This award provides support to U.S. researchers participating in a project competitively selected by a 14-country initiative on global change research through the Belmont Forum and The Joint Research Programming Initiative on Agriculture, Food Security and Climate Change (FACCE-JPI). 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. This group 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 the Belmont Forum and JPI-FACCE 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 food security and land use change. 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 project will involve researchers from the UK, USA, India, Brazil, South Africa and Australia who will work together to develop an international network to understand the environmental and social benefits and trade-offs that arise through the continued global expansion of sugarcane production, and its broader consequences for land use and food security. The project will focus on the agricultural economies especially those that under pressure to improve resource efficiency and increase resilience. The group will identify and assess the factors contributing to increased sugar cane production; how this increased production is affecting land-use, water resources and ecosystems and the broad-range of socio-economic impacts, benefits and tradeoffs related to how the land is being used.
