Amy Lauren Lovecraft

Policy strategies to address sustainability of Alaskan boreal forests in response to a directionally changing climate.

Human activities are altering many factors that determine the fundamental properties of ecological and social systems. Is sustainability a realistic goal in a world in which many key process controls are directionally changing? To address this issue, we integrate several disparate sources of theory to address sustainability in directionally changing social–ecological systems, apply this framework to climate-warming impacts in Interior Alaska, and describe a suite of policy strategies that emerge from these analyses. Climate warming in Interior Alaska has profoundly affected factors that influence landscape processes (climate regulation and disturbance spread) and natural hazards, but has only indirectly influenced ecosystem goods such as food, water, and wood that receive most management attention. Warming has reduced cultural services provided by ecosystems, leading to some of the few institutional responses that directly address the causes of climate warming, e.g., indigenous initiatives to the Arctic Council. Four broad policy strategies emerge: (i) enhancing human adaptability through learning and innovation in the context of changes occurring at multiple scales; (ii) increasing resilience by strengthening negative (stabilizing) feedbacks that buffer the system from change and increasing options for adaptation through biological, cultural, and economic diversity; (iii) reducing vulnerability by strengthening institutions that link the high-latitude impacts of climate warming to their low-latitude causes; and (iv) facilitating transformation to new, potentially more beneficial states by taking advantage of opportunities created by crisis. Each strategy provides societal benefits, and we suggest that all of them be pursued simultaneously.

Increasing Wildfire in Alaska's Boreal Forest: Pathways to Potential Solutions of a Wicked Problem

ABSTRACT Recent global environmental and social changes have created a set of “wicked problems” for which there are no optimal solutions. In this article, we illustrate the wicked nature of such problems by describing the effects of global warming on the wildfire regime and indigenous communities in Alaska, and we suggest an approach for minimizing negative impacts and maximizing positive outcomes. Warming has led to an increase in the areal extent of wildfire in Alaska, which increases fire risk to rural indigenous communities and reduces short-term subsistence opportunities. Continuing the current fire suppression policy would minimize these negative impacts, but it would also create secondary problems near communities associated with fuel buildup and contribute to a continuing decline in subsistence opportunities. Collaborations between communities and agencies to harvest flammable fuels for heating and electrical power generation near communities, and to use wildland fire for habitat enhancement in surrounding forests, could reduce community vulnerability to both the direct and the indirect effects of global climate change.

Vulnerability and adaptation to climate-related fire impacts in rural and urban interior Alaska

This paper explores whether fundamental differences exist between urban and rural vulnerability to climate-induced changes in the fire regime of interior Alaska. We further examine how communities and fire managers have responded to these changes and what additional adaptations could be put in place. We engage a variety of social science methods, including demographic analysis, semi-structured interviews, surveys, workshops and observations of public meetings. This work is part of an interdisciplinary study of feedback and interactions between climate, vegetation, fire and human components of the Boreal forest social–ecological system of interior Alaska. We have learned that although urban and rural communities in interior Alaska face similar increased exposure to wildfire as a result of climate change, important differences exist in their sensitivity to these biophysical, climate-induced changes. In particular, reliance on wild foods, delayed suppression response, financial resources and institutional connections vary between urban and rural communities. These differences depend largely on social, economic and institutional factors, and are not necessarily related to biophysical climate impacts per se. Fire management and suppression action motivated by political, economic or other pressures can serve as unintentional or indirect adaptation to climate change. However, this indirect response alone may not sufficiently reduce vulnerability to a changing fire regime. More deliberate and strategic responses may be required, given the magnitude of the expected climate change and the likelihood of an intensification of the fire regime in interior Alaska.

Connecting scientific observations to stakeholder needs in sea ice social–environmental systems: the institutional geography of northern Alaska

Abstract The institutions governing sea ice system services in the Arctic are associated with particular places, species, and environments. Yet scholars rarely consider the way these associations may present barriers to, or facilitate, effective translation of scientific data into broadly available information for stakeholders to create and debate policy. In light of rapidly changing arctic environments how can data best be collected and disseminated to affected stakeholders as usable information to facilitate effective planning? This article explores the linkages between scientific data production and policy implementation related to sea ice loss in the Arctic. The rapid decline of arctic summer sea ice is currently tracked and studied intensively but a comprehensive approach to address the changes is lacking. Our work builds upon earlier research establishing the need to approach sea ice as a complex multi-jurisdictional geophysical–social–ecological feature from a services standpoint. Our research catalogs the geography of sea ice institutions in northern Alaska to demonstrate the fragmentation in data production and distribution. We then examine two case studies. The first is a newly established cross-scale information bridge improving sea-ice and weather information relevant to walrus hunting and management. The second is the case of the emerging arctic marine traffic regime. We argue that in order to maximize data production, dissemination, and participatory capacity across stakeholders: (1) scientific observations should be tied to institutional density and sea ice services, and (2) information bridges should exist across major institutional actors.

