Project acronym BIGSEA
Project Biogeochemical and ecosystem interactions with socio-economic activity in the global ocean
Researcher (PI) Eric Douglas Galbraith
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITAT AUTONOMA DE BARCELONA
Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), PE10, ERC-2015-CoG
Summary The global marine ecosystem is being deeply altered by human activity. On the one hand, rising concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases are changing the physical and chemical state of the ocean, exerting pressure from the bottom up. Meanwhile, the global fishery has provided large economic benefits, but in so doing has restructured ecosystems by removing most of the large animal biomass, a major top-down change. Although there has been a tremendous amount of research into isolated aspects of these impacts, the development of a holistic understanding of the full interactions between physics, chemistry, ecology and economic activity might appear impossible, given the myriad complexities. This proposal lays out a strategy to assemble a team of trans-disciplinary expertise, that will develop a unified, data-constrained, grid-based modeling framework to represent the most important interactions of the global human-ocean system. Building this framework requires solving a series of fundamental problems that currently hinder the development of the full model. If these problems can be solved, the resulting model will reveal novel emergent properties and open the doors to a range of previously unexplored questions of high impact across a range of disciplines. Key questions include the ways in which animals interact with oxygen minimum zones with implications for fisheries, the impacts fish harvesting may have on nutrient recycling, spatio-temporal interactions between managed and unmanaged fisheries, and fundamental questions about the relationships between fish price, fishing cost, and multiple markets in a changing world. Just as the first coupled ocean-atmosphere models revealed a wealth of new behaviours, the coupled human-ocean model proposed here has the potential to launch multiple new fields of enquiry. It is hoped that the novel approach will contribute to a paradigm shift that treats human activity as one component within the framework of the Earth System.
Summary
The global marine ecosystem is being deeply altered by human activity. On the one hand, rising concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases are changing the physical and chemical state of the ocean, exerting pressure from the bottom up. Meanwhile, the global fishery has provided large economic benefits, but in so doing has restructured ecosystems by removing most of the large animal biomass, a major top-down change. Although there has been a tremendous amount of research into isolated aspects of these impacts, the development of a holistic understanding of the full interactions between physics, chemistry, ecology and economic activity might appear impossible, given the myriad complexities. This proposal lays out a strategy to assemble a team of trans-disciplinary expertise, that will develop a unified, data-constrained, grid-based modeling framework to represent the most important interactions of the global human-ocean system. Building this framework requires solving a series of fundamental problems that currently hinder the development of the full model. If these problems can be solved, the resulting model will reveal novel emergent properties and open the doors to a range of previously unexplored questions of high impact across a range of disciplines. Key questions include the ways in which animals interact with oxygen minimum zones with implications for fisheries, the impacts fish harvesting may have on nutrient recycling, spatio-temporal interactions between managed and unmanaged fisheries, and fundamental questions about the relationships between fish price, fishing cost, and multiple markets in a changing world. Just as the first coupled ocean-atmosphere models revealed a wealth of new behaviours, the coupled human-ocean model proposed here has the potential to launch multiple new fields of enquiry. It is hoped that the novel approach will contribute to a paradigm shift that treats human activity as one component within the framework of the Earth System.
Max ERC Funding
1 600 000 €
Duration
Start date: 2016-07-01, End date: 2021-06-30
Project acronym BSD
Project Euler systems and the conjectures of Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer, Bloch and Kato
Researcher (PI) Victor Rotger cerdà
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITAT POLITECNICA DE CATALUNYA
Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), PE1, ERC-2015-CoG
Summary In order to celebrate mathematics in the new millennium, the Clay Mathematics Institute established seven $1.000.000 Prize Problems. One of these is the conjecture of Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer (BSD), widely open since the 1960's. The main object of this proposal is developing innovative and unconventional strategies for proving groundbreaking results towards the resolution of this problem and their generalizations by Bloch and Kato (BK).
