This award provides support to U.S. researchers participating in a project competitively selected by a 13-country initiative on global change research through the Belmont Forum and the G8 countries Heads of Research Councils. The Belmont Forum is a high level group of the world's major and emerging funders of global environmental change research and international science councils. 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. The G8 Heads of Research Councils developed a funding framework to support multilateral research projects that address global challenges in ways that are beyond the capacity of national or bilateral activities. 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.

Working together in an inaugural call of the International Opportunities Fund, the Belmont Forum and G8HORCs have provided support for research projects that seek to deliver knowledge needed for action to mitigate and adapt to detrimental environmental change and extreme hazardous events that relate to either Freshwater Security or Coastal Vulnerability. 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 and that bring together natural scientists, social scientists and research users (e.g., policy makers, regulators, NGOs, communities and industry).

This award supports research activities that will create a better understanding of the underlying socio-ecological adaptation processes in coastal regions that facilitate effective adaptation to coastal vulnerabilities. Adaptation practices can have long term and unintended consequences for the vulnerability of society, specific stakeholders, and/or ecosystems. Understanding how feedbacks occur between risk from biophysical changes, cognitive processes and adaptation practices can facilitate more effective adaptation strategies. This project will adopt a socio-ecological systems approach to model practices and feedbacks in response to climate change in three coastal regions in France, South Africa, and the United Kingdom. This will be done by assessing interactions among (1) actual risks posed by climate change; (2) cognitive factors such as perceived risk and adaptive capacity; (3) adaptations; and (4) situational learning where decision makers and stakeholders participate in modeling processes. Multi-scale models, ranging in scale from individuals to regional planning bodies, will be developed to study cognitive shifts that contribute to adaptation practices. This project will contribute toward improving vulnerability and adaptation assessment and decisions by focusing on the way decisions are made and the long term implications consequences of decisions and practices.