The human geography of Arctic sea ice: introduction

Research across disciplines affiliated with geophysical, biological, and engineering sciences has created important informative models of the annual sea ice cycle, ice-dependent species, and structural capacities for human activities in regions with sea ice. In the new millennium, the widespread acceptance in the scientific world of climate change and its amplification at the poles, along with the Fourth International Polar Year (2007 2009), have created a broader interest in sea ice as a feature in the complex Arctic social-environmental system. Various disciplines have documented the use of sea ice by many different people (e.g. the Inuit, scientists), organizations (e.g. oil and gas developers and hunting and fishing associations), animals (e.g. marine mammals), and other living organisms (a whole suite of biota). However, it was not until the more recent documented trend of the thinning and shrinking of its coverage (Lemke et al. 2007; Stroeve et al. 2012) and increasing socioeconomic and geopolitical interests in the Arctic (Byers 2009; Zellen 2009) that any comprehensive approach toward analyzing sea ice from a social science perspective began to arise (e.g. Eicken et al. 2009). In light of the focus on climate change and its amplified effects at the poles (ACIA 2005), the past decade has resulted in a consideration of sea ice from a systems perspective, more specifically from a social-environmental system perspective. This perspective is defined by a suite of interactions among interdependent social, ecological, and geophysical features in a geographic space bounded by time. The sea ice system provides a suite of vital ecosystem services (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005) to the peoples of the North, and its diminishment will have profound effects on these societies (Aporta et al. 2011; Hovelsrud et al. 2011; Krupnik et al. 2010; Lovecraft 2008; Lovecraft and Eicken 2009). To consider the implications of the changing sea ice social-environmental system from a geographic perspective, this special issue of Polar Geography brings together a cross-section of work, focusing on the sea ice cycle from the perspective of human geography. Human geography, here, is conceptualized broadly as the spatial study of human activities in a particular social-environmental system along with the human understanding(s) of this system. Arctic sea ice has been a part of human sociocultural practices as far south as Japan and as long as a millennia. Myriad examples include the ice as a place of enculturation, a platform for industry, a habitat for animals, a hazard for traffic, travelways for hunters and explorers, a buffer to coastal communities, and a part of spiritual identity. These qualities are experiencing rapid changes driven primarily by three major interconnected global

Robustness or resilience? Managing the intersection of ecology and engineering in an urban Alaskan fishery

Systems theories of robustness and resilience, which are derived from engineering and ecology, respectively, have been increasingly applied to social-ecological systems (SESs). Social-ecological robustness has been applied primarily to management of physical dimensions of SESs (e.g., water management) and resilience to management of ecological dimensions of SESs (e.g., rangelands). However, cases of highly engineered systems have yet to be adequately evaluated by either approach. We find the robustness framework serves to better explain management options of a highly engineered, ecologically-based SES, the lower Ship Creek fishery in Anchorage, Alaska, USA. Robustness applies well to this system because its dynamics are highly engineered through both structures and institutions. Even the salmon are products of a hatchery fishery that operates independently of many ecological variables and feedbacks within the system. However, robustness theory has yet to develop a prescriptive method for management that can assist practitioners. We conclude by applying Ostrom’s design principles to the system dynamics to assess opportunities for increasing the robustness of this urban fishery.

Interlocal Rules and Democracy in the Administration of Cross-Border Policy Communities

The management of contiguous transboundary ecological commons presents a complicated nexus in which at least two forms of governance and culture characterize and attempt to solve commonly shared environmental problems. Two nations with a long history of cross-border environmental cooperation are Canada and the United States. However, the evolution of effective transboundary management of water policy has been hampered by an inadequate understanding of the growth of localized transnational institutions between them. This study analyzes the interlocal natural resource stewardship in the binational Areas of Concern (AOCs) shared by Canada and the United States in the Great Lakes Basin. These AOCs are the St. Clair, St. Marys, and Detroit rivers. Interlocal characterizes a situation in which local entities on either side of a contiguous border make agreements or reach working understandings across international boundaries to solve commonly shared problems. The intent of this paper is to demonstrate the evolving administrative capacity to reconceptualize community based governance rooted in the local ecological space of shared borderlands.

Simulations and Role Playing (S&RP) I Track Summary

Undergraduates often have difficulty conceptualizing phenomena for which they have little experience, such as life in an Islamic state or the pressures of foreign policy decision making. The participants of the S&RP Track I explored multiple ways political science might address this challenge. While the exercises employed by participants differed, the desire to help students experientially learn key concepts and materials provided the central motivation. S&RP are a valuable complement to traditional teacher-centered methods of content delivery, such as lectures that tend to focus on acquisition of knowledge without reflection. One clear advantage of S&RP is the ability to encourage synthesis and evaluation of information by literally taking students out of their chairs and having them “learn by doing.” Such strategies help students shift their roles from being passive receivers of information to active participants in the learning process. The participants of this track felt strongly that S&RP can play a vital role for students, faculty, and their institutions by enhancing faculty ability to impart key skills, analytical tools, and varied perspectives to students who in turn become empowered as a part of their own education. As institutions compete for students and students demand applicable courses, novel teaching methods that make clear connections between political instruction and the lived realities of those taught benefit everyone.