Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: YAKU, Integrating Water Governance and Child Health: A Cross-Sectoral Approach to Reducing Under-5 Mortality

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. Working together in this Collaborative Research Action, the partner agencies have provided support to foster global transdisciplinary research teams of natural, health and social scientists and stakeholders from across the globe to improve understanding of climate, environment and health pathways to protect and promote health. The projects will provide crucial new understanding into the health implications arising from the impacts of climate change and variability on; 1) decision-science approaches to adaptation and implementation, 2) food, environment, and biological security and 3) risks to ecosystems and populations. 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 to increase our knowledge of the complex linkages and pathways between the climate, environment and health to help solve complex challenges that face societies. The YAKU project seeks to study the connections between water governance and health by investigating child mortality, which represents a key marker of the overall health of a society. Unsafe drinking water, lack of proper sanitation and presence of stagnant water rank among the main causes of under-5 children mortality. Adequate water and sanitation management systems are instrumental in countering the spread of infectious vector borne and water-borne diseases responsible for a large proportion of child mortality around the world. The YAKU team will identify effective cross-sectoral strategies that can significantly reduce mortality rates by improving water governance models. Specifically, the team will examine water governance models in the sectors related to safe water supply, sanitation, and wastewater management in rural and urban community settings in Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Morocco and Tunisia to elucidate their potentially differential impacts on under-5 child mortality. This information will help improve population health, especially for approaches to water governance and child health across different geographies, including the United States. The project will provide information on water governance adaptation and resilience mechanisms needed to confront environmental risks, in relation to child health which can be used to enhance water governance/management systems to reduce child mortality due to infectious diseases, and in turn, improve the overall health of their societies. 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.