Modeling climate futures, impacts, response and adaptation options for Arctic communities

The Arctic is undergoing transformative climate change, with profound implications for transportation systems. The lengthening of the shipping season in the Arctic Ocean is well-documented herein, with warming temperatures also compromising the operating period and safety of winter roads. Less studied are the more informal transportation networks involving use of unmaintained trails on frozen lakes, rivers, ocean, and the frozen ground, which are critically important for travel between communities, to cultural sites, and for practicing traditional hunting and fishing activities which have particular importance for Indigenous communities. In research conducted as part of the Indigenous Health Adaptation to Climate Change (IHACC) project (www.ihacc.ca), we have documented concerns among Inuit communities in Arctic Canada that changing trail access due to climate change is affecting a variety of health outcomes including compromising food security, impacting wellbeing, and reducing physical safety. In a paper published in Nature Climate Change (Ford et al., 2019) we developed trail access models which identify quantitative risk thresholds of ice and weather conditions that affect the ability and safety of using trails, based upon Indigenous knowledge and science. The proposed PhD project will take this work to the next level, examining how projected future changes in sea ice and weather conditions might affect trail conditions, working closely with Inuit communities. The PhD has 3 primary objectives:

1. Draw on the latest climate model information to produce suitable climate scenarios for the region, accounting for uncertainty in response and taking account of potentially high impact low likelihood outcomes.

2. Using already developed trail access models, use the downscaled climate model data to model how climatic and ice-related thresholds and associated trail access might be affected at different levels of warming, over different timescales, and by different generations and classes of climate model (e.g. CMIP5 vs CMIP6).

3. Working with a number of Inuit communities, use participatory scenario planning approaches to examine what projected changes might mean for community livelihoods, culture, and well-being, and identify opportunities for adaptation. Particular attention will be paid to the upper and lower parts of the model uncertainty distributions: for example, what is the minimum change we are now committed to and what this might mean locally; what are the worst case scenarios that may be encountered.

The PhD project will be on the cutting edge of developing innovative interdisciplinary approaches to connect science and Indigenous knowledge, and will involve working in the region witnessing the most climate change globally. Reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of the project, the student will be supervised by a social scientist who works with Indigenous knowledge systems in the Arctic (Ford, U of Leeds), a natural scientist (Lowe, Met Office), and an epidemiologist based in Canada who has expertise in participatory epidemiology (Harper, U Alberta).

The student will be expected to spend considerable time in Inuit communities in northern Canada, and be comfortable working in challenging cross-cultural contexts and climates. They will have strong modeling and/or statistical analysis training and be interested in engaging in a highly interdisciplinary and participatory project.