Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: IMProving Heat-Health RESponse in South Asia

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 IMPHRESS project seeks to help communities address challenges around extreme heat events. Extreme heat is a serious global public health challenge and impacts of heat in areas with large populations are poorly understood. While there has been an increasing amount of research into extreme heat it has been challenging to mount a systemic response to the heat-health challenge due to the lack of research that addresses all aspects of this systems problem. Working with partners from India, the research team will seek to measure heat exposure and the frequency and intensity of extreme heat events to help develop physical activity and energy expenditure models for occupations with high heat exposure. These models will be combined with weather forecasts to develop a prototype early warning system that provides targeted heat-health advisories. The project will also develop a suite of heat stress metrics and develop multi-dimensional estimates of chronic heat stress and loss in labor productivity and engage with community and institutional actors to facilitate development of heat-health 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.