Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: Decision Support Systems to Improve Schistosomiasis Preparedness and Control in the Era of Global Changes

About This Grant

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. Working together in this Collaborative Research Action, the partner agencies have provided support to foster global transdisciplinary research teams of natural, health and social scientists and stakeholders from across the globe to improve understanding of climate, environment and health pathways to protect and promote health. The projects will provide crucial new understanding into the health implications arising from the impacts of climate change and variability on; 1) decision-science approaches to adaptation and implementation, 2) food, environment, and biological security and 3) risks to ecosystems and populations. 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 to increase our knowledge of the complex linkages and pathways between the climate, environment and health to help solve complex challenges that face societies. The project seeks to investigate the combined effect of environmental and land use change on the distribution of snail-borne schistosomiasis, a debilitating parasitic disease affecting more than 200 million people worldwide, with more than 800 million at risk. Schistosomiasis transmission is closely linked to water management infrastructure (e.g., dams, irrigation systems, and reservoirs) and the expansion of peri-urban areas lacking wastewater treatment. Schistosomiasis risk is also influenced by changing temperatures as the distribution and abundance of host snails and the parasite’s free-living stages, are temperature dependent. Despite the health risk assessments conducted for diseases such as malaria and dengue, schistosomiasis is often overlooked in Environmental Impact Assessments of water projects and health surveillance plans. A major gap is the lack of tools to provide decision-makers with timely, evidence-based insights into schistosomiasis risk under scenarios of land use change. This project aims to investigate the social, economic, and environmental determinants of schistosomiasis risk across rural and urban gradients, and assess its consideration in urban planning, Environmental Impact Assessments, and health surveillance systems. The project team will develop an open-access, user-friendly decision support system to estimate schistosomiasis transmission risk and assemble a database of potential actionable solutions based on historical successes and failures in schistosomiasis control, equipping stakeholders with both risk assessments and mitigation strategies. 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.