Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: RETRACE-ResilienceS to Climate Risks: Lessons from Arctic and Pacific Communities

This award provides support to U.S. researchers participating in a project competitively selected by a 55-country initiative on global environmental 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 environmental change, foster collaboration among the research community across several regions, and contribute to knowledge advances at the global level. The project intersects participatory action research, science co-construction, and transdisciplinarity. The RETRACE project will enable communities to identify and strengthen unique resilience levers, enhancing understanding and response to environmental risks through the integration of traditional knowledge and scientific insights. The approach will bridge the gap between theoretical resilience science and the actual experiences of community resilience, by synthesizing local narratives with scientific research, making resilience strategies more understandable and accessible to both communities and policymakers. A significant output of the project is the development of a spatial decision-support system, combining qualitative and quantitative data to aid decision-making. The project outcomes will offer a model for other vulnerable communities, providing a framework to understand and strengthen resilience in various settings. 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.