Geography Program
About
Witness the Arctic provides information on current arctic research efforts and findings, significant research initiatives, national policy affecting arctic research, international activities, and profiles of institutions with major arctic research efforts. Witness serves an audience of arctic scientists, educators, agency personnel, and policy makers. Witness was published biannually in hardcopy from 1995-2008 (archives are available below) and is currently published online 3-4 times annually, depending on newsworthy events.
Archives
With the Spring 2009 issue, ARCUS changed the format of Witness the Arctic. To provide more frequent updates and reduce printing and mailing costs and associated environmental impacts, the newsletter is now distributed online in three or four shorter issues per year, depending on newsworthy events.
Contact
If you have a question or an idea for a Witness article, contact Betsy Turner-Bogren at betsy [at] arcus [dot] org.
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Housed within the College of Science and Management, the Geography Program (www.unbc.ca/geography/index.html) has ten faculty.
Gail Fondahl is involved in a project under the aegis of the Sustainable Development Working Group of the Arctic Council to develop and then test a set of social indicators for tracking human development in the Arctic. The Arctic Social Indicators (ASI) project, which is a follow-up to the 2004 Arctic Human Development Report and involves over two dozen collaborators, is led by Joan Nymand Larsen of the Stefansson Arctic Institute and Peter Schweitzer of the University of Alaska Fairbanks. The team is modifying common indicators of human development (such as education, life expectancy, and material well-being) to reflect the arctic context and developing new indicators reflecting relationship to nature and cultural resilience as measures of domains arctic residents have indicated as critically important to their well-being. The ASI report will be published in late 2009; the indicators will then be tested and verified.