Breakthroughs on BSD were achieved by Coates-Wiles, Gross, Zagier and Kolyvagin, and Kato. Since then, there have been nearly no new ideas on how to tackle BSD. Only very recently, three independent revolutionary approaches have seen the light: the works of (1) the Fields medalist Bhargava, (2) Skinner and Urban, and (3) myself and my collaborators. In spite of that, our knowledge of BSD is rather poor. In my proposal I suggest innovating strategies for approaching new horizons in BSD and BK that I aim to develop with the team of PhD and postdoctoral researchers that the CoG may allow me to consolidate. The results I plan to prove represent a departure from the achievements obtained with my coauthors during the past years:
I. BSD over totally real number fields. I plan to prove new ground-breaking instances of BSD in rank 0 for elliptic curves over totally real number fields, generalizing the theorem of Kato (by providing a new proof) and covering many new scenarios that have never been considered before.
II. BSD in rank r=2. Most of the literature on BSD applies when r=0 or 1. I expect to prove p-adic versions of the theorems of Gross-Zagier and Kolyvagin in rank 2.
III. Darmon's 2000 conjecture on Stark-Heegner points. I plan to prove Darmon’s striking conjecture announced at the ICM2000 by recasting it in terms of special values of p-adic L-functions.
Summary
In order to celebrate mathematics in the new millennium, the Clay Mathematics Institute established seven $1.000.000 Prize Problems. One of these is the conjecture of Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer (BSD), widely open since the 1960's. The main object of this proposal is developing innovative and unconventional strategies for proving groundbreaking results towards the resolution of this problem and their generalizations by Bloch and Kato (BK).
Breakthroughs on BSD were achieved by Coates-Wiles, Gross, Zagier and Kolyvagin, and Kato. Since then, there have been nearly no new ideas on how to tackle BSD. Only very recently, three independent revolutionary approaches have seen the light: the works of (1) the Fields medalist Bhargava, (2) Skinner and Urban, and (3) myself and my collaborators. In spite of that, our knowledge of BSD is rather poor. In my proposal I suggest innovating strategies for approaching new horizons in BSD and BK that I aim to develop with the team of PhD and postdoctoral researchers that the CoG may allow me to consolidate. The results I plan to prove represent a departure from the achievements obtained with my coauthors during the past years:
I. BSD over totally real number fields. I plan to prove new ground-breaking instances of BSD in rank 0 for elliptic curves over totally real number fields, generalizing the theorem of Kato (by providing a new proof) and covering many new scenarios that have never been considered before.
II. BSD in rank r=2. Most of the literature on BSD applies when r=0 or 1. I expect to prove p-adic versions of the theorems of Gross-Zagier and Kolyvagin in rank 2.
III. Darmon's 2000 conjecture on Stark-Heegner points. I plan to prove Darmon’s striking conjecture announced at the ICM2000 by recasting it in terms of special values of p-adic L-functions.
Max ERC Funding
1 428 588 €
Duration
Start date: 2016-09-01, End date: 2021-08-31
Project acronym CHAMELEON
Project Intuitive editing of visual appearance from real-world datasets
Researcher (PI) Diego Gutierrez Pérez
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSIDAD DE ZARAGOZA
Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), PE6, ERC-2015-CoG
Summary Computer-generated imagery is now ubiquitous in our society, spanning fields such as games and movies, architecture, engineering, or virtual prototyping, while also helping create novel ones such as computational materials. With the increase in computational power and the improvement of acquisition techniques, there has been a paradigm shift in the field towards data-driven techniques, which has yielded an unprecedented level of realism in visual appearance. Unfortunately, this leads to a series of problems, identified in this proposal: First, there is a disconnect between the mathematical representation of the data and any meaningful parameters that humans understand; the captured data is machine-friendly, but not human friendly. Second, the many different acquisition systems lead to heterogeneous formats and very large datasets. And third, real-world appearance functions are usually nonlinear and high-dimensional. As a result, visual appearance datasets are increasingly unfit to editing operations, which limits the creative process for scientists, engineers, artists and practitioners in general. There is an immense gap between the complexity, realism and richness of the captured data, and the flexibility to edit such data.
We believe that the current research path leads to a fragmented space of isolated solutions, each tailored to a particular dataset and problem. We propose a research plan at the theoretical, algorithmic and application levels, putting the user at the core. We will learn key relevant appearance features in terms humans understand, from which intuitive, predictable editing spaces, algorithms, and workflows will be defined. In order to ensure usability and foster creativity, we will also extend our research to efficient simulation of visual appearance, exploiting the extra dimensionality of the captured datasets. Achieving our goals will finally enable us to reach the true potential of real-world captured datasets in many aspects of society.
