Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: Decision making in the built environment as a public health intervention for malaria control

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. BEDMAC seeks to develop a multidisciplinary approach to understand ways a well-designed and operated built environment can mitigate the risk of malaria transmission. Using comparative case studies from the participating regions, the project team will derive research insights and address transdisciplinary methodological gaps at the intersection of the built environment and malaria’s impacts on human health. Specifically, the project will develop a novel transdisciplinary methodology drawing from convergent approaches in global comparative research to enhance our understanding of common drivers of malaria and context-specific processes that can help deliver a malaria-smart building sector. 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.