The Belmont Forum, a group of global change research funding agencies, had convened a mid-term meeting of funded collaborative research projects under the Call “Coastal Vulnerability”. The meeting was convened by the TPO (NERC) alongside the ‘Deltas in Times of Change II’ conference in Rotterdam on 23 September 2014.

Together with its sister programme “Freshwater Security” this Belmont Forum initiative leveraged some 20M Euros in new funding. TRUC (or Transformation and Resilience on Urban Coasts) is among the newly funded projects. The project is led by IRDR SC member Mark Pelling and focused on the relationship between resilience and transformation on highly urbanized coasts. Five cases of megacities are being examined: Kolkata, Lagos, London, New York and Tokyo (with Shanghai also being studied in a funded sister project). TRUC will build an original integrated, participatory framework in collaboration with stakeholders to first characterise and then identify interactions between bio-physical, land-use and decision making processes, connecting this project to the RIA working group of IRDR.

At the Belmont Forum workshop, projects were joined by four thematically aligned projects funded under the EU’s Framework Programme 7. All in all, the meeting was attended by 18 Belmont Forum funded projects representatives, 9 EU funded projects representatives, 2 project stakeholders (Institute of Water Modelling, Bangladesh), 6 members of the supporting funding agencies (DFG, CSIRO, ANR, NSF, NERC, FAPESP), and the Peer Review Panel Chair.

Representatives from each of the projects gave presentations before splitting up into two parallel workshop sessions in the afternoon, focusing respectively on providing feedback to the Belmont Forum agencies, and on identifying cross-cutting themes, project outputs and stakeholders. Participants were keen to share knowledge and learning and use the benefit of each other’s experiences. The meeting was a positive start to the development of a community focused on the issue of coastal vulnerability. Both workshop sessions were able to identify many areas for the Belmont Forum to consider for future developments.

For a presentation of the TRUC project, see: http://www.belmontforum.org/modules/file/icons/application-pdf.pngTRUC.pdf