Climate & Cultural Heritage (CCH): Collaborative Research to Address Urgent Challenges

The Joint Programming Initiatives Cultural Heritage and Global Change (JPI CH) and Connecting Climate Knowledge for Europe (JPI Climate) and the Belmont Forum are pleased to announce the launch of their joint call, or “Collaborative Research Action (CRA)” entitled “Climate & Cultural Heritage (CCH): Collaborative research to address urgent challenges.”

This Call aims to support transdisciplinary and convergent research approaches on cultural heritage and climate change, to foster collaboration among the research community across several regions, and to contribute to knowledge advances and policy change at the global level. Applicants are invited to submit research proposals that should address at least one of the three call themes (please consult the call text for further details):

1. The Impact of Climate Change on Cultural Heritage;
2. Cultural Heritage as a Resource for Climate Mitigation and Adaptation;
3. Sustainable Solutions for Heritage.

Budget and Participating Countries.

The available funding in this call is over 15M€ from Funding Organizations in: Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, Spain, the United Kingdom, the United States, Thailand, Türkiye.

The Adaptation Research Alliance and Future Earth will also support this CRA through network and capacity building, which may include funding opportunities at the post-award stage (i.e. after the selected research proposals are awarded funding). For further information, please contact their representatives and/or the Thematic Program Office (see contact details at page 19).

Eligibility Requirements Overview

• Proposals must address at least one of the three call themes, with cross-cutting linkages across all three themes encouraged.
• Proposals must be submitted by a Consortium of minimum three Principal Investigators (PIs) from three different countries, which also involves at least one Societal Partner (SP).
• LPIs and PIs must request funding from a Funding Organization, on behalf of their host institutions, and cannot participate in a self-funded or in-kind capacity. Please note that a researcher may be involved in a maximum of two proposals as PI (except for research applicants based in Lithuania who can only be involved in one proposal as PI or other primary project implementer) and cannot be involved in more than one proposal as LPI.
• Additional consortium members may participate in a self-funded capacity if the minimum requirement of participants from three countries requesting funding from three Funding Organizations is met. They can join the Consortium as Associate Principal Investigators (API) or Societal Partners (SP), depending on their expected roles in the project.
• Consortia must be transnational and transdisciplinary.
• The projects must last up to 3 years (36 months) and start no later than 30 June 2024.

Application Process

Interested and eligible applicants are expected to submit the research proposal on Belmont Forum Grant Operations (BFgo) website. Please carefully review the call documents on the platform when preparing a proposal.

Info Event Replay and Matchmaking

The Thematic Program Office has presented the CRA and answered questions from prospective applicants upon an online Info Event held on Tuesday 16 May, 10:00 UTC.

An online Matchmaking Platform, which aims at supporting consortium building and fostering networking, particularly for Early Career Researchers, will also be available to all prospective applicants. If you would like to join the matchmaking platform, please sign up using this form.

Timeline

Contacts

• Specific questions about eligibility should be directed to the Contact Points listed in the Call Text and in each of the Funding Organization’s Annex.
• Any questions on the general eligibility can be directed to the Thematic Programme Office at cultural-heritage-climate-2023@anr.fr and cch@nwo.nl.

FAQ

The TPO has made a list of frequently asked questions and you can consult it here.

Background

Joint Programming Initiatives (JPIs) were established to pool national research efforts and foster the implementation of the European Research Area (ERA) to address grand societal challenges. JPIs are flexible intergovernmental partnerships with the aim of better aligning the research and innovation investments spent at the national level. They involve countries that voluntarily agree to work in partnership towards common visions encapsulated in Strategic Research and Innovation Agendas and implemented through joint activities.

The Belmont Forum is a group of funding agencies from around the world that support transdisciplinary, globally-representative research groups and coproduction/participatory methods to address various global environmental change topics. Topics are addressed through CRAs and the Cultural Heritage and Climate CRA is among three research calls that will be launched in 2023.

The call results from a White Paper jointly developed and published in March 2022 by the two JPIs and from joint workshops held in June and September 2022 aimed at identifying and incorporating research priorities from Africa, the Americas and Asia.