Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: Rapid Arctic environmental Changes: implications for well-being, resilience and Evolution of Arctic communities (RACE)

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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. The RACE project addresses the impacts of rapid climate and environmental changes in the Arctic on infrastructure and pan-Arctic and regional population dynamics. By using best available datasets from in-situ and satellite observations and re-analyses together with climate model simulations, the project will develop improved regional assessments of Arctic Social Indicators, which in turn, will be used for projections of population dynamics as well as demographic and life quality trends of Arctic communities. For the first time results of large-scale climate diagnostics and projections will be used and translated into social indicators and further into demographic variables by using socioeconomic and demographic models, thus providing accurate regional projections of the Arctic population dynamics which presently are routinely relying exclusively on economy forecasts. Results of this project will provide critical information about on-going and future climate and environmental changes, assessments of the impact on these changes on community well-being, and projections of climate-mediated pan-Arctic and regional population dynamics. This information is critical for building strategies for sustainable social-economic development in the Arctic and pan-Arctic regions in the 21st century.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.