IMPALA will deliver a step change in global model climate prediction for Africa on the 5-40 year timescale by delivering reductions in model systematic errors, resulting in reduced uncertainty in predictions of African climate and enabling improved assessment of the robustness of multi-model projections for the continent. IMPALA will include key foci on continental convection and land-atmosphere coupling as fundamental drivers of local rainfall, and oceanic convection and aerosols as influencing global modes of variability and the teleconnection pathways by which they drive rainfall over various parts of the continent. Convection, land-atmosphere coupling and aerosols have been identified in the DFID/Met Office Climate Science Research Partnership (CSRP) as first order drivers of African rainfall and processes where contemporary models show significant uncertainties and biases. IMPALA will use a single multi-temporal, multi-spatial resolution model, the Met Office Unified Model (MetUM), to allow rapid pull through of improvements made in the project into improved African climate modelling capability although the methodology and understanding will be widely applicable across all contemporary models. We will work through a pan-Africa lens to develop a benchmark suite of metrics targeted on key processes and user-relevant variables and will use the most relevant observations from past and future campaigns and latest remote sensing data. Strong links to partners and Regional Consortia (RC) will facilitate two-way evaluation and feedback, ensuring local understanding of relevant climate processes and required climate information in the regions. Evaluation of the impacts of the global model improvements, developed both within the project and through gearing from the ongoing model development process at the Met Office will be tested in idealised-scenarios of climate change. The unique capability of the MetUM to run across a broad range of spatial and temporal scales will be central to the project. Running the MetUM as a cloud-resolving weather model, through to a multi-decadal climate model, will allow evaluation of physical processes controlling the uncertainty in key metrics of pan-African climate variability and climate change on the 5-40 year time scale. The latest global coupled models available at the Met Office will be harnessed to drive a higher resolution (4km) convection-permitting regional model, for the first time across the entire African continent, under both current and idealised future climates. This will deliver understanding of the roles played by improved local representation of convective processes and high impact weather on the climate variability and change over the continent and be used to improve convective, land-atmosphere coupling and aerosol parametrizations in the coarser-scale models. The results will also provide an important new resource for RC and other African-focused climate research, enabling better-informed evaluation of the robustness of multi-model projections. This, in turn, can be utilised by decision makers to improve risk management for health, agriculture and water resources and help protect the livelihoods of the most vulnerable, safeguarding societal development already achieved. Key model results, metrics and observations will be made available to the FCFA RC and local partners through an interactive webpage. The consortium will also work closely with the FCFA Coordination, Capacity Development and Knowledge Exchange (CCKE) Unit in their pan-African cross-programme research activities.

The STRATEGIC project aims to co-create responsible research and innovation approach that aligns with social-cultural values, principles, contexts, needs and interests in SSA and implement capacity development plans that can strengthen the ethics and regulatory capacity to ensure responsible digital health technologies for clinical research and practice. The project will involve SSA and EU partners and stakeholders and co-create functional resources, such as the STRATEGIC training materials. The urgency of strengthening ethics and legal infrastructure for digital health technologies in SSA is due to the increasing integration of digital technologies into clinical research and practice and the potential negative impacts of these systems on patients, communities and society. While most countries in the Global North have recognised the importance of responsible digital health technologies, the ethics and regulatory capacities for addressing the ethical and legal risks of these technologies are still lacking in SSA. The overarching aim of the STRATEGIC project is to co-create a theoretically strong, empirically supported and widely consulted responsible research and innovation approach and capacity development plan and materials that can strengthen relevant ethics and regulatory institutions for clinical research and practice in SSA. It will identify and map the existing ethical and legal infrastructure in SSA, highlighting the gaps and needs; use these insights to co-create an RRI approach and co-develop and implementing trainings that will also be interested into existing training infrastructure and network. It will also establish sustainable e-community that exist beyond the project. Methodologies to be used include, stakeholder engagement and co-creation strategies such as focus groups, consensus workshops and roundtable discussions.

Eddy Rich Earth System Models (EERIE) will develop a new generation of Earth System Models (ESMs) that are capable of explicitly representing a crucially important, yet unexplored regime of the Earth system, the ocean mesoscale. Leveraging the latest advances in science and technology, EERIE will substantially improve the ability of such ESMs to faithfully represent the centennial-scale evolution of the global climate, especially its variability, extremes and how tipping points may unfold under the influence of the ocean mesoscale. Model improvements include new dynamical cores, new components (particularly sea ice), scale-aware parametrization and the complementary use of Machine Learning (ML) The technological challenge associated with this ambition is very high. EERIE’s goal is to achieve a simulation speed of up to 5 simulated years per day (5 SYPDs) and to make efficient use (reduction in power consumption by 50%) of the pre-exascale supercomputers now available in Europe. The technological solutions that are to be leveraged in EERIE are the use of reduced precision, GPUs, ML and reduced I/O. Alongside model improvements, EERIE will develop innovative experimental simulation protocols that are suitable for the mesoscale, to be pioneered on behalf of the global climate modelling community, in preparation for the next IPCC. EERIE will produce useful and usable climate information that will contribute to national and international climate change assessments such as IPCC; it will incorporate model variability and extremes within an Integrated Assessment Model (IAM) via a MLemulato;, and it will deliver storyline approaches to the consequences of climate tipping points and disease outbreaks.

The project aims at developing a pioneering approach to the reception of Classical Antiquity in children’s and young adults’ contemporary culture. This newly identified research field offers valuable insights into the processes leading to the formation of the culture recipients’ identities along with their initiation into adulthood. However, the most vital potential of this phenomenon remains unexploited, for the research is still selective, focused mainly on Western culture. With my project, I intend to overcome these limitations by applying regional perspectives without the pejorative implication of regional as parochial or inferior. I recognize regions as extremely valuable contexts of the reception of Antiquity, which is not only passively taken in, but also actively reshaped in children’s and young adults’ culture in response to regional and global challenges. Thus, the essence of this innovative approach consists in comparative studies of differing reception models not only across Europe but also America, Australia & New Zealand and – a bold but necessary step – in parts of the world not commonly associated with Graeco-Roman tradition: Africa and Asia. The shared heritage of Classical Antiquity, recently enhanced by the global influence of popular culture (movies, Internet activities, computer games inspired by the classical tradition), gives a unique opportunity – through the reception filter – to gain deeper understanding of the key social, political and cultural transformations underway at various locations. The added value of this original research, carried out by an international team of scholars, will be its extremely broad impact on the frontiers of scholarship, education and culture: we will elaborate a supra-regional survey of classical references, publish a number of analyses of crucial reception cases, and prepare materials on how to use ancient myths in work with disabled children, thus contributing to integration and stimulating cultural exchange.