Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: Guiding the pursuit for sustainability by co-developing a Sustainable Agriculture Matrix (SAM)

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 focuses on formulating pathways for sustainable agriculture by engaging with stakeholders to co-develop an indicator system and associated products that will measure agriculture sustainability. The consortium will identify the inter-linkages among various sustainable development goals (SDGs) related to agriculture and identify strategies for advancing sustainable agriculture to help inform policy.

To maximize the interactions and collaborations across the boundaries of disciplines, sectors, and nations, the consortium will organize a range of networking and co-learning activities, such as consortium-wide meetings, regular experience sharing and peer-learning sessions, and field visits. The research team will also cultivate cross-country partnerships to investigate the historical trajectories of agriculture sustainability and to analyze tradeoffs between their developed indicators and SDGs in each region and the globe.

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.