Partners: Johns Hopkins University, University of Bonn (Germany), University of Brescia (Italy), Addis Ababa University (Ethiopia)
Funding Agency: Belmont Forum
Award Period: 2016-2019
This award provides support to U.S. researchers participating in a project competitively selected by a six-country initiative on global change research through the Belmont Forum. The Belmont Forum is a group of the world?s major and emerging funders of global environmental change research. It aims to accelerate delivery of the international environmental research most urgently needed to remove critical barriers to sustainability by aligning and mobilizing international resources. Each partner organization provides funding for researchers from their country 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 project is also supported by the NSF Office of International Science and Engineering Global Venture Fund.
Working together in a Collaborative Research Action, the six partner organizations have provided support for research projects that utilize a strong inter- and trans-disciplinary approach to examine environmental and related societal change in mountain regions. This award provides support for the U.S. researchers to cooperate in a consortium of partners from at least three of the participating countries and that brings together natural scientists, social scientists and research users (e.g., policy makers, regulators, NGOs, communities and industry).
This research will identify options to address emerging food-energy-water pressures in the rapidly changing Ethiopian Blue Nile Mountains. This project will engage stakeholders at local, regional, and national level to define system components and dynamics, identify favored adaptation strategies, and develop scenarios of probable and of possible futures under externally forced and locally driven change.