The Belmont Forum is pleased to announce the new awards funded under the multilateral, transdisciplinary Collaborative Research Action (CRA) focusing on Transdisciplinary Research for Pathways to Sustainability. 

The call supports the establishment of transdisciplinary networks to develop innovative solutions for sustainable development pathways. The funded networks seek to assess the positive and negative inter-linkages between the economy, technology, institutions with the environment, climate, biodiversity, and human well-being to understand potential pathways to a sustainable world. A critical focus of these networks is the co-production of knowledge and solutions using a transdisciplinary approach with deep engagement of societal stakeholders to ensure ownership of research outcomes, relevance to decision-makers, social acceptance, and empowerment.

Fourteen funders have committed approximately 2.5M€ of monetary and in-kind resources to support 13 research networks involving 136 personnel from 37 countries over the next 1-2 years. The teams will focus on sustainability challenges throughout the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe. Reaching a new milestone, 28% of personnel supported by this Belmont Forum call are from African Nations due to the generous support and partnership from FutureEarth Africa, AllEnvi, GEO, NIMR, and NRF. 

The CRA is aligned with the Future Earth Science-Based Pathways for Sustainability initiative, which aims to serve as an ‘incubator for engagement’ to build understanding of: a) How interactions at various scales in complex human-environment systems produce trade-offs or synergies within a context of competing development agendas, b) how transformations can be mobilized to enable expansion of integrated pathways to sustainability in diverse concrete contexts, and c) how local pathways and processes of transformation interact across locations and scales and ‘add up’ to outcomes at the regional and global levels.

Please send questions regarding the CRA to Pathways@futureearth.org

The National Science Foundation (NSF) managed the delivery of this call on behalf of the Belmont Forum partners/member countries (detailed below):