Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: Re-Energize Governance of Disaster Risk Reduction and Resilience for Sustainable Development

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 Re-energize project will address the interactions between disasters and sustainable development for effective disaster risk management and will provide an assessment of risk factors due to human activities, including climate change. The project will embed disaster risk reduction and resilience into development planning and programs by employing artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP) across six case studies from four continents.

The team will create an open-access tool to provide critical data to decisionmakers and planners for disaster risk reduction strategies and will develop a response processes to help generate standardized approaches intended to enhance the resilience of communities. This project will ultimately develop innovative and implementable strategies and technologies to help reduce disaster risk and enhance societal coping capabilities.

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.