Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: Coastal Ocean Assessment for Sustainability and Transformation

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 to address critical issues in ocean sustainability including, conservation and sustainable use of the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development. This complex challenge required that the projects utilized integrated, transdisciplinary and cross-sectoral approaches and bring together natural and social sciences as well as policymakers, resource managers, industries, citizens and other societal partners.

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 needed to accelerate sustainable use of oceans and minimize the effects from global change.

This project seeks to develop an innovative stakeholder-driven tool that monitors, forecasts, and reports the effectiveness of management decisions on coastal and ocean sustainability. The tool will enable decision makers to formulate and evaluate strategies designed to improve environmental resources at a global scale. The project will enable forecasting the effectiveness of future management regimes on coastal ecological, economic and social aspects.

The process of co-developing a COAST Card brings together different groups including social sciences/humanities/economy, natural sciences/technology, and societal partners to work together to co-produce new knowledge that can serve as the foundation these challenging issues.

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.