Summary
Computer-generated imagery is now ubiquitous in our society, spanning fields such as games and movies, architecture, engineering, or virtual prototyping, while also helping create novel ones such as computational materials. With the increase in computational power and the improvement of acquisition techniques, there has been a paradigm shift in the field towards data-driven techniques, which has yielded an unprecedented level of realism in visual appearance. Unfortunately, this leads to a series of problems, identified in this proposal: First, there is a disconnect between the mathematical representation of the data and any meaningful parameters that humans understand; the captured data is machine-friendly, but not human friendly. Second, the many different acquisition systems lead to heterogeneous formats and very large datasets. And third, real-world appearance functions are usually nonlinear and high-dimensional. As a result, visual appearance datasets are increasingly unfit to editing operations, which limits the creative process for scientists, engineers, artists and practitioners in general. There is an immense gap between the complexity, realism and richness of the captured data, and the flexibility to edit such data.
We believe that the current research path leads to a fragmented space of isolated solutions, each tailored to a particular dataset and problem. We propose a research plan at the theoretical, algorithmic and application levels, putting the user at the core. We will learn key relevant appearance features in terms humans understand, from which intuitive, predictable editing spaces, algorithms, and workflows will be defined. In order to ensure usability and foster creativity, we will also extend our research to efficient simulation of visual appearance, exploiting the extra dimensionality of the captured datasets. Achieving our goals will finally enable us to reach the true potential of real-world captured datasets in many aspects of society.
Max ERC Funding
1 629 519 €
Duration
Start date: 2016-11-01, End date: 2021-10-31
Project acronym DYCON
Project Dynamic Control and Numerics of Partial Differential Equations
Researcher (PI) Enrique Zuazua
Host Institution (HI) FUNDACION DEUSTO
Call Details Advanced Grant (AdG), PE1, ERC-2015-AdG
Summary This project aims at making a breakthrough contribution in the broad area of Control of Partial Differential Equations (PDE) and their numerical approximation methods by addressing key unsolved issues appearing systematically in real-life applications.
To this end, we pursue three objectives: 1) to contribute with new key theoretical methods and results, 2) to develop the corresponding numerical tools, and 3) to build up new computational software, the DYCON-COMP computational platform, thereby bridging the gap to applications.
The field of PDEs, together with numerical approximation and simulation methods and control theory, have evolved significantly in the last decades in a cross-fertilization process, to address the challenging demands of industrial and cross-disciplinary applications such as, for instance, the management of natural resources, meteorology, aeronautics, oil industry, biomedicine, human and animal collective behaviour, etc. Despite these efforts, some of the key issues still remain unsolved, either because of a lack of analytical understanding, of the absence of efficient numerical solvers, or of a combination of both.
This project identifies and focuses on six key topics that play a central role in most of the processes arising in applications, but which are still poorly understood: control of parameter dependent problems; long time horizon control; control under constraints; inverse design of time-irreversible models; memory models and hybrid PDE/ODE models, and finite versus infinite-dimensional dynamical systems.
These topics cannot be handled by superposing the state of the art in the various disciplines, due to the unexpected interactive phenomena that may emerge, for instance, in the fine numerical approximation of control problems. The coordinated and focused effort that we aim at developing is timely and much needed in order to solve these issues and bridge the gap from modelling to control, computer simulations and applications.
Summary
This project aims at making a breakthrough contribution in the broad area of Control of Partial Differential Equations (PDE) and their numerical approximation methods by addressing key unsolved issues appearing systematically in real-life applications.
To this end, we pursue three objectives: 1) to contribute with new key theoretical methods and results, 2) to develop the corresponding numerical tools, and 3) to build up new computational software, the DYCON-COMP computational platform, thereby bridging the gap to applications.
The field of PDEs, together with numerical approximation and simulation methods and control theory, have evolved significantly in the last decades in a cross-fertilization process, to address the challenging demands of industrial and cross-disciplinary applications such as, for instance, the management of natural resources, meteorology, aeronautics, oil industry, biomedicine, human and animal collective behaviour, etc. Despite these efforts, some of the key issues still remain unsolved, either because of a lack of analytical understanding, of the absence of efficient numerical solvers, or of a combination of both.
