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Global Programme on Sustainability
Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs
The programme supports sustainable economic growth that is both long-lasting and resilient to climate-related stressors. It does this through the integration of natural capital into decision making by governments, the private sector and financial institutions. The inability to value natural capital can undermine long-term growth and critically, the livelihoods of the poorest people dependent on ecosystems for their livelihoods. This programme directly addresses this challenge by (i) investing in data and research on natural capital; (ii) assisting countries to integrate this analysis into government policy making; and (iii) integrating this data and analysis into financial sector decision making.
Ocean Country Partnership Programme
Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs
The Ocean Country Partnership Programme (OCPP) supports countries to manage the marine environment more sustainably, including by strengthening marine science expertise, developing science-based policy and management tools and creating educational resources for coastal communities. The programme is funded through official development assistance (ODA) as part of the UK’s £500 million Blue Planet Fund. Through the OCPP, the UK government partners with ODA-eligible countries to deliver positive impacts for coastal communities that depend on healthy marine ecosystems. Bilateral partnerships under the OCPP are primarily delivered by the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science (Cefas), the Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC) and the Marine Management Organisation (MMO), agencies of the UK government that possess unique expertise in marine science and management. The OCPP also funds two international initiatives that align with its aims and help to develop global public goods, the Global Ocean Accounts Partnership (GOAP) and the Friends of Ocean Action (FOA). GOAP is a global, multi-stakeholder partnership established to enable countries and other stakeholders to effectively measure and manage progress towards sustainable ocean development. FOA is a platform hosted by the World Economic Forum in collaboration with the World Resources Institute, which brings together ocean leaders from a wide range of sectors to encourage action and investment into sustainable ocean projects. GOAP and FOA are both strategic partners of the OCPP, and are funded by the Blue Planet Fund (BPF). They do however remain independent organisations from OCPP, BPF, and Defra. Their work, and its intended outcomes and impacts, are strategically aligned with the OCPP and complement its programming in bilateral partnerships. GOAP and FOA were originally developed as separate business cases under the BPF, then in 2022 introduced as integrated components under OCPP to provide a clearer overall BPF offer to recipient countries. The investment to GOAP supports ODA-eligible countries to develop 'ocean accounts' to more accurately and comprehensively capture data on the natural capital assets contained within their oceans. Using this data - and through further technical, advisory, and capacity building support - GOAP aims to ensure that biodiversity is valued and integrated into policy making, decision making, and infrastructure investments in these countries, resulting in the inclusive and sustainable use and management of the ocean. An initial investment of £1million was awarded to GOAP in FY 2021/2. Following good performance in year one, a further £6million of investment was awarded, split evenly over FY's 2022/3, 23/4, and 24/5; giving a total of £7million. From December 2023, following evidence of strong value for money, this investment has since been uplifted to a total of £14.2million, involving new and expanded scope for certain activities, as well as extending the strategic partnership into FY 2025/6. FOA is a multi-stakeholder platform hosted by the World Economic Forum in collaboration with the World Resources Institute, which brings together ocean leaders from a wide range of sectors to encourage action and investment into sustainable ocean projects. FOA, working closely with the High Level Panel for Sustainable Ocean Economy, aims to mobilise ocean leaders to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 14: Life Below Water. Through OCPP the investment supports pillars of FOA's work that strategically align with OCPP's own outcomes. There was an initial investment of £1million to FOA in FY 2021/2. After FOA performed well against investment and performance criteria in year one, a further investment of £2million was awarded in both FY's 2022/3 and 2023/4; rounding total investment for FOA to £5million.
Sustainable Cooling and Cold Chain Solutions
Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs
This activity supports a number of different areas of work which aim to accelerate the climate benefits of the Kigali Amendment (KA) to the Montreal Protocol (MP) and encourage uptake of energy efficient and climate friendly solutions. This includes (1) The creation of an African Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Cooling and Cold Chains (ACES) in Rwanda. ACES will accelerate deployment of sustainable (environmental, economic and social) cold-chain solutions throughout Africa. (2) The development and deployment of an HFC outlook model to address information gaps on energy use and energy related CO2 emissions from the refrigeration, air-conditioning and heat pumps (RACHP) market. It will assist in reducing cost of the transition for Article 5 countries to the Montreal Protocol and increase the climate benefit of action under the MP. (3) Increasing countries technical capacity and providing insights on global best practice of EE improvements of cooling products in parallel with HFC phase down, through model regulations and sustainable public procurement in ASEAN and Africa.
