Renewal Proposal Excerpts
Section A: Project Summary (below)
Section C: Project Description (pdf file, 197 K)
Section D: Proposal Bibliography (pdf file, 36 K)
Four years ago, 23 researchers representing 8 natural and social science disciplines set out to examine how the combined effects of climate change, oil development, tourism, and non-local hunting might change the sustainability of Arctic villages in the range of the Porcupine caribou herd. In so doing, we stepped into the world of integrated assessment. In this renewal proposal, we describe how we will build on our experience.We are now communicating effectively between disciplines. We have a common tool-a synthesis model-to examine the sensitivity of relationships and assess levels of uncertainty. We have a level of trust with stakeholder communities that permits frank discussions of possible futures, local policies, and the limitations of science and local knowledge to predict the future. And we have contributed to our disciplines by modeling vegetation changes, caribou population dynamics, local labor markets, mixed subsistence and cash economies, and interactions between caribou and oil fields.
In many respects, we believe the Sustainability Project is a model for a regional integrated assessment. We attempted to build on solid, disciplinary science and to develop simple, reduced-form models focusing only on the relationships important to the finite set of questions we undertook to examine. We worked with stakeholder groups directly to ensure the relevance of study questions, and we combined science and local knowledge. We focused on the value of assessments as a springboard for understanding alternative futures rather than trying to predict the future.
Our project contributes to the diversity of Integrated Assessment (IA) approaches. By starting at the community level and scaling up to regional and multi-regional levels, we can focus on human adaptation to global changes. While most IAs focus solely on climate change, we examine the effects of climate change in the context of other global changes that are important to Arctic residents. And, while most IAs focus on national and international abatement policies, we are researching local and regional policy options to mediate the effects of climate change and shape the impacts of other global changes to benefit Arctic residents. Our scale of analysis also allows us to explore ways of representing values in parametric terms without reducing them all to dollar terms. The high degree of interaction between disciplines and between researchers and community members provides a great incentive to work on developing ways to make relationships in our models more transparent. We can advance IA methods while addressing some of the most important issues facing Arctic communities.
A major stakeholder group, the Iņupiat of Alaska's North Slope, has asked us to increase the relevance of our Integrated Assessment by including the marine environment. We propose to test our ideas about defining key relationships by reflecting marine relationships between climate change and oil development and the sustainability of Arctic communities. In keeping with what we have learned, we are collaborating with the North Slope Borough's Wildlife Management Department to develop and test a formal model of marine relationships as a part of our synthesis modeling. We will use this model as a means of identifying the most important and uncertain relationships. Our formal modeling of a mixed marine and terrestrial Arctic system can help integrate the Arctic System Science program OAII/SBI and LAII/ATLAS initiatives.
In continuing work in the range of the Porcupine Herd, we will reduce our uncertainty about relationships between late summer caribou forage and climate, using satellite imagery. We also propose to identify the modifications necessary to extend our synthesis and component models to two major regions of North America-the ranges of the Western Arctic and Bathurst caribou herds. We hope that successful extension of our caribou models to the Western Arctic herd will provide tools ATLAS researchers can use to examine relationships between changing land cover and reindeer/caribou systems.
We propose to continue working with our four partner communities of Aklavik, Fort McPherson, Old Crow, and Arctic Village. We have re-opened a conversation with the North Slope community of Kaktovik. We will focus on community differences in local conditions and policy contexts in order to scale up to a regional policy environment. Finally, we propose to test ideas on improving the information value of integrated assessment modeling.