This project identifies and focuses on six key topics that play a central role in most of the processes arising in applications, but which are still poorly understood: control of parameter dependent problems; long time horizon control; control under constraints; inverse design of time-irreversible models; memory models and hybrid PDE/ODE models, and finite versus infinite-dimensional dynamical systems.
These topics cannot be handled by superposing the state of the art in the various disciplines, due to the unexpected interactive phenomena that may emerge, for instance, in the fine numerical approximation of control problems. The coordinated and focused effort that we aim at developing is timely and much needed in order to solve these issues and bridge the gap from modelling to control, computer simulations and applications.
Max ERC Funding
2 065 125 €
Duration
Start date: 2016-10-01, End date: 2021-09-30
Project acronym DYNURBAN
Project Urban dynamics: learning from integrated models and big data
Researcher (PI) Diego PUGA
Host Institution (HI) FUNDACION CENTRO DE ESTUDIOS MONETARIOS Y FINANCIEROS
Call Details Advanced Grant (AdG), SH1, ERC-2015-AdG
Summary City growth is driven by a combination of systematic determinants and shocks. Random growth models predict realistic city size distributions but ignore, for instance, the strong empirical association between human capital and city growth. Models with systematic determinants predict degenerate size distributions. We will develop an integrated model that combines systematic and random determinants to explain the link between human capital, entrepreneurship and growth, while generating relevant city size distributions. We will calibrate the model to quantify the contribution of cities to aggregate growth.
Urban growth also has a poorly understood spatial component. Combining gridded data of land use, population, businesses and roads for 3 decennial periods we will track the evolution of land use in the US with an unprecedented level of spatial detail. We will pay particular attention to the magnitude and causes of “slash-and-burn” development: instances when built-up land stops meeting needs in terms of use and intensity and, instead of being redeveloped, it is abandoned while previously open space is built up.
Job-to-job flows across cities matter for efficiency and during the recent crisis they have plummeted. We will study them with individual social security data. Even if there have only been small changes in mismatch between unemployed workers and vacancies during the crisis, if workers shy away from moving to take a job in another city, misallocation can increase substantially.
We will also study commuting flows for Spain and the UK based on anonymized cell phone location records. We will identify urban areas by iteratively aggregating municipalities if more than a given share of transit flows end in the rest of the urban area. We will also measure the extent to which people cross paths with others opening the possibility of personal interactions, and assess the extent to which this generates productivity-enhancing agglomeration economies.
Summary
City growth is driven by a combination of systematic determinants and shocks. Random growth models predict realistic city size distributions but ignore, for instance, the strong empirical association between human capital and city growth. Models with systematic determinants predict degenerate size distributions. We will develop an integrated model that combines systematic and random determinants to explain the link between human capital, entrepreneurship and growth, while generating relevant city size distributions. We will calibrate the model to quantify the contribution of cities to aggregate growth.
Urban growth also has a poorly understood spatial component. Combining gridded data of land use, population, businesses and roads for 3 decennial periods we will track the evolution of land use in the US with an unprecedented level of spatial detail. We will pay particular attention to the magnitude and causes of “slash-and-burn” development: instances when built-up land stops meeting needs in terms of use and intensity and, instead of being redeveloped, it is abandoned while previously open space is built up.
Job-to-job flows across cities matter for efficiency and during the recent crisis they have plummeted. We will study them with individual social security data. Even if there have only been small changes in mismatch between unemployed workers and vacancies during the crisis, if workers shy away from moving to take a job in another city, misallocation can increase substantially.
We will also study commuting flows for Spain and the UK based on anonymized cell phone location records. We will identify urban areas by iteratively aggregating municipalities if more than a given share of transit flows end in the rest of the urban area. We will also measure the extent to which people cross paths with others opening the possibility of personal interactions, and assess the extent to which this generates productivity-enhancing agglomeration economies.