Darwin Initiative
Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs
The Darwin Initiative is the UK’s flagship international challenge fund for biodiversity conversation and poverty reduction, established at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. The Darwin Initiative is a grant scheme working on projects that aim to slow, halt, or reverse the rates of biodiversity loss and degradation, with associated reductions in multidimensional poverty. To date, the Darwin Initiative has awarded more than £195m to over 1,280 projects in 159 countries to enhance the capability and capacity of national and local stakeholders to deliver biodiversity conservation and multidimensional poverty reduction outcomes in low and middle-income countries. More information at https://www.gov.uk/government/groups/the-darwin-initiative. This page contains information about Rounds 27 onwards. For information about Rounds 1 to 26, please see the Darwin Initiative website -https://www.darwininitiative.org.uk/
Nurturing breakthrough technologies to solve the global grand challenges of Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) in the Environment
UK - Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC)
A grant to the Centre for Cellular and Mollecular Platforms (C-CAMP) to deliver a national and international call for application (‘AMR Challenge’) to identify innovative solutions addressing prioritised AMR challenges in the environment for the benefit of low- and middle-income countries(LMICs). The Challenge will be specific for AMR in the Environment and will be executed independently as curated and designed by GAMRIF and C-CAMP. However, through the broader umbrella of the India AMR Innovation Hub (Hub), anchored by C-CAMP, the larger stakeholder network may be leveraged for advancing the innovations identified through the Challenge.
India - Newton International Fellowship
DEPARTMENT FOR SCIENCE, INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGY
Scheme supports early-career international researchers to spend two years undertaking research at a host university or research institution in the UK, enabling them to benefit from a period within a first class research environment in some of the UK’s best universities. Awards provide stipend, research monies, and relocation costs.
Phase III, Multicentre, Randomized, Double-blind, Placebo-controlled Study to Evaluate Efficacy of Probiotic Supplementation for Prevention of Neona
DEPARTMENT FOR SCIENCE, INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGY
MRC Joint Global Health Trial in India, The current trial aims to find out if feeding probiotics daily for 30 days during the first month of life would prevent these infections. Remaining healthy in the first month is important as it allows the newborns t
Core - International Collaboration Awards
DEPARTMENT FOR SCIENCE, INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGY
International Collaboration Awards enable outstanding researchers in the UK to partner with the best research groups in developing countries on projects that address issues faced by developing countries.
Weather & Climate Service Partnership (WCSSP) India - Met Office
DEPARTMENT FOR SCIENCE, INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGY
To undertake research on natural hazards in South Asian Monsoon system (both summer and winter); Improve capability of global coupled, regional convective scale (km) coupled and sub-km city-scale (300m) modelling frameworks to predict priority natural hazards over India. This will involve a significant observational strand to evaluate coupled models at the process level (see Appendix A for draft observations strategy); and Improve tools and techniques for risk based (Ensemble) forecasting of natural hazards at a range of prediction timescales up to a season ahead as a mechanism/pathway for delivering improved weather and seasonal climate services in country.
Weather & Climate Service Partnership (WCSSP) India - Calls - tender
DEPARTMENT FOR SCIENCE, INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGY
To undertake research on natural hazards in South Asian Monsoon system (both summer and winter); Improve capability of global coupled, regional convective scale (km) coupled and sub-km city-scale (300m) modelling frameworks to predict priority natural hazards over India. This will involve a significant observational strand to evaluate coupled models at the process level (see Appendix A for draft observations strategy); and Improve tools and techniques for risk based (Ensemble) forecasting of natural hazards at a range of prediction timescales up to a season ahead as a mechanism/pathway for delivering improved weather and seasonal climate services in country.
Weather and Climate Science for Service Partnership (WCSSP) India - Calls- tender-UKCEH
DEPARTMENT FOR SCIENCE, INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGY
FHIM (Flood Hazard Impact Model) Implementation. This project “FHIM (Flood Hazard Impact Model) Implementation”, aims to work in partnership with UK (Met Office) and Indian (e.g. NCMRWF (National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting), IMD (India Meteorological Department)) partners to run and upscale the FHIM modelling framework to other regions in India, as well as to port it onto HPC systems used by MoES. This builds on significant developments to the FHIM framework over 4 Phases from 2019-2023 and the effective collaborative partnerships developed with IMD and NCMRWF.
Weather and Climate Science for Service Partnership (WCSSP) India - Calls- tender-NATIONAL OCEANOGRAPHY CENTRE
DEPARTMENT FOR SCIENCE, INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGY
Relocatable regional ocean model support to support the uptake of previous programme outputs by partners. The methodology will take the form of 2 technical work packages and an engagement work package, which will be coordinated by a 4th management work package. The technical work packages focus on delivering a Python based open source toolbox that will be easily deployable through a Conda/Mamba environment. These tools will be developed to access data from either local or cloud sources. Particular care will also be made to ensure the code can scale; efficiently handling large datasets and/or making use of high performance computing environments.
