IPY: Municipal Water Systems and the Resilience of Arctic Communities

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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.