Max ERC Funding
1 292 586 €
Duration
Start date: 2016-08-01, End date: 2021-07-31
Project acronym eLightning
Project Lightning propagation and high-energy emissions within coupled multi-model simulations
Researcher (PI) Alejandro Luque Estepa
Host Institution (HI) AGENCIA ESTATAL CONSEJO SUPERIOR DEINVESTIGACIONES CIENTIFICAS
Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), PE10, ERC-2015-CoG
Summary More than 250 years after establishing the electrical nature of the lightning flash, we still do not understand how a lightning channel advances. Most of these channels progress not continuously but in a series of sudden jumps and, as they jump, they emit bursts of energetic radiation. Despite increasingly accurate observations, there is no accepted explanation for this stepped progression.
This proposal addresses this open question. First, we propose a methodological breakthrough that will allow us to tackle the main bottleneck in the theoretical understanding of lightning: the wide disparity between length-scales within a lightning flash. We plan to apply techniques that have succeeded in other fields, such as multi-model coupled simulations and moving-mesh finite elements methods. Acting as a computational microscope, these techniques will reveal the small-scale electrodynamics around a lightning channel.
We will then apply these techniques to elucidate the intertwined problems of lightning channel stepping and thunderstorm-related high-energy emissions. The main hypothesis that we will test is that stepping is due to the formation of low-conductivity spots within the filamentary-discharge region that surrounds a lightning channel. This idea is motivated by observations from high-altitude atmospheric discharges. By resolving the small-scale dynamics, with our numerical method, we will also test hypothesis for high-energy emissions from the lighting channel, which crucially depend on the microscopic distribution of electric fields.
This interdisciplinary proposal, straddling between geophysics and gas discharge physics, seeks a double breakthrough: the methodological one of building multi-scale lightning simulations and the hypothesis-driven one of finding out the reason for stepping. If it succeeds, it will achieve a leap forward in our knowledge of lightning, undoubtedly one of the greatest spectacles in our planet's repertoire.
Summary
More than 250 years after establishing the electrical nature of the lightning flash, we still do not understand how a lightning channel advances. Most of these channels progress not continuously but in a series of sudden jumps and, as they jump, they emit bursts of energetic radiation. Despite increasingly accurate observations, there is no accepted explanation for this stepped progression.
This proposal addresses this open question. First, we propose a methodological breakthrough that will allow us to tackle the main bottleneck in the theoretical understanding of lightning: the wide disparity between length-scales within a lightning flash. We plan to apply techniques that have succeeded in other fields, such as multi-model coupled simulations and moving-mesh finite elements methods. Acting as a computational microscope, these techniques will reveal the small-scale electrodynamics around a lightning channel.
We will then apply these techniques to elucidate the intertwined problems of lightning channel stepping and thunderstorm-related high-energy emissions. The main hypothesis that we will test is that stepping is due to the formation of low-conductivity spots within the filamentary-discharge region that surrounds a lightning channel. This idea is motivated by observations from high-altitude atmospheric discharges. By resolving the small-scale dynamics, with our numerical method, we will also test hypothesis for high-energy emissions from the lighting channel, which crucially depend on the microscopic distribution of electric fields.
This interdisciplinary proposal, straddling between geophysics and gas discharge physics, seeks a double breakthrough: the methodological one of building multi-scale lightning simulations and the hypothesis-driven one of finding out the reason for stepping. If it succeeds, it will achieve a leap forward in our knowledge of lightning, undoubtedly one of the greatest spectacles in our planet's repertoire.
Max ERC Funding
1 960 826 €
Duration
Start date: 2016-06-01, End date: 2021-05-31
Project acronym GEPPS
Project Globalization, Economic Policy and Political Structure
Researcher (PI) Jaume VENTURA FONTANET
Host Institution (HI) Centre de Recerca en Economia Internacional (CREI)
Call Details Advanced Grant (AdG), SH1, ERC-2015-AdG
Summary Globalization is expanding economic borders rapidly. Barriers to trade are now lower than ever and this has led to the creation of many truly global goods and asset markets. And yet globalization is changing political borders only slowly. The second wave of globalization that started after WWII found the world organized into a set of states or centralized
jurisdictions that often go beyond cultural borders but that clearly fall short of economic borders. These centralized jurisdictions still hold most of the political and decision-making power.
This growing mismatch between markets and states lowers the quality of economic policymaking. Since constituencies are located inside the state, governments tend to disregard effects of economic policies that are felt beyond the political border.
