Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: Biocultural adaptation of resource management traditions under the effects of climate change

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. The project focuses on how the use of indigenous ecological knowledge, a critical aspect of cultural heritage, can provide a source of resiliency, mitigation, and adaptation to the effects of climate change. Transmission of knowledge across generations, has the advantage of preserving hard-to-discover technical information and stabilizing resource use-rights to avoid conflict, while knowledge that is shared quickly amongst a network of contacts enables the diffusion of technical innovations and new social arrangements. This project will investigate how indigenous ecological knowledge and diverse forms of technical knowledge are transmitted within a society and how those knowledge streams are used to develop adaptation pathways to deal with challenges induced by climate change. The project will work with communities in Hoonah Alaska U.S.A., Zhetysu Kazakhstan, Chiapas Mexico, and Khovd Mongolia to compare socio-cultural data and ecological data on the changes in resource distributions anticipated due to climate change to provide data for these communities make informed decisions regarding potential adaptation 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.