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.

From space, the human impact on the planet is seen by the spread of cities; but the cities themselves are spreading into much larger territories, amorphous sprawling areas between and surrounding cities - i.e. the 'peri-urban'. Arguably, the planet has not only entered the Anthropocene, but also a 'Peri-cene': a global human-environment system shaped by peri-urbanization. Around the world the peri-urban displays many characteristics: global hubs and local enclaves, sprawl and disorder, disruption of communities and livelihoods, and in particular, growing climate risks and ecological disruption. Peri-urbanisation is both a material process of land-use change and impact, and a human process of social, economic, political, and cultural transitions: whether informal or planned, intensive or extensive, the peri-urban is critical to the provision of urban food, energy and water. In turn, understanding peri-urbanisation is critical to three Sustainable Development Goals: Goal 11 on Sustainable Cities and Communities, Goal 13 on Climate Action, and Goal 15 for Life on Land. The PERI-CENE project will provide the first ever comprehensive assessment of peri-urbanisation climate impacts, risks and vulnerabilities. It will provide a global typology and global assessment with an inter-active peri-urban analysis tool. It builds an interactive Living Lab with 18 city-regions from around the world, and explores deeper issues in two case studies. The PERI-CENE then develops forward pathways to be scaleable and transferable.

This Programme Grant will accelerate the delivery of decentralised water technologies by bringing the most up-to-date bioscience and energy engineering to bear. It will re-write emerging design rules for engineering biology to ensure that off-grid environmental biotechnologies can be configured with confidence. Bespoke microbial treatment communities will be evolved using a new suite of high-throughput synthetic-biology inspired, experimental platforms. For rural populations and UK Islands and in the developing world, from sub-urban Bangkok to the Amazon and Arctic Canada, we will develop site-specific off-grid integrated heat/water technologies. We will develop low-cost sensors, real-time monitoring and adaptive control for remote distributed water infrastructure. With water technology companies, we will analyse how suites of technologies can be configured and controlled to shape new models for decentralised provision. Scottish Water will invest significantly in co-creating rural demonstrators and a mobile technology-demonstration platform for sustainable communities and with Northumbrian, Welsh Water and other utilities and stakeholders we will build momentum for a radically new low-carbon decentralised future for the water industry. Working with stakeholders, from communities to legislators, we seek to incentivise community-led infrastructure solutions and to modify regulation in ways that balance local stakeholder needs and global goals for decarbonising infrastructure. Working with professional bodies and innovation centres we will create a global centre of excellence in off-grid water provision, with the drive and passion to deliver transformational change; helping to deliver 2050 net-zero carbon and Sustainable Development Goal 6.

Montane forests in the Andes and the South-eastern Brazilian Mountain Range host the highest plant biodiversity on Earth. Current rates of warming in the Andes are three times higher than elsewhere in S. America, and higher than average warming of 5-6oC is predicted by the end of this century. Hence, the (sub)tropical mountain ranges in Latin America form a high-priority area in which to study the response of tropical trees under future environmental change. Tropical forests also play a crucial role in the global carbon budget, accounting for more than half of terrestrial net primary production and storing around 40% of plant biomass. Uncertainty in the response of tropical forests to global warming is responsible for a large uncertainty in atmospheric CO2 concentrations under any given scenario of anthropogenic CO2 emissions. However, the current generation of Dynamic Global Vegetation and Earth System Models do not include a representation of montane forest functioning, which stems from a lack of empirical understanding, leading to a consideration of only lowland tropical forests in models. We intend to address this knowledge gap by initiating a Latin America-wide network of tropical montane forest sites to gather existing understanding in order to model the contribution of these forests to the regional and global carbon and water cycles, under current and future climate change. This will be achieved via a dedicated workshop at the Uni-Campinas, Brazil, hosted by PP-FAPESP Nagy, with the participation of empirical experts across the network together with DGVM and ESM modellers.

The UN Convention on Biological Diversity promotes using an ecosystems approach (EA) to support the delivery of ecosystem services and benefits (ESB) as a dynamic conceptualisation of environmental quality. It is promoted as enabling an easier integration of environmental goods and services into economic processes and policies. However, many researchers suggest that an EA is 'science in the making' and emerging policy initiatives overlook complexities that stem from both uncertain scientific underpinnings and socio-economic divisions. These include gender divisions and inequalities, yet these topics are largely absent from ESB discussions. While feminist writers (and others) suggest caution with adopting an EA, ADEPT seeks to explore if and how the approach could be useful for promoting wellbeing for women and men. While environmental justice scholars have long suggested that socio-economic hardship and the distribution of environmental goods and bads are correlated, recent applications of intersectional theory suggest that practical experiences of exclusion from opportunity always intermesh with other divisions such as those based on race, social class, disability status, sexuality, age and geographical location. There is then a need to address environmental and socio-economic vulnerability in an integrated manner. To do so an EA needs to first address a binary exclusion; firstly, there is a need to highlight ways in which ESB frame environmental quality, often affording stronger representation to expert interpretation of how environmental quality is experienced. Secondly, there is need to understand how intersecting vulnerabilities influence access to a range of ESB (with a focus on those linked to urban blue-green space e.g. clean water, flood mitigation and recreational opportunities). The focus of the current research will be a major urban zoning project in Belo Horizonte (BH), which covers a range of land-use types from dense low-income urban districts to rich gated neighbourhoods, protected areas, commercial and industrial districts. This provides an ideal case study area in which to trial and extend understandings of gendered vulnerability to environmental change within local urban contexts. Research to be undertaken will involve identifying socio-economic and environmental vulnerabilities and zones of interaction, exploration of differential experiences of urban ESB and scoping the potential of these as a means to support poverty alleviation in urban transformations. Results from BH will also be discussed within a Sao Paulo (SP) context, through the involvement of field researchers from SP currently involved in a local community engagement project involving the redevelopment of urban water management policies. The research collaboration is organised around a series of four international research workshops. An online research community will support the combination and interrogation of both new and existing data sets and development of new evidence of the processes which underpin urban vulnerability, forming the context within which any resilience solutions would need to be derived.