Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: Residual Risk of Extreme Floods: a challenge for achieving sustainable development goals

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.

The project will create an international network of experts and a community of practice to address the residual risk of flooding damage to help inform sustainable development. The exposure of human populations to flooding has increased in the last several decades, but many people are unaware that they reside in flooding risk zones. Residual risk of extreme floods (RREflood) project aims to help manage this risk and increase communication with the public by creating a network focused on the interplay among residual risk and its management.

The project members will collaboratively design a framework to integrate residual risk in local planning efforts, create a platform to facilitate advances in basic knowledge and tools to reduce residual flood risk, and identify research needs that will be beneficial to countries worldwide. This project will promote mechanisms to raise capacity for effective climate change-related planning and management and will identify effective ways to communicate the residual flood risk to residents and stakeholders, with the goal to reduce the adverse effects of natural disasters.

The international scientific community will be enhanced by the addition of a novel network of experts on residual flood risk; this network will facilitate exchanges and mutual learning to improve methods in global practice. The RREFlood project will thus create a new community around global flood risk and engage in pathways to sustainability through global research and community support.

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.