IPY: Municipal Water Systems and the Resilience of Arctic Communities

在过去的几十年里，世界各地的偏远地区以市政供水系统（MWS）的形式修建了供水基础设施，以减少与水传播疾病和污染物相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。该研究项目提出“MWS 的存在与否会影响水的社会价值吗？”研究重点是 MWS 在影响俄罗斯远东和阿拉斯加西部社区的水价值观、观念和知识方面可能发挥的作用，调查人员将深入了解社区在快速变化的社会和自然环境中的复原力和脆弱性。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，但包含不同的文化群体。 这两个地区的社区在获取生活和工业用水方面面临着类似的挑战，并且由于大规模资源开采而正在经历快速转型。这些跨文化比较将有助于研究团队了解 MWS 是否会降低管理水资源的适应能力。该研究项目的目的是了解 MWS 是否会通过“疏远”过程降低社区用户对其水文景观的熟悉度，从而影响社区的长期恢复力，调查人员在之前的工作中观察到了这种现象。该项目采用跨学科方法，利用居民提供的关于他们的价值观、看法和他们所依赖的水的知识的信息。 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）。 由于北极几乎不存在水的社会数据或人种学，因此收集的数据将是对人类与淡水相互作用的有限分析的独立、新颖的贡献。此外，社区成员将接受 AWRVI 使用方面的培训，并获得该工具供他们在本项目结束后使用。 AWRVI 在每个社区的应用将作为社区可以参考的基线，以便衡量不同场景下其复原力随时间的变化。此外，这项工作将为了解曾经历过 MWS 和失去 MWS 的社区如何适应提供新的见解。 最终，这项研究不仅将帮助北极社区，而且还将帮助世界各地的许多发展中社区评估MWS的权衡，以及水处理/供应技术提供的好处是否应与短期和长期的文化变化相平衡。

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.