ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

"The twin concepts of sustainability and conservation that are so pivotal within current debates regarding economic development and biodiversity protection both contain an inherent temporal dimension, since both refer to the need to balance short-term gains with long-term resource maintenance. Proponents of resilience theory and of development based on ‘indigenous knowledge’ have thus argued for the necessity of including archaeological, historical and palaeoenvironmental components within development project design. Indeed, some have argued that archaeology should lead these interdisciplinary projects on the grounds that it provides the necessary time depth and bridges the social and natural sciences. The project proposed here accepts this logic and endorses this renewed contemporary relevance of archaeological research. However, it also needs to be admitted that moving beyond critiques of the misuse of historical data presents significant hurdles. When presenting results outside the discipline, for example, archaeological projects tend to downplay the poor archaeological visibility of certain agricultural practices, and computer models designed to test sustainability struggle to adequately account for local cultural preferences. This field will therefore not progress unless there is a frank appraisal of archaeology’s strengths and weaknesses. This project will provide this assessment by employing a range of established and groundbreaking archaeological and modelling techniques to examine the development of two east Africa agricultural systems: one at the abandoned site of Engaruka in Tanzania, commonly seen as an example of resource mismanagement and ecological collapse; and another at the current agricultural landscape in Konso, Ethiopia, described by the UN FAO as one of a select few African “lessons from the past”. The project thus aims to assess the sustainability of these systems, but will also assess the role archaeology can play in such debates worldwide."

1 196 701 €

Start date: 2014-02-01, End date: 2018-01-31

Global change involves a large number of complex interactions between various earth system processes. In the atmosphere, one component of the earth system, there are crucial feedbacks between physical, chemical and biological processes. Thus many of the drivers of climate change depend on chemical processes in the atmosphere including, in addition to ozone and water vapour, methane, nitrous oxide, the halocarbons as well as a range of inorganic and organic aerosols. The link between chemistry and climate is two-way and changes in climate can influence atmospheric chemistry processes in a variety of ways. Previous studies have looked at these interactions in isolation but the time is now right for more comprehensive studies. The crucial contribution that will be made here is in improving our understanding of the processes within this complex system. Process understanding has been the hallmark of my previous work. The earth system scope here will be ambitiously wide but with a similar drive to understand fundamental processes. The ambitious programme of research is built around four interrelated questions using new state-of-the-art modelling tools: How will the composition of the stratosphere change in the future, given changes in the concentrations of ozone depleting substances and greenhouse gases? How will these changes in the stratosphere affect tropospheric composition and climate? How will the composition of the troposphere change in the future, given changes in the emissions of ozone precursors and greenhouse gases? How will these changes in the troposphere affect the troposphere-stratosphere climate system? ACCI will break new ground in bringing all of these questions into a single modelling and diagnostic framework, enabling interrelated questions to be answered which should radically improve our overall projections for global change.

2 496 926 €

Start date: 2011-05-01, End date: 2017-04-30

Computer models based on known physical laws are our primary tool for predicting climate change. Yet the state-of-the-art models exhibit a disturbingly wide range of predictions of future climate change, especially when examined at the regional scale, which has not decreased as the models have become more comprehensive. The reasons for this are not understood. This represents a basic challenge to our fundamental understanding of climate. The divergence of model projections is presumably related to systematic model errors in the large-scale fluxes of heat, moisture and momentum that control regional aspects of climate. That these errors stubbornly persist in spite of increases in the spatial resolution of the models suggests that they are associated with errors in the representation of unresolved processes, whose effects must be parameterised. Most attention in climate science has hitherto focused on the thermodynamic aspects of climate. Dynamical aspects, which involve the atmospheric circulation, have received much less attention. However regional climate, including persistent climate regimes and extremes, is strongly controlled by atmospheric circulation patterns, which exhibit chaotic variability and whose representation in climate models depends sensitively on parameterised processes. Moreover the dynamical aspects of model projections are much less robust than the thermodynamic ones. There are good reasons to believe that model bias, the divergence of model projections, and chaotic variability are somehow related, although the relationships are not well understood. This calls for studying them together. My proposed research will focus on this problem, addressing these three aspects of the atmospheric circulation response to climate change in parallel: (i) diagnosing the sources of model error; (ii) elucidating the relationship between model error and the spread in model projections; (iii) understanding the physical mechanisms of atmospheric variability.

2 489 151 €

Start date: 2014-03-01, End date: 2020-02-29

"Since 1960, the television industry has undergone successive waves of technological change. Both the methods of programme making and the programmes themselves have changed substantially. The current opening of TV’s vast archives to public and academic use has emphasised the need to explain old programming to new users. Why particular programmes are like they are is not obvious to the contemporary viewer: the prevailing technologies imposed limits and enabled forms that have fallen into disuse. The project will examine the processes of change which gave rise to the particular dominant configurations of technologies for sound and image capture and processing, and some idea of the national and regional variants that existed. It will emphasise the capabilities of the machines in use rather than the process of their invention. The project therefore studies how the technologies of film and tape were implemented; how both broadcasters and individual filmers coped with the conflicting demands of the different machines at their disposal; how new ‘standard ways of doing things’ gradually emerged; and how all of this enabled desired changes in the resultant programmes. The project will produce an overall written account of the principal changes in the technologies in use in broadcast TV since 1960 to the near present. It will offer a theory of technological innovation, and a major case study in the adoption of digital workflow management in production for broadcasting: the so-called ‘tapeless environment’ which is currently being implemented in major organisations. It will offer two historical case studies: a longditudinal study of the evolution of tape-based sound recording and one of the rapid change from 16mm film cutting to digital editing, a process that took less than five years. Reconstructions of the process of working with particular technological arrays will be filmed and will be made available as explanatory material for any online archive of TV material ."

1 680 121 €

Start date: 2013-08-01, End date: 2018-07-31