Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: Community-Centered Modeling of Housing Related Health Disparities

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 ComDisp project aims to develop an internationally proven, collaborative, iterative process for grassroots modeling of health with predictive capability across weather-variability scenarios. The project responds to health-related challenges related to housing conditions in the USA, Vietnam, Turkey and Ecuador - with broad relevance in every global society - where living environments are shaped by historical and contemporary patterns of change. The project focuses on populations who live in areas with high exposure to weather-variability and local hazards. In these areas, elderly, children, and individuals that have pre-existing health conditions are at elevated risk. The project team will leverage existing partnerships with non-academic stakeholders to include local governments (land use, housing, public health), and community health & housing organizations. The team will build on the approach developed by a team member’s study in Florida which developed a unique agent-based model and a network of indoor and outdoor air quality sensors with local community members in a participatory action research process. The project will combine spatial analyses of multiple environmental hazards that are impacted by weather-variability - in particular heat island effects, heatwaves, hurricanes and flooding - pertinent to cardiovascular and respiratory health outcomes. The team will develop local models of housing and health in USA, Vietnam, Turkey and Ecuador to connect and augment national datasets and models, to not only project future localized scenarios but to develop a strategy with affected communities to alter their present and future through science and action. 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.