Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: Stakeholder-supported decision making for sustainable conjunctive management of soil and groundwater (INCLUSIVE)

University Of California-Davis, Davis CA

Investigators

Abstract

This award provides support to U.S. researchers participating in a project competitively selected by a 9-country initiative on global change research through the Belmont Forum. The Belmont Forum is a consortium of research funding organizations representing over 55 countries 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 award provides support for the U.S. researchers to cooperate in consortia that consist of partners from at least three of the participating countries. The research teams will work to identify sustainable pathways to help alleviate the increasing and unprecedented pressure on the natural resources that interact to provide sustainable life support systems and essential benefits to societies such as food production and water quality and quantity. The impacts of changes in land management and urbanization will be evaluated to develop sustainable soils and groundwater management options that will help create and maintain sustainable terrestrial ecosystems. As groundwater extraction increases worldwide, generating a range of economic and ecological impacts, many countries are implementing regulation systems to restrict groundwater use. Implementation of these restrictions is often problematic resulting in low regulatory compliance. This project seeks to demonstrate that well-designed stakeholder processes can deliver socially accepted management rules with higher compliance, thereby enhancing groundwater long-term sustainability. The project focuses on how effective stakeholder involvement impacts stakeholder groundwater literacy, develops capacity to think long-term and capture trade-offs, and contributes to developing innovative regulations. The research team will investigate whether a paradigm shift from narrowly defined groundwater management practices of limiting water abstraction to conjunctive soil and groundwater management which focuses on managing "net water extraction" accounting for retention and recharge can improve regulatory compliance. The project will rely on 7 transdisciplinary case studies in France, the United States and Taiwan to engage in collective learning and the identification of pre-conditions for successful stakeholder processes delivering socially accepted groundwater management schemes. 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.