Catalyzing Transdisciplinary Approaches to Global Socio-Environmental Challenges through International Collaboration: Role for U.S. Organizations

The challenges facing humanity are complex and are not restricted to national borders.  The causal factors of these challenges can be subtly interrelated and many often play a role in several different global issues.  This interconnected nature means that actions and decisions designed to solve a single problem can invariably impact other seemingly unrelated challenges and lead to unintended consequences.  Sustainable solutions to the majority of the world’s most difficult socio-environmental challenges can be achieved if science communities and societies from across the globe work together to employ a systems approach that relies on inter- and transdisciplinary methods to problem solving.  These approaches provide a more holistic framework to assess potential solutions.  

While multinational, inter- and transdisciplinary research is essential for solving these challenges, funding these teams is difficult for many national funding agencies.  To solve this problem, the Belmont Forum[1] came together in 2012 to establish an international opportunity for multi-national teams to address global environmental challenges through a single, peer-reviewed proposal where successful proposal partners are funded through their own national funding agency and no funds cross international borders. 

Since 2012, the Belmont Forum has supported 10 separate calls to support user-focused, inter- and trans-disciplinary collaborative projects that require collaboration among natural sciences, social sciences, the humanities and stakeholders and that emphasize local knowledge to address societal needs.  The research teams seek to deliver products and information useful for decision-making and to utilize existing data in innovative ways to address critical challenges.

Over the next several years the Belmont Forum will be launching new initiatives to support multi-national, inter- and transdisciplinary research teams to address challenges in ocean sustainability, climate, environment and health, arctic observing and sustainability, disaster risk reduction and resilience, science for the Sustainable Development Goals (systems approaches to achieve the SDGs), Science-driven e-Infrastructure Innovation – data interoperability. 

The Belmont Forum seeks to work with a wide variety of organizations that complement the existing Belmont members.  Each participating organization declares who is eligible to receive their support, the limit of or type of support and if there are particular research areas that the organization is particularly interested in supporting.  Support can include monetary funds, in-kind support of organization staff time, access to facilities or other options.  This presentation will explore the developing initiatives and identify ways of partnering with the Belmont Forum. 

An informal consortium of 29 of the world’s principal and emerging funders of environmental change research, aims to mobilize international resources to catalyze delivery of the environmental science-derived solutions that society needs to mitigate and adapt to challenges and opportunities associated with global environmental change.  The Forum has supported 63 projects across 10 funding actions, for a total amount of approximately 128M USD.