Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: Pacific Ocean Pathways in Support of Sustainable Development: An Integrated Approach

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. The teams will establish transdisciplinary networks to develop innovative solutions for sustainable development pathways and seek to assess the positive and negative inter-linkages between the economy, technology, institutions with the environment, climate, biodiversity, and human well-being to understand potential pathways to a sustainable world.

This project seeks to establish cost-effective, efficient, and sustainable transdisciplinary processes, methods and networks to assist stakeholders, scientists, public officers and citizens of the Pacific Islands to share common objectives and actions to achieve environmental sustainability. The project will build a network focusing on two pilot sites, Fiji and New Caledonia.

The project will examine the impacts of climate change and other stressors on the ocean environment and ecosystem services. The team will investigate the consequences of these impacts on the environment, society, and economy, to develop sustainable and complementary pathways for future development and sustainable ocean stewardship. These pilot sites will create the framework and methodology and serve as a guide for application and adaptation to other interested Pacific Island Countries.

PACPATH will integrate a broad range of existing data sets, generate new data sets, and develop new, locally relevant products that will rely on freely available sources such as from the Copernicus Marine Service.

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.