The result is a worsening in policymaking that could seriously mitigate the gains from globalization and even turn them into losses. The goal of this project is to improve our understanding of how this growing mismatch between economic and political borders affects economic policy and political structure. In particular, it focuses on the inefficiencies this mismatch creates and on how should we (“the citizens of the world”) handle them.
The project is organized around two themes. The first one is the handling of enforcement externalities. One of the key roles of governments is to enforce contracts. When these contracts involve domestic and foreign residents, governments have the temptation to enforce selectively so as to shift income to domestic residents at the expense of foreigners. The second theme is the evolution of political structure. The world is currently organized into state or centralized jurisdictions. This project studies the hypothesis that globalization leads to an alternative political structure based on a set of overlapping jurisdictions.
Summary
Globalization is expanding economic borders rapidly. Barriers to trade are now lower than ever and this has led to the creation of many truly global goods and asset markets. And yet globalization is changing political borders only slowly. The second wave of globalization that started after WWII found the world organized into a set of states or centralized
jurisdictions that often go beyond cultural borders but that clearly fall short of economic borders. These centralized jurisdictions still hold most of the political and decision-making power.
This growing mismatch between markets and states lowers the quality of economic policymaking. Since constituencies are located inside the state, governments tend to disregard effects of economic policies that are felt beyond the political border.
The result is a worsening in policymaking that could seriously mitigate the gains from globalization and even turn them into losses. The goal of this project is to improve our understanding of how this growing mismatch between economic and political borders affects economic policy and political structure. In particular, it focuses on the inefficiencies this mismatch creates and on how should we (“the citizens of the world”) handle them.
The project is organized around two themes. The first one is the handling of enforcement externalities. One of the key roles of governments is to enforce contracts. When these contracts involve domestic and foreign residents, governments have the temptation to enforce selectively so as to shift income to domestic residents at the expense of foreigners. The second theme is the evolution of political structure. The world is currently organized into state or centralized jurisdictions. This project studies the hypothesis that globalization leads to an alternative political structure based on a set of overlapping jurisdictions.
Max ERC Funding
1 080 000 €
Duration
Start date: 2016-09-01, End date: 2021-08-31
Project acronym Market Design
Project Market Design: Theory and Applications in Development
Researcher (PI) William Martin Fuchs
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSIDAD CARLOS III DE MADRID
Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), SH1, ERC-2015-CoG
Summary There are two components to my research plan.
First is the study of dynamic markets for real and financial assets in which traders might have asymmetric information. In particular I aim to understand how different characteristics of the market such as frequency of trade and transparency affect the efficiency with which these markets operate. This is a stepping stone to then be able to understand how these markets can be designed or regulated to improve their efficiency. Allowing for competition among market places can also indicate if the best way to intervene in these markets is by fostering competition or if direct government intervention is called for.
Second, market imperfections are exacerbated in developing countries due to the poor rule of law and poor institutional framework. Thus, important welfare gains can potentially be achieved by mitigating these imperfections and fostering the development of markets. I plan to work on these issues by combining theoretical analysis with controlled randomized trials to validate the theoretical insights in the field. For example there are many durable goods such as solar lights that would greatly enhance the welfare of poor rural households. These markets have been very slow to develop due to the lack of credit of final consumers and uncertainty about product quality. By properly designing the self-enforcing agreements between the producers of these goods and the retailers we can ensure retailers get access to financing from the producers. In turn this would allow retailers to extend financing to final consumers. Work on the field will surely uncover other frictions which we can study theoretically how to overcome and again test in the field with further controlled randomized trials.
Summary
There are two components to my research plan.
First is the study of dynamic markets for real and financial assets in which traders might have asymmetric information. In particular I aim to understand how different characteristics of the market such as frequency of trade and transparency affect the efficiency with which these markets operate. This is a stepping stone to then be able to understand how these markets can be designed or regulated to improve their efficiency. Allowing for competition among market places can also indicate if the best way to intervene in these markets is by fostering competition or if direct government intervention is called for.
