Turkey

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.

Wheat is arguably the most important cereal crop in the world, with more than 600 million tons produced annually, supplying greater than nineteen percent of human dietary calories. The limited genetic diversity of wheat however renders it vulnerable to new diseases. The wheat stem rust fungus, known as the 'polio of agriculture', has caused repeated widespread crop failures throughout recorded history in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. In the 1950s Norman Borlaug, father of the Green Revolution, successfully bred for resistance to the disease. This resistance held until the end of the '90's, when a new, super-virulent race of wheat stem rust called Ug99 emerged in Africa. Ug99 is capable of causing disease on greater than ninety percent of the world's wheat varieties. First detected in Uganda, it has spread at an alarming rate through sub-Saharan Africa and across the Arabian Peninsula, appearing in Iran in 2008. Because wind-borne rust spores can travel long distances, it is only a matter of time before this scourge reaches Pakistan and India, the source of nineteen percent of the world's wheat and home to 1 billion people. Changing climate will expose Europe to enhanced risk of the disease. New sources of stem rust resistance are urgently needed. Although traditional breeding can introduce new genes into wheat from other related species, this process is laborious, time-consuming, and difficult to control, often causing the simultaneous introduction of deleterious characteristics along with the desired trait ('linkage drag'). Moreover, when new resistance genes are deployed one-at-a-time, the pathogen typically overcomes the resistance gene within one or two growing seasons, rendering it useless. This problem can be alleviated by introducing more than one resistance gene at a time, but that turns out to be impractical if not impossible by conventional breeding methods. The work proposed here aims to identify new resistance genes from a wild relative of wheat, Aegilops sharonensis. This grass, native to the Levant, is closely related to one of wheat's progenitors, and contains a rich trove of new, unexploited resistance genes. Our long-term strategy is to isolate, by molecular cloning, as many new resistance genes as possible from this species, and introduce them in combinations using GM methods. Molecular cloning makes it possible, indeed straightforward, to put several new genes together in the same location in the genome, allowing breeders to work with them as a 'single' gene. This holds tremendous advantages for disease resistance breeding, and is a clear case where GM technology is not only vastly superior to conventional breeding, but indeed required for sustainable food security. Our proposal has the specific goals of i) cloning the first of these genes, based on preliminary genetic mapping information already in hand, and ii) developing a novel method for quickly identifying the position in the genome of any gene of interest. This novel method will use a combination of classical genetics and 'next-generation' ultra-high-throughput sequencing technology, which now makes experiments that would have been prohibitively expensive only a few years ago both feasible and affordable. The platform we are developing will have as a primary output new lines of wheat that harbour three or more new stem rust resistance genes at a single genetic locus. These lines will be made available to public breeding programs that develop new breeding material for developing countries in harm's way from stem rust. Aegilops also harbors genetic diversity for other useful traits, including water and nitrogen use efficiency. Thus, the genomic data and methodology we will develop in this project will benefit wheat improvement generally.

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.