ALTER aims to demonstrate that there are real and lasting benefits for wide scale poverty alleviation, particularly for the rural poor, by tackling soil degradation at a range of spatial scales, from field to landscape, and using opportunities within agricultural as well as severely degraded land. Throughout the world, soil degradation impacts on the health, wealth and well-being of rural people in many different ways. Soils have a key supporting role in maintaining agricultural yields, water availability, water quality, resources for grazing animals and other ecosystem services. Some are perhaps less obvious but still valued such as maintaining habitats to support honey-bees and local wildlife. In Africa, soil degradation is recognised as a major constraint to alleviating poverty in rural communities. We have chosen to work in Ethiopia and Uganda where there are contrasting issues of soil degradation in mineral and organic soils are a result of agricultural land use but similar reliance in rural communities' on a range of benefits from soils. Solutions to soil degradation are not simple and require a much better understanding of how people benefit from soils, what they stand to gain if they can improve the condition of the soils that they manage whether for crops, livestock, timber production or as semi-natural areas, what they would need to do to accomplish this and what barriers may prevent this. In parallel we need to gain better insight into the likely success of different management options to improve soils. Ultimately these options will require some form of investment whether that be via money, time, resources or other mechanisms. We will investigate the relative pros and cons of these mechanisms from the perspective of local people, organisations involved with markets for Payments for Ecosystem Services and national objectives in alleviating poverty. A broader view of carbon benefits and trading is an opportunity to invest in lasting improvements in degraded ecosystems and the livelihoods of the poor that depend on these. All of this research and evidence building needs to be placed into the context of climate change. We need to establish that whatever might be suitable, acceptable and viable for tackling soil degradation now will have long-term benefits to local people and that these benefits will not be negated by the on-going changes to local climate. The ALTER project is an international consortium between The James Hutton Institute (UK), University of Aberdeen (UK), Hawassa University (Ethiopia), The Ethiopian Government's Southern Agricultural Research Institute (SARI, Ethiopia), Carbon Foundation for East Africa (CAFEA, Uganda) and the International Water Management Institute (Nile Basin & Eastern Africa Office, Ethiopia). This team brings together natural scientists, social scientists and economists to work together with rural communities and other local decision-makers and facilitators to improve our capacity to predict how human-environment linked systems respond to incentives and other drivers change. This predictive capacity is needed to be able to explore whether different options for change could result in substantive poverty alleviation.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

United States

This research will focus on the human factors that influence the management of diseases in domestic livestock. Specifically, it will analyse how and why livestock farmers make their decisions (usually in collaboration with advisors and in response to government regulation), how this affects disease control and, more widely, farm productivity and competitiveness, acceptance of agricultural innovation, and adoption of new technologies. Work will focus on bovine tuberculosis (bTB) and the opportunities and obstacles faced by government and farm advisors in communicating risk and encouraging change. This is an important case study: the incidence of bTB in England and Wales has been rising since the mid-1980s, the area in which bTB is considered 'endemic' has gradually expanded, and the cost of dealing with bTB is considerable to both taxpayers and livestock farmers. Further, bTB is a complex and highly politicised disease, making it important to explore social as well as scientific factors that influence the spread of disease and decisions regarding its management. The research will examine existing evidence of the opportunities and obstacles faced by government, advisors and farmers; identify and study successful examples of good communication of effective disease management practices; examine in detail the chain and methods of communication; and present the findings to government and the farming industry. The results will identify effective communication methods and disease management approaches that can be implemented in government policy and more successfully accessed and adopted by farmers.

As flood hazard, and the frequency of extreme floods in particular, is projected to increase in the future the risks associated with the impact of wood in rivers is also likely set to increase. Thus, in order effectively manage wood in river systems there is a need to understand and predict how the presence of wood will produce ecological benefits and how these benefits trade-off against the risks associated with its presence. This is not currently possible and this project seeks to address this significant knowledge gap. In order to improve understanding of this benefit-risk relationship there is a need to overcome major deficiencies in knowledge, including: (i) a lack of any attempt to systematically quantify the driving variables in wood dynamics and despite the rapid development and evolution of high-resolution measuring technologies there are inconsistencies in the type and methods of data collected. This means that there is limited capacity to validate predictive models of risk; (ii) research has been undertaken in an ad hoc manner and so many of the empirical relationships of the cost-benefits of wood dynamics have been drawn from case studies. Since the empirical relationships are used to underpin management strategies it is unclear of the global applicability of these sites beyond specific environments in which the relationships were derived, and (iii) limited understanding of how predicted increases in the frequency and intensity of flood events will serve to increase the risks posed by wood in river systems. By bringing the diverse skill set of the project partners together for the first time means that this network is now in a position to address these deficiencies. This proposal draws on the experience and expertise of all project partners who work across different global catchments representative of different hydroclimates and operationalise different management strategies. By doing this the network will deliver a globally derived and globally applicable standardised approach to both quantifying the impact of, and predicating current and future risks posed by, wood in rivers. The project will outcome 6 deliverables, including: D1 - A fully searchable interactive global digital risk atlas; D2 - A new series of directly comparable, standardised metrics and measuring protocols for quantifying, modelling and managing wood dynamics in rivers; D3 - A systems dynamics model which can be used to predict how key management interventions and environmental change scenarios affect risk associated with wood in rivers; D4 - A series of journal papers (included already outline agreed Nature Reviews article) to disseminate research findings to the academic and practitioner community; D5 - A series of funding proposals to underpin future sustainability of the network; and D6 - A series of events to further expand the scope of the network to the academic and practitioner communities.