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 and apply innovative trans-disciplinary approaches to improve coastal community adaptation strategies to climate change. Delivery of products and findings from evidence-based environmental research to local communities is a critical barrier limiting coastal adaptation strategies. Accounting for local communities? culture, history of adaptation and current local to global challenges is needed to facilitate effective adaptation mechanisms. This project will use a series of case studies in France, Greenland, Russia, India, Canada, Alaska, and Senegal to analyze how natural science can be used to better adapt to future changes, how communities have adapted to past changes and how memories of past adaptations frame current and future efforts. This will be achieved by developing an overarching trans-disciplinary framework to understand coastal adaptation, conducting field work in a range of settings, performing an experiment on cultural mediation of coastal adaptation, and developing a series of briefs. This project will contribute toward a better understanding of adaptation as a scientific, social, economic, and cultural practice in coastal communities by identifying the key community-level challenges to the definition and implementation of evidence-based adaptation.
