This award provides support to U.S. researchers participating in a project competitively selected by a 13-country initiative on global change research through the Belmont Forum and the G8 countries Heads of Research Councils. The Belmont Forum is a high level group of the world's major and emerging funders of global environmental change research and international science councils. It aims to accelerate delivery of the international environmental research most urgently needed to remove critical barriers to sustainability by aligning and mobilizing international resources. The G8 Heads of Research Councils developed a funding framework to support multilateral research projects that address global challenges in ways that are beyond the capacity of national or bilateral activities. Each partner country provides funding for their researchers within a consortium to alleviate the need for funds to cross international borders. This approach facilitates effective leveraging of national resources to support excellent research on topics of global relevance best tackled through a multinational approach, recognizing that global challenges need global solutions.
Working together in an inaugural call of the International Opportunities Fund, the Belmont Forum and G8HORCs have provided support for research projects that seek to deliver knowledge needed for action to mitigate and adapt to detrimental environmental change and extreme hazardous events that relate to either Freshwater Security or Coastal Vulnerability. This award provides support for the U.S. researchers to cooperate in consortia that consist of partners from at least three of the participating countries and that bring together natural scientists, social scientists and research users (e.g., policy makers, regulators, NGOs, communities and industry).
This award supports research activities that will develop natural and social science frameworks to promote the adaptation to sea-level rise and related coastal hazards in coastal Bangladesh. Sea-level rise, changes in land-surface topography, and changes in the frequency of storms contribute to increasing vulnerability to coastal regions. This is especially true in Bangladesh, a low-lying coastal nation with a high population density that is also prone to hazards including monsoonal flooding, saltwater intrusion, erosion, and drinking water hazards. This project will quantify the causes of sea-level rise and land movement as well as the human interactions that govern coastal vulnerability in Bangladesh. An earth system analysis and prediction system will be constructed to promote the adaptation to and mitigation of these detrimental hazards. Using a range of satellite and ground instrumentation as well as socio-economic tools, this project will integrate improved sea-level rise predictions with land subsidence. This project will contribute an analysis and prediction framework to improve the coastal resilience of Bangladesh. The integrated development of a natural and social science framework will provide a novel decision support tool for the adaptation of sea-level rise that is transportable to other coastal regions of the world.
