Proposed Sessions

Long-term changes in Arctic social-ecological systems

Affiliation: University of Northern Iowa, USA and Institute of Geography RAS, Russia | Country: United States | Organizer(s): Andrey Petrov, Tatiana Vlasova

The Arctic is undergoing rapid environmental, socio-cultural geopolitical and economic transformation. This session aims at exploring how Arctic communities and stakeholders deal with the combined challenges from climate change, political, economic and resource pressures, changes to the global order and new social-cultural realities and what the future might hold for the Arctic. We invite papers that present interdisciplinary approaches to understanding long-term changes developed within the biophysical and social scholarship, such as studies of Arctic social-ecological systems, interaction of society and place, and future social-ecological change scenarios toward Arctic sustainability building at different scales. These papers will contribute to the understanding of long-term human responses to Arctic environmental change and long-term transformative impacts of human activities on Arctic ecosystems, including: (1) improving understandings of long-term human responses to specific climate change ‘events’; (2) providing insights into long-term human impacts on Arctic and sub-Arctic biological diversity; (3) enhancing understanding human strategic responses and decision-making ‘pathways’ in Arctic SES’s over generational time scales; and (4) engagement of the Indigenous knowledge in understanding social-ecological dynamics at different time and space scales.