Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: Ecological and Economic impacts of the intensification of EXtreme Events in the Benguela Upwelling System (EXEBUS)

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 project will focus on the Benguela Upwelling System (BUS) located in a unique geographical location at the conjunction of three major ocean currents in the southern African continent. The BUS is one of the most productive marine ecosystems in the world, and directly supports the livelihoods and wellbeing of people in South Africa, Namibia, and Angola as well as many people of the interior of the African continent.

The project will assess how extreme events in the atmosphere and ocean systems impact the ecological, sociological, governance, and macroeconomic systems of the study area through an integrated ecosystem assessment. The assessment to be undertaken by a transdisciplinary consortium of international researchers, practitioners, and representatives of the private sector and civil society will bring unique and complementary perspectives for both understanding the changes in this dynamic system, applying, and communicating the importance of these findings.

The team will ascertain the roles of, trends in, and range of variability and the associated extremities of natural and anthropogenic geophysical, biological, governance, socio-economic features and phenomena. These results will be used to produce a variety of outcomes including indicator development, risk assessments, and environmental forecasting and experiences of future generations.

These outcomes will enable the development of an Ecosystem-Based Management framework for application in the region.

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.