Award Number
1744417

Project Abstract:

The investigators will conduct a series of workshops that will employ a complex systems framework to gain insight into system dynamics and overall resilience in the Arctic region. Resilience represents the capacity of a community to buffer and adapt to stress and shocks, and thus navigate and even shape change. The workshops will integrate resilience theory and research methods with Indigenous community observations and practice. This integration is needed to address the societal concerns associated with the rapid pace of environmental change in the New Arctic. Diverse expertise will be represented, and the workshop participants will include Arctic Indigenous scholars and community members from climate-affected Alaskan communities.

This series of workshops will employ a complex systems framework to gain insight into system dynamics and overall resilience, which can be defined as the capacity to buffer and adapt to stress and shocks, and thus navigate and even shape change. The workshop will integrate resilience theory and research methods with Indigenous community observations and practice, which is needed to address the societal concerns in the New Arctic. Merging expertise from multiple disciplines through a complex system approach is a robust way to conduct convergent research on a Pan-Arctic scale. Further, the iterative structure of the workshops with local community inclusion and the plan to integrate knowledge from six themes will enhance the convergent outcomes of the workshops. The meaningful inclusion of Indigenous scholars and community members in the workshops makes the project more convergent in that it is not only transdisciplinary science but seeks out issues and information important to Arctic and mid-latitude tribal communities. This project promotes convergence by addressing the societal concern of achieving resilience for Arctic communities and by integrating diverse fields of science through a complex systems approach and through engagement with Indigenous scholars and community members. The range of expertise represented by the participants includes ecosystem science, social science, climatology and system science.

Logistics Summary

This project will conduct two, three-day workshops in 2018 in Fairbanks, Alaska, with a third workshop funded by and held at the University of Nebraska. The goal these workshops is to convene relevant, disparate expertise on the thematic goals with a diverse group of researchers, practitioners, and stakeholders in the far north and mid-latitudes to understand how transformations in the New Arctic can be managed to reduce inequitable and undesirable outcomes for people and nature. No fieldwork is associated with this project.

Keywords

Adaptive Capacity, Resilience, Transformation, Traditional Knowledge, Biogeochemical Cycling, Spatial Regimes, Feedbacks

Project Location

Resources

Convergence Science in the Anthropocene: Navigating the Known and Unknown

Angeler, David G. and Allen, Craig R. and Carnaval, Ana and Palmer, Clare. "Convergence science in the Anthropocene: Navigating the known and unknown," People and Nature, v.2, 2019. doi:10.1002/pan3.10069

Program
Navigating the New Arctic

Dates

-

Location

Fairbanks, AK; Lincoln, NE

Members

Principal Investigator

Craig Allen
University of Nebraska

Co-Principal Investigator

Martha Shulski
University of Nebraska

Co-Principal Investigator

Hannah Birge
The Nature Conservancy