Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: Food System Governance, Food Sercurity and Land Use in Southern Africa

University Of Florida, Gainesville FL

Investigators

Abstract

This award provides support to U.S. researchers participating in a project competitively selected by a 13-country initiative on global change research through the Belmont Forum and The Joint Research Programming Initiative on Agriculture, Food Security and Climate Change (FACCE-JPI). The Belmont Forum is a high level group of the world's major and emerging funders of global environmental change research and international science councils. It aims to accelerate delivery of the international environmental research most urgently needed to remove critical barriers to sustainability by aligning and mobilizing international resources. This group developed a funding framework to support multilateral research projects that address global challenges in ways that are beyond the capacity of national or bilateral activities. 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 an inaugural call of the International Opportunities Fund, the Belmont Forum and JPI-FACCE have provided support for research projects that seek to deliver knowledge needed for action to mitigate and adapt to detrimental environmental change and extreme hazardous events that relate to food security and land use change. 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 and that bring together natural scientists, social scientists and research users (e.g., policy makers, regulators, NGOs, communities and industry). This project seeks to investigate how food production and distribution affects how land is used and how these choices are affected by changes in the environment. This project will focus on Southern Africa as a case study and will develop an international group of partners from 4 countries who will work together to understand the relationships between the demands for food, food distribution networks and how land and natural resources are used. Results of this study are likely to help understand these interactions in other countries, including the United States.