Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: Marine Research and Innovation for a Sustainable management of Coasts and Oceans (MARISCO)

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 focuses on developing, merging and synthesizing transdisciplinary, global knowledge for understanding the consequences of human actions for coastal and ocean sustainability and produce strategies and tools for effective management. Data analysis and model development of coastal marine ecosystems will be conducted utilizing both natural and social science expertise with the goal of defining the feedback loops within different aspects of biodiversity change and Nature’s Contributions to People.

This project will develop, merge and synthesize transdisciplinary, global knowledge for understanding the consequences of human actions for coastal and ocean sustainability and produce strategies and tools for effective management.

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.