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Land Degradation Neutrality Fund
Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs
The LDN Fund invests in projects which reduce or reverse land degradation and thereby contribute to ‘Land Degradation Neutrality’. The LDN Fund is co-promoted by the Global Mechanism of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) and Mirova. It is a public-private partnership using public money to increase private sector investment in sustainable development. The fund invests in sustainable agriculture, forestry and other land uses globally. The Fund was launched at the UNCCD’s COP 13 in China in 2017.
The eco.business Fund
Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs
The eco.business fund is a public-private partnership investment fund which aims to shift incentives in financial institutions (i.e. Banks) towards investing in nature, by embedding social and environmental risk into investment decisions, catalysing transformational change in the financial sector. The fund will increase lending to businesses which incorporate sustainable practices that contribute to biodiversity conservation, sustainable use of natural resources, climate change mitigation and adaptation to its impact across South America: Ecuador, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Colombia, Panama, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico and Peru.
Scalable Ecosystem Monitoring In Kenya: Soil health And human-wildlife coexistence
DEPARTMENT FOR SCIENCE, INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGY
African ecosystems represent the vibrant heart of the continent?s wellbeing: as thriving habitat for the abundant, unique wildlife, as a basis for humanity?s survival and growth (e.g. clean water, agriculture, resilience), and as a key economic factor (e.g. clean energy provision, food, critical materials, tourism). Adapting to and combatting the ecological crises already battering Africa is crucial for its future, in which protecting and restoring terrestrial ecosystems will assume an inevitable role. One pertinent problem in sub-Saharan Africa is to improve agricultural yields for growing nutritious demand whilst restoring ecosystems on limited arable, already-degraded land. Increasingly encroached spaces, stressed by climate extremes and anthropogenic expansion, also proliferate human-wildlife conflicts that threaten shared multi-species livelihoods, balanced biodiversity, local productivity, as well as the economically important sector of sustainable wildlife tourism. Understanding complex ecosystems can only advance through data-driven evidence of their state, evolution, and sustainable interventions, and thereby inform decision-making. Scaling up data acquisition across large, complex landscapes is the key bottleneck. Our new paradigm--to bring physics into the ecosystem instead of ecosystems into labs or computers--aims at tackling this data-poverty crisis at scale. Ecosystem monitoring is extremely difficult: any comprehensive understanding of interactions between diverse agents, and how they change across spatial and temporal scales, across regions and over time, requires scalable, non-invasive, information-dense, well-understood data, ideally in real-time. To meet some of the most urgent and demanding challenges unfolding across Africa and elsewhere, this is the only viable path forward. We suggest conducting in-field physics applied to two key challenges in Africa: food provision and wildlife conflict, both intrinsically embedded in the climate crisis, while offering scalable climate solutions, improving community resilience and local stakeholder empowerment. This project will develop and deploy a rigorous physics-based ecosystem monitoring framework that integrates non-invasive geophysical data acquisition, sensor technology, and community co-design to address two intersecting challenges: Monitoring and restoring soil health by creating tomographic imaging of the evolving 3D soil, and mitigating crop-raiding elephant conflict by an early-warning system for farmers. We will design a modular, open-hardware physics-informed sensor kit (~£20-30 /unit), to be locally assembled at minimal cost and effort, for detecting seismic and environmental signals relevant to soil structure, moisture, weather and wildlife movement. This will be facilitated by symbiotic expertise between Kenyan and UK research, academic, non-profit institutions which already forged deep partnerships, each bringing into the project an integral role leading essential subprojects, ensuring equity and reciprocity. By the end of the project, we will have: Two physics-based monitoring sites operating in Kenya; open-source designs for wide-spread adaptation; a new generation of trained local physicists, environmental scientists, and farmers; demonstrated proof that physics research can drive solutions to imminent real-world problems. The combined effort on scaling up sensing while skilling up farmers, students, and scientists will break new grounds for large-scale ecosystem monitoring across Africa, not only to support local communities and scientists in their mitigation and adaption to the climate and ecological crises, but to empower them to lead innovations with bespoke solutions that may propel Africa to the fore of tackling these crises, and lead the way for other world regions that will face similar problems in the future. This unites rigorous scientific innovation with ethical, participatory implementation ? a model for how intersectional physics collaborations can work for people and the planet.
