Collaborative Research: Resilience and adaptive capacity of arctic marine systems under a changing climate (RACArctic)

This award provides support to U.S. researchers participating in a project competitively selected by a 14-country initiative on global change research through the Belmont Forum. The Belmont Forum is a high level group of the world's major and emerging funders of global environmental change research and international science councils. It aims to accelerate delivery of the international environmental 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 utilize existing Arctic observing systems, datasets and models to evaluate key sustainability challenges and opportunities in the Arctic region, to innovate new sustainability science theory and approaches to these challenges and opportunities, and support decision-making towards a sustainable Arctic environment. 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 and that bring together natural scientists, social scientists and end users (e.g., policy makers, regulators, NGOs, communities and industry). The RACArctic (Resilience and adaptive capacity of arctic marine systems under a changing climate) project will bring together a team of natural and social scientists from the US, Japan, and Norway to investigate stressors and futures of fisheries-impacted marine ecosystems in the north. Through a synthesis of available observations, including information from fisheries managers and subsistence harvesters, the team will assess the effects of physical drivers and human pressures on marine ecosystems and key fish populations in the North Atlantic and North Pacific. Best practices for fisheries management in these sectors will be developed from the available management frameworks taking into account not only physical-biological relationships but the adaptive capacity of fish stocks, the integrated ecosystem, and the socio-economic needs of fisheries-dependent communities in the Subarctic-Arctic transition zone. This comparative analysis will connect with a breadth of stakeholders through a series of workshops and provide use-inspired results through collaboration with fisheries management councils.