Promoting resilience of subsistence farming to El Niño events in Papua New Guinea: an integrated social-ecological approach More than a quarter of the global human population depends on small-scale subsistence agriculture for their livelihoods. As these farmers rely on crops from a small cultivated area, they are highly vulnerable to extreme weather events. One such event is El Niño, a periodic reversal of ocean currents in the Pacific Ocean with pronounced global impacts on weather. Papua New Guinea (PNG) is a lower middle income country in the western Pacific, which is particularly hard hit by El Niño events. Since 85% of the population depend on subsistence farming in family "food gardens", El Niño can cause widespread damage to crops and livelihoods, directly through drought and frost; and indirectly through crop pests and diseases. Farmers can respond partially, by changing the crops they grow and where they grow them, or by collecting alternative foods from surrounding forest. When extreme events like El Niño occur they set off a series of related effects across ecological and social systems. For example, crops subjected to drought may be more susceptible to pests and thus suffer greater damage, leading to lower yields and reduced food. In turn, people may use forest products to supplement their food, which could degrade the forest, reducing its ability to buffer the village against future drought.  Our project will develop an integrated approach to investigating linkages between ecological and socioeconomic impacts of the 2015 El Niño on subsistence farming in PNG. We will focus on food gardens from 200m to 2700m elevation on Mount Wilhelm. We will compare ecological and social changes caused by the El Niño in villages at different elevations, and whether people with different abilities to cope with droughts (e.g. those with larger/smaller gardens) were affected differently. We will collect data on how the current El Niño is affecting crops through drought and frost, and by altering the number of insect pests and the severity of crop diseases. We will assess how El Niño might cause increased reliance of farmers on food collected from surrounding forests, how this affects forest biodiversity, and the ability of the forest to support resilient food gardens by providing pest control.   We will gather villagers' perceptions of the impacts of El Niño on their livelihoods and wellbeing, and on how they coped. For example, we will ask whether there are things they would like to have done to cope, but were unable to do (e.g. changing to drought-resistant crop varieties), and discover the barriers to employing these coping strategies. Together with local villagers and our PNG collaborators, we will develop options to help support villagers and surrounding ecosystems during future El Niño events. We will ask villagers which option they prefer, and how they would change their behaviour under different future scenarios. For example, if El Niño events became more frequent, would they change their crops permanently? If the forest was reduced due to logging, would this change their response to El Niño? Using our results we will build a model of how the forest, food gardens and people's livelihoods interact, and use it to talk to villagers and the government about the likely impact of different interventions to support villagers. We will then propose ways to make their livelihoods more sustainable and resilient, for future El Niño events.  Our project builds on a long-term collaboration with the New Guinea Binatang Research Center, in which local research assistants are trained to collect ecological data. The project extends our research to include social dimensions. We will train the assistants to collect information about people as well as insects, to build a long-term project that can support villages to become more resilient to future climate change and build scientific capacity within PNG. It will also help researchers globally to understand better how El Niño events affect social-ecological systems and how to make these systems more resilient The Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) supports cutting-edge research to address challenges faced by developing countries. The fund addresses the UN sustainable development goals. It aims to maximise the impact of research and innovation to improve lives and opportunity in the developing world.