Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: Building Urban Community Networks for Sustainable Cities in Africa

该奖项为参与由55个国家通过贝尔蒙特论坛发起的全球变化研究项目的美国研究人员提供支持。贝尔蒙特论坛是一个研究资助组织的联盟，致力于支持跨学科方法来应对全球环境变化的挑战和机遇。它的目的是通过协调和调动国际资源，加速提供最迫切需要的国际研究，以消除可持续发展的关键障碍。每个伙伴国在一个联盟中为它们的研究人员提供资金，以减轻对跨越国际边界的资金的需求。这种方法有助于有效利用国家资源，支持对全球相关主题的优秀研究，最好通过多国方法解决，同时认识到全球挑战需要全球解决方案。该奖项为美国研究人员在至少三个参与国的合作伙伴组成的联盟中进行合作提供支持。这些小组将建立跨学科网络，为可持续发展途径制定创新的解决办法，并设法评估经济、技术、机构与环境、气候、生物多样性和人类福祉之间的积极和消极相互联系，以了解通往可持续世界的潜在途径。该项目旨在确定社会、经济和生态挑战及其相互依存关系对非洲城市可持续性的影响。该项目将在六个具有代表性的非洲城市网络中发展城市社区网络并与之合作，以开发促进这些城市和其他非洲城市可持续发展的潜在途径。该项目将对这些城市的社会、经济和生态资产进行评估，并确定这些资产在空间和时间上的分布。这些数据将帮助该项目将问题从“城市社区没有什么”转变为“城市社区有什么”，以建立协同效应和相互依赖性。该项目将利用真实的卫星图像、社会和生态设施、参与式地理信息系统、感兴趣的社区空间地图，以及对现有城市政策、指令和章程的数据和广泛审查，建立潜在的可持续发展途径。然后，利益相关者将本地化并缩小计划的规模，从全球到国家一级，从国家到社区一级。根据这些发现和经验，将为可持续的非洲城市制定合理的方案。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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. 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 teams will establish transdisciplinary networks to develop innovative solutions for sustainable development pathways and seek to assess the positive and negative inter-linkages between the economy, technology, institutions with the environment, climate, biodiversity, and human well-being to understand potential pathways to a sustainable world.The project seeks to determine the social, economic, and ecological challenges and their interdependencies affect the sustainability of African cities. The project will develop and work with urban community networks in six representative African cities networks to develop potential pathways to foster sustainability of these and other African cities. The project will assess the social, economic and ecological assets of these cities and determine how these assets are distributed in space and time. This data will help the project reframe the question from “what city communities do not have” to “what city communities have” for building synergies and interdependencies. The project will utilize ground-truthed, satellite images, social and ecological facilities and participatory geographic information systems, maps of community spaces of interest, along with data from and extensive review of existing urban policies, directives, and by-laws, to build potential sustainability pathways. The stakeholders will then localize and downscale the plans from global to national level, and from national to community level. Based on these findings and experiences, plausible scenarios for sustainable African cities will be developed.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.