The National Science Foundation (NSF) addresses global change issues through investments that advance frontiers of knowledge, provide state-of-the-art instrumentation and facilities, develop new analytical methods, and enable cross-disciplinary collaborations while also cultivating a diverse, highly trained workforce and developing educational resources. In particular, NSF global change programs support the research and related activities to advance fundamental understanding of physical, chemical, biological, and human systems and the interactions among them. The programs encourage interdisciplinary approaches to studying Earth system processes and the consequences of change, including how humans respond to changing environments and the impacts on ecosystems and the essential services they provide. NSF programs promote the development and enhancement of models to improve understanding of integrated Earth system processes and to advance predictive capability. NSF also supports fundamental research on the processes used by organizations and decision makers to identify and evaluate policies for mitigation, adaptation, and other responses to the challenge of a changing and variable environment. Long-term, continuous, and consistent observational records are essential for testing hypotheses quantitatively and are thus a cornerstone of global change research. NSF supports a variety of research observing networks that complement, and are dependent on, the climate monitoring systems maintained by its sister agencies.

NSF regularly collaborates with other USGCRP agencies to provide support for a range of multi-disciplinary research projects and is actively engaged in a number of international partnerships.