Agency

Established in 2009, the Belmont Forum is a partnership of funding organizations, international science councils, and regional consortia committed to the advancement of transdisciplinary science. Forum operations are guided by the Belmont Challenge, a vision document that encourages:

International transdisciplinary research providing knowledge for understanding, mitigating and adapting to global environmental change.

Forum members and partner organizations work collaboratively to meet this Challenge by issuing international calls for proposals, committing to best practices for open data access, and providing transdisciplinary training.  To that end, the Belmont Forum is also working to enhance the broader capacity to conduct transnational environmental change research through its e-Infrastructure and Data Management initiative.

How the Belmont Forum Works

Scientist and stakeholder support is made possible through Collaborative Research Actions (CRAs), which are the Forum equivalent of a call for proposals.  Since its establishment, the Forum successfully led 17 calls for proposals, supporting 99 projects and more than 1000 scientists and stakeholders, representing over 40 countries on 6 continents.  Themes addressed by CRAs have included Freshwater Security, Coastal Vulnerability, Food Security and Land Use Change, Climate Predictability and Inter-Regional Linkages, Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, Arctic Observing and Science for Sustainability, and Mountains as Sentinels of Change.  New themes are developed through a scoping process and made available for proposals through the Belmont Forum website and its Grant Operations page.

Each proposal submitted to a CRA theme in the Belmont Forum Grants Operations (BFgo) must consist of a project co-developed by natural scientists, social scientists, and stakeholders that hail from at least three countries.  Stakeholder is used in its broadest sense in CRAs, representing the potential to co-develop and co-implement projects with communities, policymakers, business and industry, unionized bodies, tribal organizations, non-governmental organizations, and many others not listed here.  Similarly, the Forum’s definition of social science includes the full breadth of social disciplines, including economics and the humanities.  The research itself can take place within one or more countries anywhere in the world, but the team itself must be eligible for support from three funding organizations participating in the CRA.