IPY: Municipal Water Systems and the Resilience of Arctic Communities

在过去几十年中，在世界偏远地区以城市供水系统（MWS）的形式建造了水基础设施，以减少与水传播疾病和污染物有关的发病率和死亡率。然而，科学家、政策制定者和社区对MWS的社会文化影响知之甚少。这个研究项目的问题是“MWS的存在与否会影响水的社会价值吗？”重点研究MWS在影响俄罗斯远东和阿拉斯加西部社区水的价值、观念和知识方面可能发挥的作用，研究人员将深入了解快速变化的社会和自然环境下的社区复原力和脆弱性。研究小组将在俄罗斯东部的楚科奇地区和阿拉斯加西部的苏厄德半岛收集数据。这两个地区具有相似的生物物理、地理和生存特征，但却包含不同的文化群体。这两个区域的社区在获取家庭和工业用水方面面临着类似的挑战，并且由于大规模的资源开采正在经历迅速的转变。这些跨文化比较将有助于研究小组了解MWS是否会降低水资源管理的适应能力。研究项目的目的是了解MWS是否会通过“距离”过程降低这些社区用户对其水文景观的熟悉程度，从而影响社区的长期恢复力，这是研究人员在以前的工作中观察到的一种现象。该项目的跨学科方法使用了居民提供的关于他们所依赖的水的价值观、观念和知识的信息。此外，该研究将这些知识整合到一个新的综合工具中，以评估其整体恢复能力，称为北极水资源脆弱性指数（AWRVI）。由于北极几乎没有关于水的社会数据或民族志，因此收集到的数据将是对现有的人类与淡水相互作用的有限分析的独立的、新颖的贡献。此外，将对社区成员进行使用AWRVI的培训，并向他们提供在本项目结束后使用的工具。AWRVI在每个社区中的应用将作为一个基线，供社区参考，以便在不同的情景下测量其弹性随时间的变化。此外，这项工作将提供新的见解，了解拥有和失去MWS的社区是如何适应的。最终，这项研究不仅将帮助北极社区，还将帮助世界各地的许多发展中社区评估MWS的利弊，以及水处理/供水技术提供的好处是否应该在短期和长期内与文化变化相平衡。

Over the past several decades, water infrastructure, in the form of municipal water systems (MWS) have been constructed in remote regions of the world in order to reduce morbidity and mortality associated with water-borne diseases and contaminants. However, scientists, policy makers, and communities have little understanding of the sociocultural effects of MWS. This research project asks "Does the presence or absence of MWS affect the social values of water?" Focusing the research on the role that MWS may play in affecting the values, perceptions and knowledge of water in the Russian Far East and Western Alaska communities, the investigators will provide insights into community resilience and vulnerability with rapidly changing social and natural environments. The research team will be gathering data in the Chukotka region of Eastern Russia and the Seward Peninsula, Western Alaska. These two regions share similar biophysical, geographical, and subsistence characteristics but contain different cultural groups. Communities in both regions share similar challenges in acquiring water for domestic and industrial uses and are experiencing rapid transformations due to large-scale resource extraction. These cross-cultural comparisons will aid the research team in understanding whether MWS reduce the adaptive capacity to manage water resources. The objective of the research project is to understand whether or not MWS affect longer term resilience of a community by decreasing the familiarity of the users in these communities with their hydrological landscapes through a process of "distancing", a phenomenon the investigators have observed in previous work. The interdisciplinary approach of the project uses information provided by residents about their values, perceptions, and knowledge of the water they rely on. In addition, the research integrates this knowledge into a new, composite tool to assess their overall resilience called the Arctic Water Resources Vulnerability Index (AWRVI). Since almost no social data or ethnography of water exist for the Arctic, the data collected will be a stand-alone, novel contribution to the limited analyses that exist of human-freshwater interactions. In addition, community members will be trained in the use of AWRVI and provided with the tool for their use beyond the conclusion of this project. The application of AWRVI in each community will serve as a baseline that communities may refer to in order to measure changes in their resilience over time, under diverse scenarios. In addition, this work will provide new insight into how communities who have had MWS and lost them are adapting. Ultimately, the research will help not only Arctic communities, but many developing communities worldwide to assess the trade-offs of MWS and whether or not the benefits that are provided by water treatment/supply technologies should be balanced against cultural changes in the short and long term.