CITY-MOVE adapts and implements the WHO Global Action Plan on Physical Activity (GAPPA) in six cities across three continents and develops a cross-contextual evaluation framework for transferability and scalability. Physical activity is a key behavior to reduce the NCD burden, including protecting against cancers and type 2 diabetes. There are many evidence-based interventions for cities to promote physical activity, yet they remain under-implemented, with a whole-of-system approach particularly lacking, and often fail to target the least active or vulnerable groups. Knowledge gaps are: a) how to adapt, b) successfully implement, and c) evaluate interventions, and d) how to transfer lessons to other interventions, target groups and contexts. In partnership with the cities, we identified interventions targeting individuals across the life course, particularly vulnerable and least active groups, aligned with the GAPPA domains of active people, societies, environments and systems. CITY-MOVE will: 1) Develop a city-GAPPA Theory of Change and operationalise assessment measures; 2) Adapt city-GAPPA to six cities, engaging stakeholders in each context; 3) Support cities in successful implementation through action research in living labs; 4) Assess reach, adoption, feasibility, fidelity, and sustainability of selected interventions in each city; 5) Improve the development and utilisation of routinely collected data to support successful implementation; 6) Generate cross-contextual evidence on implementation, evaluation and scalability through multi-criteria decision assessment for 12 interventions in six cities; and 7) Generate global capacity through regional Communities of Practice. CITY-MOVE results lead to increased physical activity by target populations, contributing to reduced premature NCD mortality, and to adaptable solutions ready for take-up by implementers.

Food security is consistently seen as one of the key global challenges for the coming decades. Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), currently representing 13% of total food trade, could contribute to solving this challenge given its comparative advantage in terms of water and land availability. Agricultural exports and increasing global food demand represent a big opportunity for the economic development of LAC countries. In the last decades, governments have designed programmes, regulations and institutions aimed at increasing agricultural productivity in countries like Ecuador and Peru. However, there is some evidence of this agricultural expansion already causing some environmental problems (e.g. aquifer overexploitation) and impacts on sectors competing for the same resources (energy). Getting the Water-Energy-Food-Environment (WEFE) nexus right is crucial for LAC countries to ensure the sustainable development of agriculture and the economy without compromising natural resources availability for present and future generations. NEXT-AG's aim is to provide policymakers in those countries with the needed evidence base that allows them to develop new coordinated policies and programmes for increasing resilience and promoting sustainable economic growth in the context of increasing national and global food demand. The project has five main areas: 1) Data collection; 2) Policy and institutional mapping; 3) Modelling and integration; 4) Dissemination and outreach; 5) Project management. The core part of the project is the modelling of the different components of the WEFE nexus, done in collaboration with stakeholders, and their integration, which results will form the needed evidence base to inform future agricultural policies. Specifically, the project team will 1) collect and synthesise evidence on available water and energy resources and their use in agriculture and interaction with other sectors, showing key dependencies and trade-offs, and how the most relevant national policies and development plans might be influencing those links; 2) develop a participatory modelling framework to study the trade-offs between food production and key biophysical and environmental nexus components under contrasting climate, policy and socio-economic scenarios; 3) inform policymaking on how to better integrate nexus thinking into future coordinated policies and development strategies. The outcomes of the project will not only be relevant for Andean countries, but for other developing countries where food exports are one of the key economic activities.

INTEGRITY aims to evaluate alternative management of mixed crop-ruminant livestock systems to increase the potential increment of Carbon and Nutrient Circularity in diverse agro-climatic regions. Nine countries from three continents (America, Europe, and Oceania) are involved in this proposal. Different degrees of integration between the crops and livestock components of a system may have advantages or disadvantages, so trade-offs among economic (productivity, efficiency), environmental (nutrient cycling, soil health, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions), and social (work arduousness and organization, household networks) indicators will be identified. Gaps in knowledge regarding impacts of the integration need to be addressed to fully understand the mechanisms that reduce GHG emissions and/or increase soil C sequestration and nutrients (i.e. C, N) use efficiency in mixed production systems; and which would be the impact of proposed interventions with a broader and holistic perspective. These interventions will be specifically designed for each situation and will be evaluated experimentally to quantify their impact, not only through direct and specific effects but also in a broad sense addressing the circularity within the agricultural systems by different modeling tools. Standardized evaluation approaches and procedures across the different partners will allow direct comparison of the relative impact of new management alternatives. Stakeholders’ involvement through the process will certainly help to focus on applicable new practices and facilitate their adoption by farmers. The conformed Low Carbon Livestock - Research Network, a regional platform involving countries from America and Europe created in 2020 and supported by the GRA, will strengthen the capacity-building opportunities for young researchers and enhance the result dissemination platform. Proposed activities within this project will be organized in 5 Work Packages (WP). The WP1 will investigate different management practices at diverse agricultural systems to enhance nutrient circularity, production efficiency, and reduce C footprint; WP2 aims to identify the potential improvement of C footprint by increasing the inclusion of by-products in ruminants feeding programs; WP3 will evaluate the management of carbon circularity and climate change mitigation and adaptation in mixed crop-ruminant livestock systems through system approach assessment and Information and Communication Technology (ICT) (i.e. design of digital twins of farms based on combining sensor data and modeling that can help the decision-making process of stakeholders on the production chain of different mixed production systems). Also, this WP includes agent-based modeling to understand the decision-making process and other emergent properties of mixed crop-livestock production systems; WP4 will involve engagement with stakeholders, training, communication, and dissemination; WP5 project coordination. A particular characteristic of this proposal is the range of diverse production systems with different agro-climatic and socio-cultural characteristics that will allow observing differential responses of enhanced resource use efficiency and optimize nutrient circularity with the integration of the two systems components at different locations. This project involves cross-institutional and cross-disciplinary cooperation, which will be supported by the consortium’s complementary scientific skills, and reinforce and expand a history of mutual cooperative research where new partners will be involved.

