Sustainability of Arctic Communities: An Interdisciplinary Collaboration of Researchers and Local Knowledge Holders

Abstract

Just under 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 government cutbacks 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. We have been working with four communities: Aklavik, Fort McPherson, Old Crow, and Arctic Village. We have worked together to incorporate research and local knowledge-based understanding in a common tool - a synthesis model - to examine the sensitivity of relationships and assess levels of uncertainty. We are discussing with our partner communities possible futures, local policies, and the limitations of science and local knowledge to predict the future. Along the way, we have contributed to our disciplines by modeling vegetation changes, caribou population dynamics, local labor markets, mixed subsistence and cash economies, and oil field-caribou interactions.

In many respects, we believe that the sustainability project is a model for a regional integrated assessment (IA). We attempted to build on solid, disciplinary science, and to develop simple, reduced form models that focus on only the relationships important to the finite set of questions we undertook to examine. We worked with stake holder 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. While most IA's 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 IA's 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 to represent 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 obvious. We can advance IA methods while addressing some of the most important issues facing Arctic communities.

While we think that aspects of the Sustainability Project can serve as a model for integrated assessments, we also think that the lessons learned during the course of the project may be as valuable as its successes. We organized the project by discipline, and later learned that the most important relationships within a discipline are not necessarily the most important when integrating across disciplines. We constructed a synthesis model at the beginning of the project to promote integration, but found that researchers did not use the model because it was written with unfamiliar software. We were committed to focusing much of the project on discussions with communities rather than model building, by found ourselves working into the fourth year on modeling tasks. In this paper we report our successes and the lessons learned. We conclude that integrated assessment is an effective tool for promoting learning among researchers of different disciplines and between researchers and communities. IA is also useful for identifying major uncertainties and associated research needs.