NSF Award
2135761
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 establish transdisciplinary networks to develop innovative solutions for sustainable development pathways and seek to assess the positive and negative inter-linkages between the economy, technology, institutions with the environment, climate, biodiversity, and human well-being to understand potential pathways to a sustainable world.<br/><br/>The project seeks to determine the social, economic, and ecological challenges and their interdependencies affect the sustainability of African cities. The project will develop and work with urban community networks in six representative African cities networks to develop potential pathways to foster sustainability of these and other African cities. The project will assess the social, economic and ecological assets of these cities and determine how these assets are distributed in space and time. This data will help the project reframe the question from “what city communities do not have” to “what city communities have” for building synergies and interdependencies. The project will utilize ground-truthed, satellite images, social and ecological facilities and participatory geographic information systems, maps of community spaces of interest, along with data from and extensive review of existing urban policies, directives, and by-laws, to build potential sustainability pathways. The stakeholders will then localize and downscale the plans from global to national level, and from national to community level. Based on these findings and experiences, plausible scenarios for sustainable African cities will be developed.<br/><br/>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.
