Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: The Indigenous Peoples Observatory Network (IPON): Understanding and responding to complex climate-health emergencies

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 IPON project seeks to investigate complex climate-health emergencies, which are crises caused by co-occurring and compounding medical, social, economic, and environmental risks that overwhelm health systems. Extreme events are among the major emerging drivers of these emergencies, intersecting with complex regional and global challenges such as biodiversity loss, land degradation, food and nutrition insecurity, and emerging diseases. Local communities face unique health challenges exacerbated by rapid environmental change, compounded by social determinants of health such as limited access to healthcare. The project will document, understand, and monitor the factors affecting the creation, evolution, and impact of complex climate-health emergencies among local communities in Uganda, Sri Lanka, India, Peru, Bolivia, and Argentina. Through the development and use of Observatories, the project will leverage real-time community-driven monitoring to document and analyze how interacting climatic and non-climatic stresses affect health systems and lived experiences. This approach deepens understanding of complex climate-health emergencies, establishes scalable solutions and offers innovative strategies for adaptation and mitigation applicable across various climate-sensitive regions. By integrating knowledge systems and co-developing pilot interventions, this project will generate transformative insights into how extreme climatic events mediate complex climate-health emergencies through food systems, inform resilience-building strategies, and establish an international knowledge-sharing network to guide health risk management policies. 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.