Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: Aquaponics optimization in a local climatic, economic and cultural context

University Of Washington, Seattle WA

Investigators

Abstract

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 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 teams will develop and employ new transdisciplinary approaches to address sustainable consumption and production as a socio-technical system to help inform decision-making for sustainable, resilient, and just systems of consumption and production. The project focuses on the role that aquaponics can play in sustainable food production by advancing technology that can recover water, energy, and nutrients from waste streams within existing supply chains. The aim is to enhance a climate-change-resilient food production system that: reduces, reuses, and recycles inputs while increasing nutrient and water use efficiencies; reutilizes industrial and agricultural waste streams to turn them into food, energy, and profit; provides ways to produce food that adapt to local climate change conditions; and builds community capacity to support and sustain positive change through skills development and knowledge exchange. The project will take a holistic approach to evaluate aquaponics operations in diverse geo-climatic zones and document how adaptations of their technologies and practices can better support local and regional food production. The project contributes to decarbonized and resource-efficient food production; it improves nutrient reuse and microbial relationships for fish and plant health; increases energy efficiency; reduces fossil fuel dependency and freshwater needs; develops scalable models for implementation; enhances deployment of human resources with technologies; and explores how aquaponics can be adapted to geo-climatic diversity. 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.