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 seeks to investigate the combined effect of environmental and land use change, such as the development of water management infrastructures, on the distribution of snail-borne schistosomiasis, a debilitating parasitic disease of poverty, affecting more than 200 million people worldwide. The study will focus on Brazil and Ivory Coast as these countries are countries particularly vulnerable to this parasitic disease as a consequence of projected climate change combined with growing human population, deforestation, expansion of agriculture and of marginal urban settings and the development of dams and irrigation canals. The project will couple different model types to understand how species are distributed in response to relevant socio-economic and environmental drivers of schistosomiasis to produce maps of present and future risk for schistosomiasis under projected environmental conditions. The project will provide a major step forward in the development of novel ways to profile schistosomiasis risk by integrating models of schistosomiasis transmission with remote sensing and GIS spatial representation of other ecological, environmental and socioeconomic drivers of schistosomaisis risk. The project will combine field data at different scales with theory to investigate the linked human and natural drivers of parasite transmission to improve understanding of the expected future distribution of schistosomiasis risk. The project will provide a reference framework to investigate the environmental determinants of a wide family of snail-borne and soil-transmitted infections affecting over 1.5 billion of the world’s poorest people.
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.
