This award provides support to U.S. researchers participating in a project competitively selected by a 55-country initiative on global change research through the Belmont Forum. The Belmont Forum is a consortium of research funding organizations focused on support for transdisciplinary approaches to global environmental change challenges and opportunities. It aims to accelerate delivery of the international research most urgently needed to remove critical barriers to sustainability by aligning and mobilizing international resources. 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 this Collaborative Research Action, the partner agencies have provided support to foster global transdisciplinary research teams of natural (including climate), health and social scientists and stakeholders from across the globe to improve understanding of climate, environment and health pathways to protect and promote health. The projects will provide crucial new understanding into the health implications arising from the impacts of climate change and variability on; 1) the quality/quantity of food, 2) chronic exposure to increases/changes in heat and humidity and 3) changes in the distribution and incidence of a range of infectious diseases and emergence of novel pathogens. 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 to increase our knowledge of the complex linkages and pathways between the climate, environment and health to help solve complex challenges that face societies.
The project will focus on the health effects and associated socio-economic costs of increasing temperatures and wildfires to quantify the changes in cardiopulmonary mortality and morbidity and associated economic costs due to extreme heat and air pollution under alternative climate and socioeconomic scenarios. The project will produce a global heat index projection related to air pollution data including that of wildfires, projection of cardiopulmonary diseases burden under different scenarios, and data on socio-economic costs associated to co-occurring events of extreme heat and high pollution. The project brings together an international research consortium with expertise in climate modelling, epidemiology, economics and health impact assessments. The team of academics, non-governmental and private sector researchers will work together to assess the link between heat, air pollution and human health and quantify the associated health burden. The project will benefit a broad range of local and national-level stakeholders, including local communities, government, health service agencies, and local and national decision-makers. The major impacts will be improved capability in assessing health impacts; cohesive resilience towards climate change; data to inform major international scientific assessments; strategies to ease economic burden of diseases and improve public health and safety.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
