Belmont Forum-G8 Initiative Collaborative Research: Southern Africa's Hydro-Economy and Water Security: SAHEWS

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This award provides support to U.S. researchers participating in a project competitively selected by a 13-country initiative on global change research through the Belmont Forum and the G8 countries Heads of Research Councils. The Belmont Forum is a high level group of the world?s major and emerging funders of global environmental change research and international science councils. It aims to accelerate delivery of the international environmental research most urgently needed to remove critical barriers to sustainability by aligning and mobilizing international resources. The G8 Heads of Research Councils developed a funding framework to support multilateral research projects that address global challenges in ways that are beyond the capacity of national or bilateral activities. 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 an inaugural call of the International Opportunities Fund, the Belmont Forum and G8HORCs have provided support for research projects that seek to deliver knowledge needed for action to mitigate and adapt to detrimental environmental change and extreme hazardous events that relate to either Freshwater Security or Coastal Vulnerability. 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 and that bring together natural scientists, social scientists and research users (e.g., policy makers, regulators, NGOs, communities and industry). This award supports research activities that will address important knowledge gaps in water supply, demand and sharing, and in the application of research to the effective management of freshwater security in Southern Africa. Numerous challenges including population growth, drought-induced food shortages, increasing energy demands and a variable climate interact to make Southern Africa especially sensitive to freshwater security threats. Adding to these challenges is a lack of institutional and policy instruments for equitable and sustainable management of supply and demand in the broader hydro-economy. This project will integrate an understanding of short to medium term hydro-meteorological variability and its socioeconomic consequences to develop approaches for improved regional water resources management. Researchers will develop an improved understanding of hydro-meteorological variability and human-environmental interactions to characterize how this variability affects the regional hydro-economy. This will be achieved through careful case study and co-designed research and facilitated high level knowledge exchange. This project will contribute an improved understanding of the global climate-water-food-energy nexus to support decision making and equitable and sustainable freshwater management.