A Soft Matter Physics approach to tuning soil acidity in sub-Saharan Africa
DEPARTMENT FOR SCIENCE, INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGY
Context Soil acidification is an urgent and escalating barrier to agricultural productivity in sub?Saharan Africa (SSA). Climate change amplifies nutrient leaching (Ca²?, Mg²?, K?) and the accumulation of toxic ions (H?, Al³?), which degrade soil structure, reduce water retention, and inhibit root growth. Over 35 % of SSA?s cropland (>350 million hectares) is acid-affected (pH < 5.5), especially in East, Central, and Southern Africa. The economic burden is estimated at US $68 billion annually, equivalent to a ~3% reduction in the region?s agricultural GDP. While conventional solutions such as liming (e.g. calcite or dolomite) are widely used to raise pH to optimal ranges (6.5?7.5), their real-world efficacy is constrained by uncontrolled delivery?heavy rainfall or drought can wash away, over-dissolve, or limit uptake of amendments. In response, embedding dolomite microparticles within a porous, organic polymer matrix offers a route to regulated delivery, simultaneously restoring soil organic matter (SOM). This introduces a rich but unexplored soft matter physics problem. Key themes include: Moisture retention: leveraging polymer physics to link network structure, tortuosity, and water holding Ion transport & reaction: using reaction-diffusion and fluid dynamics to capture ion release, swelling, and internal reactions Soil coupling: applying granular physics and capillarity to model fluid flow, particle rearrangements, and ion transport interactions Challenge Addressed The central challenge is to control the spatial and temporal release of liming ions under realistic soil and weather conditions?minimising loss, overliming, and inefficient uptake. Current approaches rely on trial-and-error, and there is a lack of mechanistic, multi-scale understanding that spans from molecular diffusion within polymers to macro-scale interactions in heterogeneous soils. This gap constrains the development of robust, scalable, low-cost acidification remedies in SSA. Aims & Objectives We propose a physics-driven design and evaluation of composite particles (CPs): dolomite microparticles (DLP) encapsulated in a bio-polymeric matrix (BPM) derived from agrowaste. These materials are affordable, biocompatible, and locally available across Africa. Properly engineered CPs can (i) enhance crop yields by maintaining soil pH, retain moisture and nutrient balance over time; (ii) reduce waste and over liming risks; and (iii) increase soil resilience. The research is structured into 4 Work Packages, with the following objectives: · WP1: Create CPs, characterise and model ions transport and water retention as a function of composition and environment. · WP2: Quantify effects of CPs on model soil as a function of environmental conditions and density of CPs. · WP3: Investigate CP release on a range of real soil samples representative of SSA. · WP4: Build an active network enabling the testing, manufacture and deployment of CPs in SSA. Three PDRAs based in DeKUT (Kenya), Embu (Kenya), and Stellenbosch (South Africa) will carry out experimental, characterization, and modelling tasks, supervised by an international UK-Africa team. The PDRAs will spend 3-6 months in the UK for research, training and cross?team integration. Stakeholder co-design begins with a workshop in Kenya to align technical goals with user needs. Potential Applications & Benefits There are two primary beneficiaries in this project: 1. The project helps build a pan-African physics?soil network, strengthening capacity in soft matter approaches to soil challenges. 2. Smallholder farmers across acid-impacted regions in SSA, and potentially other tropical and subtropical regions with acidified soils. Integration with stakeholders such as AGRA, ACTS and local agricultural agencies fosters pathways for scale-up, manufacture, and adoption.
Climate Smart Jobs Programme
UK - Foreign, Commonwealth Development Office (FCDO)
To strengthen the climate smart agribusinesses, creating jobs, support climate smart land management & services and to remove barriers that stop businesses getting deals.
The Democratic Republic of Congo - Green Growth Programme
UK - Foreign, Commonwealth Development Office (FCDO)
This five-year, £38m, International Climate Finance (ICF) programme will support the development of a climate-smart agricultural sector in DRC focusing on rural areas to deliver both climate and economic development objectives. There will be four elements to this programme: • Work to improve the business environment for agricultural businesses in the DRC which will be delivered in partnership with the Government of DRC. • Support to help grow climate-smart agriculture businesses. • Increasing access to finance for established agriculture businesses. • Monitoring and evaluation.
Sustainable Inclusive Livelihoods through Tea Production in Rwanda
UK - Foreign, Commonwealth Development Office (FCDO)
The project supports job creation and increased incomes by working with smallholder farmers to develop greenfield tea. The Wood Foundation Africa (TWFA) will set up and run two Services Companies supporting approximately 12,000 smallholder tea farmers over 7,500 hectares. Farmers will be supported to produce tea for the first time, employing best farming practices, including understanding and managing climate risk and variability.The Services Company will be co-owned by the farmers. This will lead to improved incomes and livelihoods (in particular nutrition and education) for the farmers and their families. Unilever and Luxmi will build a factory which will heavily rely on the tea supplied by the smallholder farmers with support from The Wood Foundation Africa.
UK Caribbean Infrastructure Fund
UK - Foreign, Commonwealth Development Office (FCDO)
As announced by the UK government in September 2015, the UK Caribbean Infrastructure Fund will create critical economic infrastructure including: bridges; renewable energy; ports; water; and sea defences that will increase productivity and resilience to natural disasters and climate change. This fund aims to improve economic development in 8 ODA eligible and 1 ODA eligible Overseas Territory by helping to boost growth and creating jobs across the region.
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