Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: Multiscale approaches and scalability within climate change--heritage risk assessments

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 transdisciplinary and convergent research approaches on cultural heritage and climate change, foster collaboration among the research community across several regions, and contribute to knowledge advances at the global level. This project seeks to create a framework for identifying climatic indicators that are applicable to coastal cultural heritage which can be used to improve climatic risk assessments by connecting potential impacts with different local, societal, economic and environmental factors such as wellbeing, sustainable culture and tourism, and infrastructure. The project will develop a set of indicators of climate change, along with a locally adaptable protocol for stakeholders’ engagement in identifying critical climate impacts that are relevant to local and cultural contexts. The project team will develop a climate adaptation decision support tool to evaluate assessment approaches across different spatial scales. The framework will not only help to better integrate different knowledge streams in climate risk assessments, but also to improve coordination and collaboration between different decision-makers involved in cultural heritage preservation. The project seeks to help provide relevant data through several case studies that can serve as examples for developing cultural heritage policies and practice. 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.