Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: Theory of Change Observatory on Disaster Resilience

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. 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 address the growing need for assessment and reduction of disaster risk, collaborative co-design of resilience strategies with a breadth of stakeholders, and scientifically and technologically enhanced responses to disasters. The project seeks to enhance the capacity of regions in Sub-Saharan Africa to better assess and respond to the effects of droughts and flood risk. The project will develop a place-based observatory to monitor environmental conditions and develop models that can aid decision-makers in creating strategies to mitigate and manage risks associated to floods and droughts. The international project team has expertise in climatology, hydrology, remote sensing, cartography, modeling, environmental risk assessment, and policy analysis. The team will work together to develop a new innovative framework to address an important issue worldwide and has great potential to advance risk preparedness. 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.