Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: From Nunavik to Iceland: Climate, Human and Culture through time across the coastal (sub)Arctic North Atlantic (NICH-Arctic)

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This award provides support to U.S. researchers participating in a project competitively selected by a 55-country initiative on global change research through the Belmont Forum. The Belmont Forum is a consortium of research funding organizations focused on support for transdisciplinary approaches to global environmental change challenges and opportunities. It aims to accelerate delivery of the international research most urgently needed to remove critical barriers to sustainability by aligning and mobilizing international resources. Each partner country provides funding for their researchers within a consortium to alleviate the need for funds to cross international borders. This approach facilitates effective leveraging of national resources to support excellent research on topics of global relevance best tackled through a multinational approach, recognizing that global challenges need global solutions.Working together in this Collaborative Research Action, the partner agencies have provided support for research projects that focus on Resilience in a Rapidly Changing Arctic. Integrated teams of scientists and stakeholders will address key areas of arctic resilience understanding and action. This collaboration of academic and non-academic knowledge systems constitutes a transdisciplinary approach that will advance not only understanding of the fundamentals of arctic resilience but also spur action, inform decision-making, and translate into solutions for resilience. This award provides support for the U.S. researchers to cooperate in consortia that consist of partners from at least three of the participating countries. This project seeks to explore and assess environmental and human resilience and vulnerability in sub-Arctic to Arctic coastal regions over time. The project will focus on areas where climate conditions and sea ice have shown large variations and where these variations play a vital role in accessibility through navigation and livelihood of the cultural communities. The succession of different cultures within the sub-Arctic and Arctic regions illustrates a wide range of adaptative strategies to harsh weather conditions, climatic variations, ocean and sea-ice instabilities and ecological stresses since early migrations via Alaska about 4500 years ago and the Nordic Seas in the 9th to 10th centuries. To better understand the impact of change on these populations over time, the project will combine geological, historical and instrumental records with narrative information from cultural practices and the representations of Nordic environments through the literature to understand the natural variability of sea ice, climate and vegetation; adaptation of local human populations to their habitat; and cultural representation and perceptions of the natural environments by local and outside-of-the-region populations.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.