Belmont Forum-G8 Initiative Collaborative Research: METROPOLE: An Integrated Framework to Analyze Local Decision Making and Adaptive Capacity to Large-Scale Environmental Change

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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 develop an integrated framework to assess the human dimensions of climate change impacts in coastal communities in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Brazil. Often, scientific research and development of policy options focus primarily on technical or managerial concerns. Social dynamics and values as well as cultural and institutional structures are often not directly incorporated and addressed when considering coastal adaptation challenges and sustainability. This project will work directly with stakeholders and policymakers to co-produce data and adaptation options when assessing risk vulnerability. Downscaled climate forecasts and state-of-the-art visualization tools will be used to illustrate potential impacts on infrastructure, health, economic risk, adaption options, and cost/benefit analyses. Social research will use a series of surveys, models and interviews to understand values, beliefs, tradeoffs, and adaptive capacity. This work will contribute toward understanding how visualization technologies, engagement processes, and risk assessment models can support decision making processes and policy actions and toward addressing the complex issue of how communities of different cultural backgrounds respond to risk.