Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: Developing REsilient African cities and their urban environMent facing the pro-vision of essential urban SDGs (DREAMS)

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.

The forum 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 developing and accessing scenarios for sustainable urban development planning in three African cities. The project combines, natural and social science methodologies with smart computer-based solutions to provide city planners with visual and quantitative information on the state of the environment and potential impacts under different scenarios.

The project team seeks to intensify the cooperation between planners focusing particularly on urban fringes. Typically, these areas are the most critical parts in cities, where formal instruments to coordinate informal settlements are lacking, often resulting in highly negative trade-offs in risk management (flood, fire), health and sanitation, and air quality.

The results of this research project will help us understand how communities can create more sustainable development pathways.

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.