Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: Climate extremes and migration in Madagascar: Towards an integrated monitoring and modeling for mitigation and adaptation

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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. 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 projects to identify and understand how climate-related events, both slow and rapid onset, are linked to human migration and mobility. The CHAIN project, focused on a case study in Madagascar, includes agent-based and multi-hazard modeling to fill gaps in our understanding around climate driven migration. The investigators will use multiple approaches to build a cohesive data set to address four specific, well-defined, gaps in the literature. By doing so, the project team will also develop cost-effective methods for quantifying and then modeling migration, in a multi-hazard environment. Importantly, the project aims to characterize migration to inform adaptation and policy responses. These goals will be accomplished via four interconnected work packages, with intentionality and theory informing the connections the team prioritizes. The work packages include: (1) remote sensing-based estimates of migration, (2) physical models, (3) measuring the migration-multi-hazard environment nexus; and (4) agent-based modeling. The research team includes researchers from France, Madagascar, Sweden, UK, and USA, and draws on several expertise to accomplish their goals: environmental physics and geography, climatology and environmental sciences, development studies, applied development economics, policy evaluation, and behavioral and other social sciences. The team also includes six stakeholder organizations and by including “knowledge-brokering” workshops throughout the project the team demonstrated their commitment to the co-production of knowledge. This collective skillset is critical for the team to develop integrated human-centric approaches and better understand complex relationships among the many factors influencing migration/mobility and its relationship to climate hazards.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.