Informing, empowering, and scaling community adaptation to Arctic change

When climate change disrupts a village, city, state, or province, how do leaders respond? What  unexpected obstacles do they run into? Researchers from the University of Saskatchewan want to know what factors are conducive to communities adapting to climate change. They also want to better characterize exactly what impedes progress.
​The team is investigating different models of adaption ranging from top-down government planning to grassroots organization. Specifically, the team will compare communities in Yukon Territory and Alaska to show how different jurisdictions respond to change. They’re developing a framework to provide communities and planners new tools to chart their future.

The team is beginning by identifying and documenting databases that explain adaption efforts. They are conducting interviews and bringing together diverse groups.  Funding comes from the Northwest Boreal Landscape Conservation Cooperative and the Alaska Climate Science Center. 
According to the lead investigator of the project, Douglas Clark, the objective is to identify the factors that facilitate or impede the development and spread of community adaptations to arctic change, by working with both the creators and intended users of existing databases that catalogue such adaptations. Observations to rule-based models that describe adaptation processes ranging from top-down agency planning to grass-roots community planning, will provide a framework to link community-empowered local adaptation with information and other resources available at larger scales. Through comparisons within and between adjacent jurisdictions in two arctic nations (Yukon, Canada and Alaska, USA) and the literature from other arctic nations, the project will assess factors that account for community differences in sensitivity to stressors and capacity to adapt. The team intends to work directly with the creators of those regionally-relevant databases and focus primarily on developing insights into the roles of (1) governance and institutional function and (2) management of renewable and non-renewable natural resources as key mediators of community adaptation.