Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: Global Change Impact on Vulnerable Carbon Reservoirs: Carbon Sequestration and emissions in soils and waters from the Arctic to the Equator

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This award provides support to U.S. researchers participating in a project competitively selected by a 9-country initiative on global change research through the Belmont Forum. The Belmont Forum is a consortium of research funding organizations representing over 55 countries 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. 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 research teams will work to identify sustainable pathways to help alleviate the increasing and unprecedented pressure on the natural resources that interact to provide sustainable life support systems and essential benefits to societies such as food production and water quality and quantity. The impacts of changes in land management and urbanization will be evaluated to develop sustainable soils and groundwater management options that will help create and maintain sustainable terrestrial ecosystems. This project will focus on understanding the long-term response of the Earth’s Critical Zone to environmental, societal and economic drivers. The Critical Zone is the heterogeneous, near surface environment where complex interactions involving rock, soil, water, air, and living organisms regulate the natural habitat and determine the availability of life-sustaining resources. This project will focus on the tropical socio-ecosystems of Western Central Africa, and the Arctic and sub-arctic zones of the Western Siberian Lowlands. These regions are now increasingly impacted by accelerated global changes with the predictable degradation of soil and groundwater systems, which could potentially lead to huge emissions of greenhouse gases and to vast carbon and nutrient exports from land to oceans. The project will create an operational research and innovation framework on climate change, land use/cover, carbon cycle and soils, surface water, and groundwater sustainability, to improve soil, surface and groundwater knowledge, management, and policy from the local to regional scale. The research team will work with relevant stakeholders to develop and implement the results of the project to raise awareness of soil, water, climate change, carbon cycle and sustainability of Critical Zone and river and lake groundwater, and threats related to their degradation.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.