The Sussex Sustainability Research Programme (SSRP), a partnership between the University of Sussex and the Institute for Development Studies, has announced its first round of funding.
Members of the STEPS Centre are involved in a number of the grants, which explore the trade-offs and synergies between, and related to, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The work builds on previous research into a variety of topics explored by STEPS and other research centres at Sussex, including the links between climate and agriculture, urbanisation, health-environment links, and Anti-Microbial Resistance (AMR).
These initial projects are designed to lead on to further, external funding. They start in April 2017 and have various end dates (the latest is the end 2019).
The four themes of the call were:
- A – Climate change (SDG 13), energy (SDG 7) and water (SDG 6)
- B – Health (SDG 3), water (SDG 6) and food security (SDG 2)
- C – Food security (SDG 2), biodiversity (SDG 15) and urban/rural dynamics (SDG 11)
- D – Methods, practices and institutions for addressing the SDGs (SDG 17) .
About the projects
The projects with STEPS member involvement are (* = Principal Investigator):
- Addressing Synergies and Trade-Offs between Goals for Climate-Resilient Agricultural Systems in Sub-Saharan Africa: includes Peter Newell*, John Thompson
- Delivering food security, community resilience, and biodiversity through rewilding and community agriculture: includes Adrian Ely
- People, Pollinators & Pesticides in Peri-Urban Farming: includes Fiona Marshall and Adrian Ely
- Farmer organisations and the resilience and sustainability of small farms: includes Dominic Glover
- Understanding trade-offs between SDGs in urbanising contexts: Novel methods of mapping rural-urban interactions in food systems to analyse risks and opportunities for environmental and human health: includes Fiona Marshall*
- Surfaces: an interdisciplinary approach to understanding and enhancing health in a vulnerable rainforest setting: includes Hayley Macgregor
- Building global surveillance with local data: towards a sustainable global response to antimicrobial resistance (AMR): includes Hayley Macgregor
For a full list of the 11 projects, their aims and the researchers involved, see the SSRP website.