Collaborative Research Belmont Forum: VULnerability of Populations under Extreme Scenarios

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This award provides support to U.S. researchers participating in a project competitively selected by a six-country initiative on global change research through the Belmont Forum. The Belmont Forum is a group of the world?s major and emerging funders of global environmental change research. 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. Each partner organization provides funding for researchers from their country 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 a Collaborative Research Action, the six partner organizations have provided support for research projects that utilize a strong inter- and trans-disciplinary approach to examine climate, environmental, and related societal change in mountain regions. This award provides support for the U.S. researchers to cooperate in a consortium of partners from at least three of the participating countries and that brings together natural scientists, social scientists and research users (e.g., policy makers, regulators, NGOs, communities and industry). This project seeks to use fossils, ancient and modern DNA samples from Morocco, Cameroon, South Africa, China, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Brazil, and modeling techniques to investigate how ecosystems in mountain ranges have changed over the past 21,000 years and to establish an index of vulnerability which can be used across different mountain ecosystems. This information will contribute to an understanding of how social and ecological changes may impact food security in these regions.