Second, market imperfections are exacerbated in developing countries due to the poor rule of law and poor institutional framework. Thus, important welfare gains can potentially be achieved by mitigating these imperfections and fostering the development of markets. I plan to work on these issues by combining theoretical analysis with controlled randomized trials to validate the theoretical insights in the field. For example there are many durable goods such as solar lights that would greatly enhance the welfare of poor rural households. These markets have been very slow to develop due to the lack of credit of final consumers and uncertainty about product quality. By properly designing the self-enforcing agreements between the producers of these goods and the retailers we can ensure retailers get access to financing from the producers. In turn this would allow retailers to extend financing to final consumers. Work on the field will surely uncover other frictions which we can study theoretically how to overcome and again test in the field with further controlled randomized trials.
Max ERC Funding
1 516 288 €
Duration
Start date: 2016-08-01, End date: 2021-07-31
Project acronym TIMED
Project Testing the role of Mediterranean thermohaline circulation as a sensor of transient climate events and shaker of North Atlantic Circulation
Researcher (PI) Eva Isabel CACHO LASCORZ
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITAT DE BARCELONA
Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), PE10, ERC-2015-CoG
Summary The Mediterranean Sea is an excellent sensor of transient climate conditions at different time scales. Changes in Mediterranean water properties result from complex interactions between the Atlantic inflow, local climate and north and south atmospheric teleconnections. In turn, Mediterranean outflow waters spill into the Atlantic Ocean, thus acting as a net salt and heat source for the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). Climate models anticipate changes in these circulation systems within decades; thus it becomes critical to understand the natural range of variations in the Mediterranean Thermohaline Circulation (MedTHC) and whether these can alter the AMOC. An innovative approach, based on both well-established and newly-developed analytical methods will be applied to characterize, qualitatively and quantitatively, past changes in the MedTHC dynamics. Specific time windows representing very different transient periods (18-14 ka BP; 9.5-6.5 ka BP and the last 2 kyr) will be targeted in order to understand the distinctive role that individual forcing mechanisms exerted in controlling MedTHC changes. Particular emphasis will be placed on building robust regional chronologies and proxy records with unprecedented high-resolution. This approach will combine proxy data from sediment cores and deep-sea corals along the main paths of water masses as they cross the Mediterranean basins and exit into the North Atlantic. This paleo-data analysis will be complemented with novel climate model paleo-simulations to test the sensitivity of the AMOC to changes in Mediterranean outflow under varying AMOC conditions. The main goals are to identify: (1) The natural range of MedTHC variability; (2) The forcings and inter-regional teleconnections driving MedTHC changes; (3) The associated impact onto the AMOC. The assessment of the forcings controlling MedTHC and the ensuing impact on the AMOC will allow us to gauge the consequences of future Mediterranean changes.
Summary
The Mediterranean Sea is an excellent sensor of transient climate conditions at different time scales. Changes in Mediterranean water properties result from complex interactions between the Atlantic inflow, local climate and north and south atmospheric teleconnections. In turn, Mediterranean outflow waters spill into the Atlantic Ocean, thus acting as a net salt and heat source for the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). Climate models anticipate changes in these circulation systems within decades; thus it becomes critical to understand the natural range of variations in the Mediterranean Thermohaline Circulation (MedTHC) and whether these can alter the AMOC. An innovative approach, based on both well-established and newly-developed analytical methods will be applied to characterize, qualitatively and quantitatively, past changes in the MedTHC dynamics. Specific time windows representing very different transient periods (18-14 ka BP; 9.5-6.5 ka BP and the last 2 kyr) will be targeted in order to understand the distinctive role that individual forcing mechanisms exerted in controlling MedTHC changes. Particular emphasis will be placed on building robust regional chronologies and proxy records with unprecedented high-resolution. This approach will combine proxy data from sediment cores and deep-sea corals along the main paths of water masses as they cross the Mediterranean basins and exit into the North Atlantic. This paleo-data analysis will be complemented with novel climate model paleo-simulations to test the sensitivity of the AMOC to changes in Mediterranean outflow under varying AMOC conditions. The main goals are to identify: (1) The natural range of MedTHC variability; (2) The forcings and inter-regional teleconnections driving MedTHC changes; (3) The associated impact onto the AMOC. The assessment of the forcings controlling MedTHC and the ensuing impact on the AMOC will allow us to gauge the consequences of future Mediterranean changes.
Max ERC Funding
2 400 000 €
Duration
Start date: 2017-01-01, End date: 2021-12-31
