Brian D. Fath

Grete K. Hovelsrud

Shirley Tagalik

Kenneth Ruud

Marcel Babin

Guillermo Auad

David A. Balton

Eddy C. Carmack

Robert W. Corell

Dorthe Dahl-Jensen

Andrey V. Dolgov

Edel O. Elvevoll

Elizaveta Ershova

Andrea M. Fisher

Matthias Forwick

Sam Herreid

Alf Håkon Hoel

Henry P. Huntington

Anne Husebekk

Brendan P. Kelly

Malinda Labriola

Rolf Mjelde

Lars-Otto Reiersen

Gunnar Sand

Asgeir J. Sørensen

Andrea Tilche

Frances Ulmer

Francis K. Wiese

Eduard Zdor

Climate change in the Arctic Ocean has stirred a remarkable surge of interest and concern. Study after study has revealed the astonishing speed of physical, chemical, ecological, and economic change throughout the expanse of the Arctic. What is more, the consequences of the changing Arctic are not restricted to the Arctic itself, but affect everyone in the Northern Hemisphere, ranging as they do from extreme weather to resource availability and food security, with implications for politics, economics, and sociology. The challenge is to comprehend the full extent and variety of these consequences, and meeting this challenge will demand a multi- and transdisciplinary understanding. Only by this means can we hope to map out a knowledge-based ecosystem and move toward knowledge-based resource management—the essential precondition for any sustainable future. In this book, leading international experts, from many felds of science and across the entire pan-Arctic region, give their specifc takes on where the Arctic Ocean is heading. All have taken care in their writing not to exclude non-experts, in the conviction that multi- and transdisciplinarity can only be achieved when communication and outreach are not tribal in nature. The recurrent guiding theme throughout these pages is “Whith -er the Arctic Ocean?” Taken in concert, the essays synthesize the current state of scientifc knowledge to project how climate change may impact on the Arctic Ocean and the continents around it. How can and how should we prepare for the imminent future that is already lapping at the threshold of the commons? What readers will hopefully take from this multi- and transdisciplinary endeavor is not the individual perspective of each contribution, but the picture that emerges across the entire suite of essays. As we move into a near future that will encompass both the probable and surprises, this book attempts to conjure the multi-dimensional space in which a sustainable future must be brought into being.

Research, Knowledge Needs and Development en Route to the New Arctic

Whither the Arctic Ocean?

Barry Smit

The ‘Year’ That Changed How We View the North This book is about a new theoretical approach that transformed the field of Arctic social studies and about a program called International Polar Year 2007–2008 (IPY) that altered the position of social research within the broader polar science. The concept for IPY was developed in 2003–2005; its vision was for researchers from many nations to work together to gain cro- disciplinary insight into planetary processes, to explore and increase our understanding of the polar regions, the Arctic and Antarctica, and of their roles in the global system. IPY 2007–2008, the fourth program of its kind, followed in the footsteps of its predecessors, the first IPY in 1882–1883, the second IPY in 1932–1933, and the third IPY (later renamed to ‘International Geophysical Year’ or IGY) in 1957–1958. All earlier IPY/IGY have been primarily geophysical initiatives, with their focus on meteorology, atmospheric and geomagnetic observations, and with additional emphasis on glaciology and sea ice circulation. As such, they excluded socio-economic disciplines and polar indigenous people, often deliberately, except for limited ethnographic and natural history collection work conducted by some expeditions of the first IPY. That once dominant vision biased heavily towards geophysics, oceanography, and ice-sheets, left little if any place for people, that is, the social sciences and the humanities, in what has been commonly viewed as the ‘hard-core’ polar research.

Community Adaptation and Vulnerability in Arctic Regions

Grete K. Hovelsrud

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