of an academic career, while the opportunity for young researchers to learn from more experienced ones is invaluable to make sure that they receive good training. The project will further focus specifically on topics of how renewable and sustainable energy can be applied in different African settings in an way that ensures that benefits are shared equally, and that different groups and specifically women get the opportunity to benefit. In particular, methods will be sought to employ renewable energy to benefit African small farmers and the entire food chain from farmer to market. Small farms and the distribution of products from these farmers is extremely important in Africa, as these small farmers collectively produce up to 70% of the continent's food, and any improvement that they can gain through using renewable energy in their farming and households is likely to make an important impact on their lives. However, in order to develop solutions that are successful and useful to them, one needs to approach the question form many different angles, including the type of technology, where and how to incorporate it into the farming or food chain activities, who are the people who will benefit, how they will benefit and whether the solution can be improved to make sure that a larger number of people will benefit. A further specific topic area will be on how renewable energy can be applied in large informal settlements to address scarcity to energy, and how to ensure that particularly women are empowered through renewable energy solutions. Through taking a broad approach to renewable and sustainable energy issues in Africa, and combining dedicated training and research activities, the project hopes to make an important contribution to training the top class African researchers of tomorrow, and to broaden their knowledge on how to tackle some of the most pressing developmental concerns on the African continent by working together with researchers who may not be in the same field as themselves.