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The Program for Early-stage Grants Advancing Sustainability Science (PEGASuS) seeks to increase knowledge, promote innovation, and establish evidence-based solutions to the world’s most difficult sustainability challenges. PEGASuS brings together researchers from across borders and the natural and social sciences to take creative approaches to exploring the relationships between people and the planet. Our goal is to generate self-sustaining research projects that will have real impacts on the health and wellbeing of human societies.

Open Calls

PEGASuS 5.1: Take it Further
Future Earth, with funding from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation’s Science Program, is now offering a new grant opportunity to existing research teams and their new partners. This opportunity will support teams to engage in transdisciplinary research in one of two different thematic areas:

Using Nature-Based Solutions to mitigate or adapt to climate change specific to the oceans and coastal systems and
Science-informed decision-support tools for reducing risk and/or improving response to disaster scenarios.
This opportunity will focus on enhancing and accelerating the existing projects, fostering new cross-project collaborations, and facilitating the involvement of new partners. The supported projects should develop new knowledge, innovative and integrated solutions and tools. The collaborative proposal must be submitted by a project lead based at an institution in a country in the Global South or by an indigenous-led organization in any country. Applicants must have an established organizational bank account to receive funds.

Traditional hard engineering coastal structures can be valuable in terms of mitigating coastal hazards. However, these hard solutions may not be aesthetically pleasing, can have deleterious effects on the environment, negative impacts on the cultural and socio-economic aspects of a community, may not always be able to be made adaptable to uncertain climate changes, are not self-sustaining, and require resources for maintenance throughout the design life of the structure.

Natural ecosystems can serve as part of, or as the whole solution, for addressing these coastal problems in a sustainable manner while facilitating development works. Small Island Developing States (SIDS), such as those in the Caribbean can embrace nature-based solutions for coastal hazard mitigation not only to maintain aesthetic appeal of tourism-driven coastal infrastructure, but to provide climate-resilient solutions. Sustainable approaches must optimize solutions to minimize the impact on the environment and engage key stakeholders in decision making to maximize benefits to the wider society. Particularly, in the face of a changing climate with the potential increase in frequency and intensity of hazardous events, engineered designs must provide a given level of protection throughout the solution’s design life. These solutions must be appropriate, justifiable, cost-efficient, adaptable, yet effective. To achieve this goal successfully, a more universal approach to the design specification of nature-based solutions is critical to the development, design and uptake of these solutions in the wider Caribbean. To advance the knowledge and skill of designing these nature-based solutions, physical and numerical modelling, along with field work at various coastal sites, will enable the assessment of how the physical and natural environment is modified with the implementation of these various types of solutions. In addition, a concomitant emphasis on the impacts of the social environment should be included if sustainability is to be truly achieved. The critical views of stakeholders/partners will be solicited to ensure relevance and the improved adoption of recommendations at a regional scale which is of paramount importance if the output is expected to assist designers, planners and decision makers in determining optimal solutions.

PI and study countries: Trinidad & Tobago, USA, Barbados, Jamaica and other selected Caribbean Island territories.

Projects may request up to $50,000 USD and have to be completed by December 31, 2025.

The application submission deadline is 15 February 2024 by 23:59 local time.

PEGASuS 6 – Risk, Response, and Responsibility in Latin America and the Caribbean
Future Earth’s PEGASuS is launching its sixth thematic research call. The PEGASuS VI call solicits proposals from transdisciplinary teams in Latin America and the Caribbean addressing the theme of Risk, Response, and Responsibility. The goal of this call is to support approaches that advance decision making and planning capabilities through integration of multiple sciences with lived experience from stakeholder groups, including but not limited to community and government representatives, planning councils, disaster response and humanitarian aid organizations, insurance and reinsurance companies, and communications partners.

Because of the many human elements in both the management, recovery, and reduction of risk, all proposals must include a social scientist or public health expert. Other knowledge holders and experts may come from a breadth of other disciplines and professions depending on the risk being addressed. Other details and required elements of proposal submissions follow below.

Funding for this program is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. The program plans to award 2-4 successful proposals in this call. Projects may request up to $250,000 USD and have to be completed by December 31, 2025.

Full proposals are due by February 15, 2024 at 20h00 EDT (UTC -5)