Request for Proposals: Enduring Impacts: Archaeology of Sustainability

The Enduring Impacts: Archaeology of Sustainability Request for Proposal (RFP) focuses on the gathering and analysis of archaeological, paleoenvironmental, and paleoclimatological data for the purposes of increasing our understanding of human-environmental interactions over time, to ultimately contribute to mitigating contemporary environmental and climatic crises. Current issues like climate change, overpopulation, disruptions in food security, and loss of habitat and biodiversity are threats that were faced and sometimes overcome by societies in the past. While the challenges we face today may be unprecedented in scale and demographic impact, there is a wealth of information on how people articulated with, mediated, and in many cases impacted long-term environmental trends over millennia. This knowledge can be employed in the development of future strategies in environmental sustainability- and resilience-building, and in understanding how human actions in the past continue to affect present-day communities in their ability to tackle environmental and climatic challenges.

Ideal grant applications for this RFP would consist of research projects that are
– scientifically rigorous and multidisciplinary;
– integrate traditional ecological knowledge systems where applicable and appropriate;
– seek stakeholding community buy-in from the outset of the project;
– have a robust external capacity development component; and
– produce archaeological, climatological, and environmental datasets that can be used in the creation of solutions for contemporary environmental issues in collaboration with local communities and/or policymakers.