Collaborative Research: Holistic Integration for Arctic Coastal-Marine Sustainability (HIACMS)

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This 3-year research project will develop and demonstrate an international, interdisciplinary and inclusive process to enhance the practice of governance for sustainability in Arctic coastal-marine systems, balancing: (a) national interests and common interests, (b) environmental protection, social equity, and economic prosperity, and (c) the needs of present and future generations. We will use geospatial integration and interdisciplinary data aggregation to document biophysical and socioeconomic changes occurring in the Arctic and to develop scenarios exploring how these complex patterns of change are likely to play out over the coming decades. This assessment will include all four ArcSEES themes (Natural and Living Environment; Built Environment; Natural Resource Development; and Governance) and provide a point of departure for the use of institutional diagnostics to examine effective strategies for addressing current issues of Arctic governance. To lend substance to the analysis, we will direct attention to three "hot spots": Bering Strait and the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas (United States, Canadian and Russian interests), the Barents Sea (Norwegian and Russian interests), and West Greenland (Greenlandic, Danish, and Canadian interests). In the process, we will engage people associated with bodies like the Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the North-East Atlantic, whose remit extends into the Arctic Ocean. To enhance cost-effectiveness, the project will collaborate with the SEARCH (Study of Environmental Change: www.arcus.org/search) and ACCESS (Arctic Climate Change, Economy and Society: www.access-eu.org) projects that are supported extensively within the United States and Europe, respectively. The project, which is jointly funded by the National Science Foundation and Centre Nationale de al Recherche Scientifique, will add value through partnerships with the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (www.nceas.ucsb.edu) in the United States and institutions in France associated with the ACCESS project as well as the Ice Atmosphere Arctic Ocean Observing System project (www.iaoos-equipex.upmc.fr). The holistic process we develop to generate and share options for Arctic coastal-marine sustainability will be memorialized by publications and through a video series emphasizing lessons of ?science diplomacy? to further stimulate education by and for the benefit of all stakeholders - representatives of government agencies, academia, industry, non-governmental organizations, and civil society. The sustainability process we develop and demonstrate in this project focusing on the Arctic Ocean will have implications everywhere on Earth where resources, human activities, and their impacts extend across or beyond the boundaries of sovereign states.