CONNEXION identifies and addresses critical connections between water management and human health in the Inkomati-Usuthu water management area (South Africa). We combine disease and water-energy-food (WEF) interaction models to better understand these connections. We visualise results in a dashboard for decision making, supporting WEF and health managers in their policy and daily practice. Our consortium includes a broad team of researchers and practitioners in WEF, nutrition, and infectious diseases, who will work together with various local stakeholders to co-create potential scenarios and recommendations. CONNEXION will contribute to improved resilience, community livelihoods, health, and wellbeing in the research area and beyond.

This project explores material flows of the colonial project of extraction. In particular, we examine the legacy of railway infrastructuresand train stations in South Africa connected to De Nederlandsche Zuid-Afrikaansche Spoorweg Maatschappy as strategic elements of spatial division and resource extraction in the colonial city, while considering the gaps, absences and erasures produced by colonial archives.

There are a number of big questions that ongoing and planned surveys of neutral hydrogen (HI) in galaxies aim to address, including: - How do galaxies form and evolve and what role does neutral atomic hydrogen play in these processes? - What transformation processes in terms of accretion and gas loss occur in galaxy clusters? - How does the neutral hydrogen in galaxies relate to the star formation rate and how does this evolve with cosmic time? - How is mass (in the form of galaxies and clusters) distributed in the local Universe and how does the large scale structure influence the local velocity flow fields? In this proposal we aim to address many different aspects of these questions within the various sub-projects listed below which include both ongoing HI surveys as well as preparation for surveys on the SKA precursor instruments, MeerKAT, APERTIF and the JVLA. South African and Dutch astronomers are closely linked by their collaborations on these surveys. There are already active collaborations in various areas including software development, collaborative data analysis for projects already underway (e.g. CHILES, Coma Cluster), technical planning for data reduction, co-supervised students, etc. Further details are listed by sub-project in the main proposal.

Note: This is the literal proposal as sent on December 16, 2012 to the coordinators of the NWO/NRF collaboration, prof. Wijers and Kraan-Korteweg. Because of an unclear agreement on the actual submission to NWO/NRF this proposal is only now formally submitted to both agencies. The working group on Astrophysical transients, their hosts and their physics,established under the NWO/NRF bilateral agreement in Astronomy and enabling technologies for Astronomy, has a natural focus on the approved two large radio transient surveys defined on the SKA-precursor telescope MeerKAT (TRAPUM and ThunderKAT) and the closely associated LOFAR transient key science project (TKP) on LOFAR2. Preparatory work on these large surveys and their associated science programs are currently ongoing at a number of Dutch and South African research institutes and universities, in close collaboration with the Universities of Southampton and Manchester in the UK. These projects have already established close ties between a number of institutes in the Netherlands and South Africa, both in terms of research visits of senior staff and joint co-supervision of South African postgraduate students. The latter is best illustrated by the current Erasmus Mundus SAPIENT exchange between the University of Cape Town (UCT) and Radboud University Nijmegen (RU) of two South African PhD students. It is on this strong foundation that this working group seeks to strengthen existing research collaborations and identify growing areas of common research interest in astrophysical transients and their hosts by bringing together researchers in South Africa and the Netherlands through a research exchange program involving staff, postdocs and postgraduate students, and joint workshops. As transient astronomy is multi-wavelength and multi-messenger astronomy, this working group automatically includes efforts both at radio, optical, X-rays wavelengths as well as astroparticle physics. Within this context, the working group identifies the concept of a small optical telescope (MeerLICHT) with an instantaneous field-of-view identical to MeerKAT and permanently linked in real-time to MeerKAT, as a novel and innovative approach to transient science, maximising the scientific returns of the fully commensal observing mode of MeerKAT as employed by ThunderKAT and TRAPUM. We also identify a need for high-energy coverage, in particular from space. Given the membership of RU in Virgo, the North-West University (NWU) participation, and a University of Amsterdam (UvA)/RU-led proposal for participation in the Cerenkov Telescope Array (CTA), it is natural to include multi-messenger astronomy within this working group, as the source populations of transients are also the natural source populations of TeV photons and gravitational waves.

The goal of this project was to intensify the collaboration of Netherlands and South African astronomers who are working together on the Square Kilometre Array project. This collaboration has led to Netherlands participation in a number of large observing projects that are currently being carried out on the South African MeerKAT radio telescope, but has also laid a foundation for future collaboration on SKA projects.