Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: Mitigation and Adaptation in Cultural Heritage Landscapes: Lessons from Transhumant Pastoral Systems for Managing Novel Climate Risks

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 the role that cultural landscapes can play as essential ecological and sociocultural services to help address climate change. The project will develop a toolkit to assist communities assess the vulnerability and resilience of cultural landscapes and further develop our understanding of the vulnerability and resilience of cultural landscapes and culturally informed strategies for climate mitigation and adaptation. The project team will work with local communities in France, Norway and Spain to develop assessment and planning tools for cultural landscapes based on the integrated analysis of social and ecological data. This information will be coupled with downscaled climate projections with clearly defined timescales to assist the communities in understanding potential risks and vulnerabilities and serve as a basis for decision-making. 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.