Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: Negotiating Ocean Conflicts among RIvals for Sustainable and Equitable Solutions

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.

This project focuses on a critical issue in ocean sustainability. The ocean provides resources and ecosystem services to multiple marine sectors and stakeholders and the goal of ocean sustainability is to accomplish a fair and sustainable use of these resources and services. This means simultaneously achieving economic development (blue growth), environmental sustainability, social equity and inclusion across space and time, in a context of growing demands. Often, the needs and actions of the various sectors and stakeholders are at cross purposes to one another resulting in conflict. This project seeks to develop and implement qualitative modeling strategies to address various ocean conflicts. The project will investigate six case studies located in three ocean regions with diverse income levels and characterized by rapid ecological and/or social change such as ocean warming, acidification or resource exploitation, urbanization, industrial development. The project will assess the origin, drivers, and mitigation strategies of these ocean conflicts in each case study where a different combination of social and ecological pressures together with trade-off decisions trigger ocean conflicts. Data produced from the case studies will be used for graphic visualizations that construct different narratives about the conflict that will ultimately promote long lasting equitable resource allocations and impartial transitions to achieve sustainable ocean management. The project will benefit a broad range of local and national-level stakeholders, including local communities, government, marine planning agencies, and local and national decision-makers by increasing the knowledge base of sustainable ocean multi-use practices to help improve and foster the blue (ocean) economy while preserving ocean space and resources.

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.