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.
This project seeks to develop a multidisciplinary approach to help improve how formal and informal health systems address changes to heat stress, infectious disease, and food systems. The project will work with citizen science and non-profit groups based in the Alaska and Trinidad and Tobago (Caribbean) to provide a contrast of locations with similar challenges. While the project will develop an assessment technique to help community organizations address climate change health risks, it will also develop techniques to overcome collective action problems, which often prove as a barrier for community action toward these challenges. The project will identify a set of indicators and techniques for assessing the potential to overcome collective action problems that will be coupled with assessment tools that can be used to advance climate change related research. The project will also provide additional knowledge on how to better integrate often siloed knowledge on environmental change, health, and risk management— especially as applied to heat stress, infectious disease, and food systems.
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.
