Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: AWareness Against Health ThReats of Extreme Weather Events (AWARE)

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. populations. The AWARE project seeks to expand on a previous Belmont Forum project that investigated the impact of extreme weather events on the burden of food- and water-borne illnesses and built a built a prototype early warning system using statistical methods. The research team will improve accuracy of the early warning system by incorporating more recent data, improve spatial resolution, and perform prospective evaluation. There is a pressing need to enhance public health adaption measures including preparedness, capability for rapid mobilization of public health resources, healthcare infrastructure resilience, and awareness training. Leveraging novel datasets and recent advances in modern machine learning, the project team will enhance the predictive power and geographic resolution of our prototype early warning system to forecast diarrheal disease burden at seasonal to sub-seasonal scales in the study area (India, Indonesia, Nepal, South Africa, Taiwan, Vietnam), and carry out a prospective evaluation of the early warning system to predict disease burden ahead of time. AWARE will leverage artificial intelligence to synthesize high dimensional data and develop early warning systems in partnership with local stakeholders to enhance resilience against health threats posed by extreme weather events. 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.