Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: Understanding Resilience and Long-Term Ecosystem Change in the High Arctic: Narrative-Based Analyses from Svalbard

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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 SVALUR project seeks to advance resilience building and adaptation to current changes in the Arctic by focusing on the creation of knowledge of the environment in the archipelago of Svalbard, situated north of Norway in the Arctic ocean. The prevalence of long-term monitoring programs to capture environmental change is increasing, but such initiatives typically capture highly specific parameters and mostly cover relatively short periods of time. Environmental understanding of people living, working and exploring parts of the Arctic is multifaceted, relational and often concerns much longer time periods. However, compared with scientific monitoring, such knowledge is rarely utilized, thus hindering holistic knowledge generation with agency in arctic areas subject to rapid environmental change. The project will capture detailed understanding of environmental change experienced by people living, working and/or exploring different parts of High Arctic Svalbard. This information will be compared environmental monitoring data, in terms of overlap, mismatch and possible synergies. The results will help provide valuable, holistic insights into long-term environmental change and how current monitoring programs can become more sensitive to people’s lived experiences and optimize their relevance to people living in and visiting the Arctic. Increasing levels of transience throughout the region mean that developing ways in which narrative-based understanding can complement scientific monitoring are pressing. SVALUR will develop research methods that are holistic and co-owned, and vital for the well-being of both current and future generations.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.