As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine takes center stage, remote areas of the Arctic are thrust to the front row of global impacts to the environment, economics and human security.
In this month’s open-acceess journal Ambio, scientists from Michigan State University (MSU) and the University of Alaska Fairbanks outline the many ways the Arctic’s natural resources, ecosystems and people are tightly connected – both to the eight countries that have land in the Arctic, as well as to global events.
It’s critical, the paper notes, to understand the complexities of tightly bound actions and events of both people and nature, especially in times of crisis – most notably climate change and heated conflict between Russia and western countries.
“The current Russia-Ukraine War has cascading consequences for the Arctic and around the world,” said Jianguo “Jack” Liu, director of MSU’s Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability. “The socioeconomic and environmental impacts go far beyond the war zones.”
The Arctic is at the epicenter of complex and socioeconomic change. Climate change is providing more shipping routes, altering the habitats of critical fish and marine life on which indigenous communities depend for subsistence, and even facilitating the phenomenon of “last-chance” tourism. Increased access to and extraction of natural resources, such as oil and natural gas, holds the potential for both positive and negative outcomes.
And since the Arctic contains eight countries, with Russia and the United States being key players, the dynamic connections between human activity, nature and politics are intensifying.
“The crisis in Europe has directly impacted Arctic oil and gas development as well as Arctic regional and global shipping,” said Lawson Brigham, researcher at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. “The complex linkages of the Arctic to the globe have never been more apparent.”.
Researchers applied the framework of metacoupling , a relatively new way of looking at complex systems holistically to understand socioeconomic and environmental interactions and influences both near and far. In several key areas of the paper, the authors reveal how Russia is deeply involved:
“In times of global challenges, it’s going to be important to be aware that Arctic communities and ecosystems affect and are affected by events both near and far. Considering these connections is critical if we hope to steer the course of the future towards sustainability,” said Kelly Kapsar , an MSU-CSIS PhD candidate and lead author of the paper.
In addition to Liu, Kapsar and Brigham, MSU-CSIS PhD student Veronica Frans also was an author on “The metacoupled Arctic: Human-nature interactions across local to global scales as drivers of sustainability.”
The work was supported by the National Science Foundation.
AMBIO
The metacoupled Arctic: Human–nature interactions across local to global scales as drivers of sustainability
30-Mar-2022