Belmont Forum-G8 Initiative Collaborative Research: Enhancing Adaptation and Resilience to Drought in Dry Tropical Social-Ecological Systems: The Guyanacaste, Costa Rica Example

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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 identify future drought adaptation options, with an emphasis on building resilience to water scarcity in drought prone social-ecological systems, using the arid Northwest region of Costa Rica as a case study. Resilience to drought requires development of coherent conceptual and scientific knowledge as well as an improved understanding of human and institutional responses to events and forecasts. The goal of this project is to contribute to the sustainable management of water resources for the benefit of both society as well as ecosystems. The project will do this by (1) characterizing current physical and social conditions; (2) modeling the impacts of changing climate and weather on resources, people and other drivers of change; and (3) developing new methods for and implementation of decision aids, including the development of practical new heuristics, communication, and outreach. These efforts will contribute important aspects of drought management and adaptation, with applications both to dry tropical environments and more broadly to drought sensitive coupled socio-ecological systems. The project will contribute toward an improved and integrated understanding of the monitoring and modeling of aquifers, agriculture, ecosystem services, climate scenarios, and weather forecasts.