ARCTIC climate change and its impact on Environment, infrastructures and Resource Availability

The ARCTIC-ERA (ARCTIC climate change and its impact on Environment, infrastructures and Resource Availability) project will address critical aspects of human well-being and sustainable use of the Arctic infrastructure and resources under the conditions of regionally accelerating global warming. Using a series of descriptors, the project will quantitatively estimate and predict climate and environmental changes in the Arctic region and their impact on human wellbeing, industrial activities and infrastructure. These estimates and predictions will support development of an efficient regional strategy of communities’ adaptation, mitigation of the major hazardous impacts that cannot be avoided, and development of the pathways to sustainable development of the region.

Utilization of all available observations and modeling products to quantitatively assess changes in the meteorological and environmental variables that directly affect current and future social and economic development in coastal areas of the Circumpolar Arctic.
Identification and evaluation of the climatic and environmental changes impact on the social and economic development of the Arctic coastal areas including impact on fossil-fuel and mineral extraction, maritime and land transportation, industrial fishing, and infrastructure development.
Quantitative assessment of the magnitude and spatial pattern of climate change and its positive and negative implications for economic development in the Circumpolar Arctic.
Development of a set of recommendations on mitigation and alleviation of the negative climate-induced effects on the Arctic communities and on their adaptation to the impacts of the environmental change as a crucial component of the sustainable development strategy for indigenous peoples and all Arctic communities and nations.

An important new challenge of the project is also the need for an effective merge of environmental data and data obtained from climate models for a comprehensive description of the ongoing and projection of the anticipated Arctic environmental change and associated changes in economic activities.

The Project Work Packages will undertake assembly and pre-processing of the available climatic, environmental, and socio-economic data, to be based upon best available in-situ data sources, modern era reanalyzes, and the CMIP5 model output for the current and future climate conditions. This dataset will be used to design Climatic Variables Critical for Social and Economic Activities (CVSEAs) which will be further used for estimation of the ongoing and projected changes in the climate and environmental variables that are critical for the human well-being and industrial activities in the Arctic. For this purpose, temperature, hydrological cycle, and atmospheric circulation related CVSEAs will be developed along with integrated CVSEAs. This will allow us to analyze regionally broken down socioeconomic implications of climatic change in the Arctic region by considering transportation, onshore/land infrastructure development and non-renewable resource development. The ongoing and projected significant changes in the Arctic atmosphere, sea ice, and ocean will be expressed through a series of integrated impact factors such as storminess, coastal erosion, icing of ships and marine structures, duration of the navigation period, requirements for heating of houses, construction and transportation safety standards, and access to natural resources. This will make it possible to develop recommendations on adaptation of coastal settlements and ports, transportation, fishery, oil and gas exploitation to the ongoing and future changes and on mitigation of their negative effects. An assessment of the current status of the economy and societal well-being of population of the settlements in the Arctic as well as forward projections of this status will result in recommendations on how to minimize the negative consequences of projected changes and to benefit from emerging opportunities.

The novelty and unique nature of our approach is in the synergy of the analysis of climate, environmental and socio-economic variables in the Arctic that offers an objectively determined path for the sustainable development of the Arctic under the present and future conditions and for improvement of life conditions in the region. The major project tasks have defined the project structure, which includes a crosscutting climate and environmental component, an economic and social component, and as well as a component aimed at identification and implementation of actions. The project structure effectively exploits the synergy between climate and environmental changes (challenge for natural science), impact of these changes on the economy and human well-being (challenge for economy and social sciences), and implementation of anticipated impacts for practical management (challenge for consultancy and end users).

Mirroring this concept, the composition of the consortium includes two experienced teams of climatologists, namely the CNRS Laboratoire de Glaciologie et Géophysique de l'Environnement (LGGE, Grenoble, France, Prof. Olga Zolina) and the P.P.Shirshov Institute of Oceanology, RAS (IORAS, Moscow, Russia, Prof. Sergey Gulev), a group from the George Washington University (USA, Dr. Dmitry Streletskiy) that is going to address environmental changes, a strong team of environmental economists and social scientists from the Institute of Economic Forecasting, RAS (IEFRAS, Moscow, Russia, Prof. Boris Porfiriev) and dedicated practitioners in consultancy and assessments from the private company HS&S Corp. (Asheville, USA) - the project end-user.

Working together for the project, these teams will produce a number of tangible multidisciplinary deliverables, such as databases of climate and environmental variables, an assessment of capabilities of climate models to replicate the observed climate change in the Arctic, projections of likely changes in the socio-economic conditions and activities in the Arctic under the influence of the climate and environmental changes, and recommendations for different sectors on how to better adapt to these changes.

These deliverables will be provided to operational agencies, climate service providers, shipping companies, oil and gas industries. Such “end-users” will be main beneficiaries of the project. The project results will be published in top-ranking peer reviewed journals and monographs, presented at major international scientific conferences, and made available through the project internet portal. The project will also contribute to the regional capacity building by training early career scientists interested in the multidisciplinary research under ARCTIC-ERA.