Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: Building Socio-Ecological Resilience through Urban Green, Blue and White Space

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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.Working together in this Collaborative Research Action, the partner agencies have provided support for research projects that focus on Resilience in a Rapidly Changing Arctic. Integrated teams of scientists and stakeholders will address key areas of arctic resilience understanding and action. This collaboration of academic and non-academic knowledge systems constitutes a transdisciplinary approach that will advance not only understanding of the fundamentals of arctic resilience but also spur action, inform decision-making, and translate into solutions for resilience. 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 Building Socio-Ecological Resilience through Urban Green, Blue and White Space (SERUS) project will focus on expanding knowledge on the impact of open space on urban resilience in Arctic cities, which are mainly considered as outposts isolated from harsh climate and fragile northern nature. This project is aimed at obtaining knowledge about future shifts of Arctic ecosystems from observations using Arctic urban heat islands as a “time machine.” Its main objective is to collect data and knowledge, to gain skills and expertise, to exchange this knowledge with local communities, to integrate diverse resilience indicators and to create a holistic understanding of urban open space in the Arctic cities. The project seeks to advance a cross-disciplinary climate-ecology-policy (CEP) approach for improvement of Arctic urban resilience by targeting natural resilience elements of this ecosystem through novel technologies of data collection, data fusion and analysis documenting parallel changes observed in urban, disturbed and pristine (natural backgrounds) types of open land-use/land-cover spaces. The project will strengthen resilience and adaptive capacity of the urban Arctic through integrating climate-ecosystem-social open space values into urban planning efforts across many Arctic cities. The project is expected to provide information that can be used to develop new ways to incorporate local and indigenous knowledge in urban planning and climate mitigation. It will raise local population and stakeholder awareness about urban climate anomalies and ecosystem responses to global change, new construction materials and air quality issues.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.