Weather and Climate Science for Service Partnership (WCSSP) India - Calls- tender-UNIVERSITY OF READING
DEPARTMENT FOR SCIENCE, INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGY
EUPHEMISMS Consolidation. The previous EUPHEMISMS/EUPHEMISMS_FO, other WCSSP-India projects, have led to important findings about how convective storms evolve over India during the monsoon season. Knowledge and techniques gained from those studies will be employed in EUPHEMISMS_CO. The researchers have already developed a catalogue of CIs by applying the CI detection algorithm (Chug et al., 2023) to the infrared brightness product of the MERGIR dataset for a larger domain than was considered in EUPHEMISMS_FO. They will use this catalogue to first demonstrate how the location and diurnal cycle of CIs vary over different parts of India, and then uncover the relationship between soil moisture and CIs. They will also demonstrate how CIs and their relationship with soil moisture vary as the monsoon evolves. The results of this work will be consolidated into a journal paper.
Psychological, social & biological predictors of child mental health and development: shared and distinctive risk and protective factors in UK & India
DEPARTMENT FOR SCIENCE, INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGY
WHO figures estimate mental health problems affect 12.8% of children in India, which equates to 60 million children. There is an urgent need for culturally sensitive longitudinal studies of community samples starting in pregnancy, designed to examine the earliest origins of child mental health problems to optimally inform the development of new and early interventions. Our study aims to do this in India and the UK. Research in western settings suggest that child mental health problems arise from a complicated mix of social, psychological and biological influences, in which key factors probably include, prenatal stress, early infant temperament, and harsh parenting as risks, and warm parenting as protective factors. There is now good evidence that individual variations and environmental exposures in early life contribute to risk for mental health problems in later childhood and beyond. However, previous research has been conducted almost exclusively in countries with Westernised standards of medical care and family arrangements, and where additional risks such as low birth weight and under-nutrition are rare. The aims of the proposed research are to compare early risk and protective factors for childhood mental health problems in UK and India to identify those that are common to Western and South Asian populations and those that are distinctive. We propose to follow up around 741 families of children in the Bangalore Child Health and Development study (BCHADS) who are living in the urban slums of Bangalore city, at age 4.5 years and age 7 years. We will compare the information we gather on these children's lives to that of the children taking part in our UK Wirral Child Health and Development Study (already collected). In both studies we have two rich data sets with parallel measures of risk and protective factors for child mental health outcomes from pregnancy onwards, including age 8-10 wks, 6 months, 14 months, 2 years, 4 years and 7 years of age. We have gathered detailed repeated measurement of key likely 'shared risks' and associated 'mechanisms' for conferring risk (e.g., gene activity, stress reactivity) and these include measures of early life stress, social support, poverty and economic adversity, early temperament, and caregiving (touch, interaction quality, parenting quality), cognitive and physical development. We will also assess risk and protective factors that may be 'distinctive' or particularly relevant to the South Asian setting: maternal nutrition in pregnancy, early immune function and gender discrimination associated with cultural favouring of the male child, and the practice of shared-caregiving as opposed to primary maternal rearing in Western societies. We also aim to advance cross-cultural measurement methods and develop new culturally sensitive measures of gender discrimination and the 'shared caregiving' parenting environment in India. This work will aid clinicians and researchers to refine their measurements in clinical practice and be able to conduct more reliable research when trying to combine data from multiple cohorts. Finally, this is a joint UK-Indian study and together we will run a series of training events to build capacity and share expertise in conducting longitudinal cohort studies, sampling and retention, measurement issues, data management and state of the art statistical methods needed in longitudinal analysis of complex data sets.
