Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: Coastal TALES, Telling Adaptations: Living Environmental Stories for coastal resilience

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 integrating local and traditional knowledge (LTK), social science and natural science to determine how past practices can deliver innovative local solutions to environmental change in coastal regions, and how these integrated approaches can help people (re)discover more sustainable ways of living in their rapidly changing coastal environments. Understanding the management and adaptation methods used by these communities provides important insights into diverse strategies for sustaining coastal ecology, local livelihoods and food security today. LTK is accumulated and transmitted through stories by resident communities in place over many years and generations. Stories reflect lessons on resilience, sustainability and adaptation. Gathering stories and using place-based understandings is a well-recognized methodology that can deepen understanding of how coastal communities draw upon their cultural heritage. The project focuses on three northern coastal regions: Kodiak Island in Alaska, Dublin Bay in Ireland and southwest Wales. All three areas have relied heavily on their shorelines for centuries. They have linguistic and cultural preservation in common and provide contrasting examples of rural and metropolitan living. Moreover, similar vulnerabilities and challenges affect these areas as a result of a changing climate. The project involves collaboration with a range of community-led initiatives to understand how stories are being used to develop low-tech, bottom-up, nature-based strategies and solutions for local coastal management. The project explores how the knowledge embedded in these stories is being adapted in different localities to reinvent cultural heritage-led sustainable innovation solutions. It highlights the importance of intergenerational knowledge and how looking to the past can help create a legacy for future generations. 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.