The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) participates in a call of the Belmont Forum on „Transdisciplinary Research for Pathways to Sustainability”. The Belmont Forum is an international partnership that mobilizes funding of environmental change research and accelerates its delivery to remove critical barriers to sustainability. The initiative invites its participants to consider and address all important interactions and cross-cutting issues among at a minimum three or more explicitly identified Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). Projects are free to prioritise the interactions to be explored, based on their own local, regional, national, or global context as long as they address the Belmont Challenge providing knowledge for understanding, mitigating, and adapting to global environmental change. Participants are required to use a transdisciplinary approach to engage society at large.
The first cycle of funding for this Collaborative Research Action (CRA) will be directed towards designing cross-cutting networks to build the community, mobilise capacity, bring together existing focused projects, develop networks focused on stakeholder mapping, engagement of new stakeholders, and evaluation of existing efforts. The aim is to build communities to be in a position to develop integrative sustainability pathways responding to society’s needs. In the coming years, future funding opportunities could expand research on sustainability pathways and SDG interlinkages.
The development of research networking consortia supported financially by at least three participating partner agencies established in three different countries is a key criterion. Researchers from countries not represented by any of the partner agencies can participate in the research project at their own expense. Transdisciplinarity of the research consortia and the active involvement of stakeholders in the research and innovation is a key criterion and should be clearly demonstrated in the application. Given the complexity and scope of the challenges, research consortia must be truly transdisciplinary, including academic researchers from: a) social sciences/humanities, b) natural sciences/technology, and c) stakeholders using a co-design, co-development and co-implementation approach.
The call was launched on 23 July 2020 with a closing date of 31 October 2020. All applicants requesting funding from DFG are required to additionally submit their complete proposal through the DFG’s elan system. The deadline for the additional DFG elan submission is 5 November 2020. Further details as to the scientific themes, principles of funding, selection criteria, all call documents and the submission portal can be found at the Belmont Forum Grant Operations website.