IndiaZooRisk+: Using OneHealth approaches to understand and co-develop interventions for zoonotic diseases affecting forest communities in India
DEPARTMENT FOR SCIENCE, INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGY
Zoonotic diseases (that spread from animals to humans) disproportionately affect poor tropical communities and can lead to loss of life, impaired livelihoods, health and welfare. Forest habitats are a significant source of such diseases. For communities that depend on forests for food, fuel and income, accessing forests comes with the increased risk of being exposed to zoonotic pathogens. Although we know that zoonotic diseases are increasing globally, we still lack knowledge on how these diseases circulate between wildlife, livestock and people as they use forests, and how environmental changes like forest degradation interact with human migration, local culture and society (knowledge sharing), and policy (land tenure, disease prioritisation) to exacerbate emergence and spread. Focussing on India as a key global hotspot for endemic and emerging zoonotic diseases and bringing together a network of policy makers and practitioners from the human health, animal health and environmental sectors with experts (public and animal health, ecology, epidemiology and social science) - thereby following the One Health approach -, this project aims to reduce health, welfare and livelihood impacts of zoonotic diseases by (1) better understanding the impacts of different drivers on health outcomes and spread of zoonotic diseases (2) co-develop improved interventions, integrating traditional knowledge, with affected forest communities and, thereby building the capacity of local communities to be more resilient to zoonotic diseases. Three neglected zoonotic diseases, Leptospirosis, Kyasanur forest Disease and Scrub Typhus that are widespread across the Western Ghats forest communities and cause severe complications and death if untreated, yet have different transmission routes, will be taken as key case-studies for field research. The research underpinning these improvements will include: (1) understanding how local culture and policies, nutrition and environment factors affect community interventions, perceptions and health outcomes from zoonotic diseases. (2) investigating how different communities share knowledge on diseases and health intervention, including traditional knowledge, both with each other and with practitioners and managers, to improve communication strategies. (3) studying the role of different wildlife and livestock hosts and tick and mite vectors in transmission of disease to humans in different seasons. (4) understanding how long distance seasonal migration of pastoralists may promote resilience or increase their exposure to diseases and environmental change. (5) developing computer models and risk maps, integrating environmental and social data, for predicting the distribution and spread of diseases. (6) building capacity in research, data analysis and cross-sectoral collaboration to underpin future One Health approaches in India. Improved decision-support tools and Apps and prioritisation of traditional knowledge will help disease managers, policy makers and community workers to develop novel interventions and better target vaccination and communication efforts towards the communities that are most at risk and help managers in agriculture and environmental sectors to understand how, for these communities, disease impacts may coincide with other negative impacts of environmental change. The project platform and approach of co-developing research, training and decision support tools on zoonotic diseases with stakeholders across sectors, accounting for their needs and underlying ecological and social processes, will build significant capacity in science, policy and practitioners to respond to these emerging and endemic global threats in India and beyond.
Royal Academy of Engineering Core - Engineering a Better World
DEPARTMENT FOR BUSINESS, ENERGY & INDUSTRIAL STRATEGY
Engineering a Better World is a unique programme focused on achieving sustainable development, through innovative, collaborative, challenge-led engineering. COVID-19
Royal Academy of Engineering Core - Frontiers of Engineering for Development
DEPARTMENT FOR BUSINESS, ENERGY & INDUSTRIAL STRATEGY
Frontiers of Engineering for Development is a series of interdisciplinary symposia that facilitates national and international collaboration to tackle global development challenges. The event brings together a select group of around 60 emerging UK and global engineering and international development leaders from industry and academia to discuss pioneering technical work and cutting-edge research for international development from a diversity of engineering fields. Seed funding is available to progress some of the best ideas coming out of the event. COVID-19
Royal Academy of Engineering Academies Collective Fund: Resilient Futures - Frontiers of Development
DEPARTMENT FOR BUSINESS, ENERGY & INDUSTRIAL STRATEGY
Frontiers of Development is part of the Joint Resilient Futures Initiative which is a collaboration between all four UK Academies under the GCRF. The aim of the JRF initiative is to construct a pipeline in the UK and the developing world for interdisciplinary researchers focused on tackling development challenges in a sustainable manner.
DfE NI - GCRF QR funding
DEPARTMENT FOR BUSINESS, ENERGY & INDUSTRIAL STRATEGY
Grant to Department for the Economy, Northern Ireland to enable Northern Irish higher education institutes to carry out pre-agreed ODA-eligible activities in line with their institutional strategies. For Queen’s University Belfast in FY2019/20 this included: workshops in Cambodia, Vietnam, South Africa, and Uganda about health and education; 11 pilot projects spanning 16 eligible countries (Angola, Burundi, China, Colombia, Ghana, India, Kenya, Kosovo, Malaysia, Nigeria, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Uganda, Vietnam and Zimbabwe); and additional support to GCRF and NF-funded activities. For Ulster University in FY2019/20 funding supported six pump-priming projects on: LMIC maternal, neonatal and child health; PTSD in Rwanda; Decision-Making in Policy Making in Africa and Central Asia; and hearing impairment and dementia in China.
HEFCW - GCRF QR funding
DEPARTMENT FOR BUSINESS, ENERGY & INDUSTRIAL STRATEGY
Additional GCRF funding to the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales to support Welsh higher education institutes (HEIs) to carry out ODA-eligible activities in line with their institutional strategies. ODA research grants do not represent the full economic cost of research and therefore additional funding is provided to Welsh HEIs in line with their research council grant income. In FY19/20 funding was allocated to Aberystwyth University, Bangor University, Cardiff University and Swansea University. In FY19/20, the funding was used to fund: the full economic cost of existing ODA eligible activities (e.g. already funded by GCRF); small ODA-eligible projects; fellowships to ODA-eligible researchers; and to increase collaboration and impact. 53 ODA-eligible countries have been reported as benefiting from the funded work, with Brazil and India the most frequently mentioned. By region, the largest number of projects were based in the LDC’s (Least Developed Countries) in Asia, South America, and East Africa, with only a few projects in the middle-income countries such as Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Georgia.