Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: Digital infrastructure for sustainable consumption

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 develop and employ new transdisciplinary approaches to address sustainable consumption and production as a socio-technical system to help inform decision-making for sustainable, resilient, and just systems of consumption and production. The Digital Infrastructure for Sustainable Consumption (DISCo) project seeks to produce both theoretically informed and practically oriented knowledge on how sustainable consumption (i.e., consumption that is less resource and carbon-intensive and/or less environmentally damaging) can be enabled through digital technologies. The team seeks to understand if digital technology can help close the gap between our intentions and actions (e.g., recycling, buying second hand, food waste diversion) when it comes to sustainability. The project team seeks to build upon existing research examining single app use and app use within a relatively homogenous community, to address three questions around (1) how digital technologies become part of our routines, (2) how digital technologies can interact with existing consumption patterns and (3) when do these technologies succeed in shifting behavior (i.e., under what conditions)? The project team will use methods from life cycle analysis and ethnography to better understand the impact of the proposed tech solutions. With the focus on food and mobility services the analyses will provide important information about changing behavior around transportation and food, both large portions of most individuals daily carbon consumption. The proposal team represents six countries (Sweden, Norway, Turkey, USA, and Japan) in related fields (sociology, communication, food and environmental sciences). The project’s overall approach stems from the range of fields employed and is organized into 5 work packages with interconnected research activities. Stakeholder involvement occurs throughout the project with societal partners participating in workshops and as part of the expert teams. 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.