Fellowships Grants and Awards

announce their intent to support a special awards competition opening in fiscal year 2002. For this awards competition, the EPA and the NSF are jointly soliciting grant applications that focus on the Decision-Making and Valuation for Environmental Policy (DMVEP) research area. The online announcement of the DMVEP awards competition and application forms are available at http://es.epa. gov/ncer/rfa/02dmvep.html. DMVEP encourages research that will contribute to the development of practical, credible approaches for estimating the benefits and costs of environmental programs and improving decision-making about environmental issues. Awards made through this competition are dependent upon the responsiveness of the proposal to the announcement, the quality of the proposed research, and the availability of funds. Proposals submitted for this competition should focus on three main areas: 1) research on ecosystems valuation, including methodologic improvements as well as ways to incorporate nonmonetizable or non-quantifiable ecologic information into environmental policy decisions; 2) research linking individual environmental values with group or community valuation of environmental amenities and research on community environmental decision-making in general ; and 3) research on the costs/benefits, use, and effects of environmental information in environmental decision-making by individuals, communities , governments, and other organizations. The competition encourages proposals from researchers from all behavioral, social, and economic sciences. It supports both collaborative and interdis-ciplinary scientific efforts, as well as research conducted within a single disciplinary tradition. It encourages collaborations with non–social science disciplines when needed to answer social science–based questions. The competition especially encourages research that integrates valuation and decision-making approaches for environmental policy. Investigators that will use survey, interview, or focus group techniques should provide information about their plans for data collection and analysis, including information about their instruments, in the project description section of the proposal. The project description section should also describe the policy relevance of the proposed research and explain how the results will be communicated to groups and organizations that can affect environmental problems. Plans for data sharing should also be specified here. The EPA and the NSF anticipate making approximately 10 awards, totaling about $1.5 million. The projected award range is $60,000–200,000 per award per year, with durations of 1–3 years. Field experiments, survey research, and multi-investigator projects may justify the higher end of this range; however, total requests in excess of $400,000 are discouraged. The deadline for receipt of applications is 15 May 2002. This PA is meant to stimulate and encourage under-represented minority doctoral candidates …