Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: Digital infrastructure for sustainable consumption

该奖项通过贝尔蒙特论坛，为参与由55个国家的全球变化研究倡议竞争性选择的项目的美国研究人员提供支持。 贝尔蒙特论坛是一个由研究供资组织组成的联合会，其重点是支持对全球环境变化挑战和机遇采取跨学科办法。 它的目的是通过调整和调动国际资源，加快提供最迫切需要的国际研究，以消除可持续性的关键障碍。每个伙伴国家都在一个财团内为其研究人员提供资金，以减轻跨越国际边界的资金需求。这一办法有助于有效利用国家资源，支持对具有全球意义的专题进行出色的研究，最好通过多国办法加以处理，同时认识到全球挑战需要全球解决办法。该奖项为美国研究人员提供支持，使他们能够在由至少三个参与国的合作伙伴组成的联盟中进行合作。 这些团队将开发和采用新的跨学科方法，将可持续消费和生产作为一个社会技术系统来处理，以帮助为可持续、有弹性和公正的消费和生产系统提供决策信息。可持续消费数字基础设施（DISCo）项目旨在提供理论上知情和实践导向的知识，说明可持续消费（即，更少的资源和碳密集型和/或更少的环境破坏性的消费）可以通过数字技术来实现。该团队试图了解数字技术是否可以帮助缩小我们的意图和行动之间的差距（例如，回收利用，购买二手，食物垃圾转移），当涉及到可持续性。该项目团队试图建立在现有研究的基础上，研究单一应用程序的使用和相对同质的社区中的应用程序使用，以解决三个问题：（1）数字技术如何成为我们日常生活的一部分，（2）数字技术如何与现有的消费模式互动，以及（3）这些技术何时成功改变行为（即，在什么条件下）？项目团队将使用生命周期分析和人种学方法，以更好地了解拟议技术解决方案的影响。随着对食品和移动服务的关注，分析将提供有关交通和食品行为变化的重要信息，这两个方面都是大多数人日常碳消费的很大一部分。该提案团队代表六个国家（瑞典，挪威，土耳其，美国和日本）在相关领域（社会学，通信，食品和环境科学）。 该项目的总体方法源于所采用的领域范围，并分为5个工作包，其中包括相互关联的研究活动。利益相关者参与整个项目，社会合作伙伴参与研讨会并作为专家团队的一部分。该奖项反映了NSF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 develop and employ new transdisciplinary approaches to address sustainable consumption and production as a socio-technical system to help inform decision-making for sustainable, resilient, and just systems of consumption and production.The Digital Infrastructure for Sustainable Consumption (DISCo) project seeks to produce both theoretically informed and practically oriented knowledge on how sustainable consumption (i.e., consumption that is less resource and carbon-intensive and/or less environmentally damaging) can be enabled through digital technologies. The team seeks to understand if digital technology can help close the gap between our intentions and actions (e.g., recycling, buying second hand, food waste diversion) when it comes to sustainability. The project team seeks to build upon existing research examining single app use and app use within a relatively homogenous community, to address three questions around (1) how digital technologies become part of our routines, (2) how digital technologies can interact with existing consumption patterns and (3) when do these technologies succeed in shifting behavior (i.e., under what conditions)? The project team will use methods from life cycle analysis and ethnography to better understand the impact of the proposed tech solutions. With the focus on food and mobility services the analyses will provide important information about changing behavior around transportation and food, both large portions of most individuals daily carbon consumption. The proposal team represents six countries (Sweden, Norway, Turkey, USA, and Japan) in related fields (sociology, communication, food and environmental sciences). The project’s overall approach stems from the range of fields employed and is organized into 5 work packages with interconnected research activities. Stakeholder involvement occurs throughout the project with societal partners participating in workshops and as part of the expert teams.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.