Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: WildFIre REsilient CULtural HeriTage (FIRECULT)

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 seeks to explore the role of fire in the development of local cultures, heritage and landscapes. The project will characterize the risk of fire regime change to lifeways, landscapes and landmarks; and quantify the direct and indirect costs to cultural heritage resulting from changing wildfire frequency, intensity and extent. In addition, the project will assess the sustainability of traditional fire management and identify best practices; develop strategies for wildfire resilient heritage governance and facilitate transdisciplinary and cross-regional knowledge exchange for heritage conservation across currently and soon-to-be fire prone regions. The project will consist of four case study sites of heritage-rich landscapes in Ireland, Kenya, Turkey, and Italy, purposefully selected to represent a range of biomes, levels of current and projected fire risk, and traditions of land use management. 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.