In Argentina and Peru the livestock sector is important for the national economies as job provider in rural areas and major contributor to the GDP. Currently the sector is facing many challenges and limitations, but also big opportunities as the demand for products of animal origin is growing. These dynamics make the need for better trained livestock professionals, able to respond to needs and demands of all livestock sector stakeholders, apparent. Therefore the objective of EDULIVE is to strengthen the cooperation of Latin American universities with all relevant livestock sector stakeholders to ensure they offer demand-driven higher education and to increase their capacity in responding to the innovation needs of the sector.EDULIVE promotes the up-take of practical entrepreneurial experiences in higher education by developing mechanisms to formalize and improve cooperation between universities and other livestock sector actors taking selected sub-sectors as pilot cases (alpaca fiber and dairy in Peru, wool and sheep meat in Argentina). Using the knowledge triangle approach, diverse livestock sector actors, such as farmers´ associations, NGOs, private businesses, national research organizations and universities jointly develop cooperation mechanisms to make Animal Sciences curricula and research activities, more demand-driven and relevant. Graduates of improved curricula are better equipped to face future challenges and strengthen the competiveness of the livestock sector and contribute to economic development. Academic staff is provided with specific training and acts as multipliers in their home institutions. In addition, short-term visits of lecturers at European universities stimulate the exchange of teaching and research ideas across borders. EDULIVE fosters regional and cross-regional cooperation on capacity building in higher education between the EU, Argentina and Peru. Long-term sustainability is achieved through the participatory project design.

Summary (for general audience, 4000 characters) Tropical plant communities are famed for their high diversity but we still have little knowledge about the evolutionary processes that have created wide differences in the composition and species richness of different kinds of tropical ecosystem. Understanding these processes is of fundamental and practical importance - for example, planning conservation strategies increasingly uses information on evolutionary relationships as part of prioritising decisions about individual species. However, for tropical plants communities, sufficiently large datasets based on DNA sequences are only just beginning to reveal the evolutionary relationships between species. As a result, the implications of threats, either through land-use or climate change, for the conservation of the evolutionary history of these communities remains almost entirely unknown. Our research will take advantage of impressive existing data of tree inventories, covering more than 1000 sites in three major biomes in tropical South America: rain forests, dry forests and savannas. We will link these data with new information on the evolutionary relationships of all genera, and all species of the legume family, which is dominant in all three biomes, using DNA sequence data. A genus-level evolutionary tree will allow us to make analyses deep into evolutionary time, whereas a species-level legume tree will give a view of recent evolution. We will investigate how many times lineages of trees have switched between the different biomes, which will deliver important knowledge for conservation and future studies of evolutionary diversification. If lineages have rarely switched between biomes, then each biome will contain a distinct subset of evolutionary diversity, and destruction of a single biome could wipe out an entire part of evolutionary history. Such scenarios of the destruction of an entire biome are not unlikely. One important aspect of this proposal is that it will not focus solely on the rain forests of the Amazon Basin, but will also consider the forgotten biomes of tree-dominated savannas and tropical dry forests. These formations deserve greater attention from scientists and conservationists because they are species-rich, and have suffered greater destruction - more than 70% of the original two million km2 of the Brazilian savannas have been destroyed, whereas c. 70% of Amazonia is intact. Tropical dry forests, of which less than 5% remain in many areas, are the most threatened tropical forest type in the world. We believe our research will highlight the importance and plight of tropical dry forests and savannas, characterised by many decision makers and commentators as worthless - fair game for destruction if this might save rain forest areas - exemplified by a recent leader in the Economist magazine (28.08.2010; Brazil's agricultural miracle: Plant the plains, save the forests; http://www.economist.com/node/16889019). In addition to biome switching, we will also investigate how adaptations to specific climatic and soil conditions have changed during evolution in these groups. This work will enable us to understand the processes driving the biome shifts we observe. In addition, these analyses may help to understand how climate change will affect communities: for example, if changes in climatic preferences of species have occurred infrequently related species will tend to have similar climatic niches, and whole groups of related species might be vulnerable to extinction from particular trajectories of climate change. The final stage of our study will examine the implications for loss of evolutionary diversity in different biomes under projected scenarios of climate and land-use change. Our results will be of relevance to conservation planning by national government agencies in South America and international organisations, such as the WWF, involved in setting priorities for tropical conservation.