Climate Week NYC Webinar: Arctic Permafrost Thaw: Science & Policy

Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Heather Goldstone, Chief Communications Officer at Woodwell Climate Research center. And on behalf of Woodwell Climate and our partners at the Belfer center at Harvard, I'm really thrilled to be able to welcome you to our event on Arctic Permafrost this afternoon. For that matter, to congratulate you on making it to one of the last events of Climate Week this completely, we hope, unique Climate Week, New York City. That of course, is coming to you not from New York City, but from places like Cape Cod and Boston. And you, though on the flip side, able to join us also from anywhere in the world, not only in New York City. So there are silver linings to this situation that we find ourselves in. We do still have folks joining us. It is at least in the Northeast, a beautiful Friday afternoon in the fall. And so I'm sure we've got some folks joining us late. We might have a few folks who registered and don't actually make it, but that's okay. Again, thank you so much for joining us. We have really an amazing panel of presenters today, some really high powered folks and some great on the ground perspectives on this issue of Permafrost Thaw. I'm going to introduce those speakers as we go and each panelist will have several minutes to kind of present a little bit about their work. I'll have a couple of questions, follow up questions for them, but then after that we have about an hour and a half together this afternoon in total and we will have a significant period of time for audience Q and A. We really want to be able to answer your questions. And so to do that we will be using the Q and A feature. So if you look toward the bottom of your screen, you can, you'll see an actual Q and A with a couple of little thought bubbles at any point during the presentations or during the event as a whole. Go ahead. And as questions occur to you, type those in there and I'll be monitoring that and pulling questions from that during the Q and A period and we'll see how many of those we can get through. While we're doing some zoom housekeeping, I would encourage you to select Speaker View. This is of course your choice entirely, but I think is a nice way to be able to see the person presenting as well. As for those who have slides that they're going to share, be able to see their slides. At least for me, I find it easier to focus on the person who's speaking if I only see their face and not the whole grid. But again, Your choice. Now, we're going to be talking about the Arctic today. And for many of us, myself included, the Arctic can feel like a distant place. And I would love to get to know a little bit about you, our audience joining us today. We would love to be in a room together and be able to just ask you to raise your hand. I'm going to test instead your zoom know how and see if you can, if you have been to the Arctic, anywhere in the Arctic, go ahead and digitally raise your hand. Wow, this is terrific. We've got a little over 100 people in the room at the moment and over three dozen raising their hands to say that they have been somewhere in the Arctic. I think that's probably a disproportionate number for many crowds that you would see. But it's terrific that we do have that level of familiarity with the region for, as I said, for many of us. And I'm going to go ahead and lower those hands. Thank you. For many of us, the Arctic can feel like a distant place, maybe even out of sight, out of mind. But as you're going to hear today, what happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic. What is happening there is dramatic and it has ramifications for all of us. And I'm going to share my screen one more time here and give you one representation of just how extreme what is going on in the Arctic is. So what you're looking at here is, is if we were to turn heat into instead of just a red color, which it's a red color, but also give it elevation, so kind of make it rise up off of the map, you can see how disproportionate the warming in the Arctic is. The Arctic is warming roughly three times faster than the global average. And as warming continues in coming decades, what you're seeing here is what we expect to be the amount of warming that we would see in different parts of the globe by mid century. You can see that while many parts of the world are likely to be experiencing temperature, global average, that we should say temperature increases compared to pre industrial conditions of 1 1/2 to 3 degrees. What we're looking at in the Arctic is something like 7,8 degrees Celsius of warming. Really quite dramatic. That plays out in all sorts of ways. And we're seeing the impacts of the amount of global warming that we've already got this year, of course, in things like the unprecedented wildfires in the western US in the record amount of tropical storm activity that we've already seen this Year getting to the Greek Alphabet for named storms in September. Then in the Arctic, we've seen just in the past few days, the official declaration that the sea ice minimum, the shrinking of the sea ice over the summer this year in the Arctic reached the second lowest minimum on record. Again, as warming continues to progress, we expect that in the next few decades, likely in the lifetime of many of the people. I will say it again in this room, even though we're not all in a room together, we will see ice free summers in the Arctic. Now, Arctic sea ice is something I think a lot of us are familiar with hearing about. But it's not just the ice in the Arctic that is melting. The ground there has for millennia been frozen. It's what we call permafrost. And the permafrost is also thawing. And that means that the ground is literally collapsing and cracking. And that has, of course, obvious and dire ramifications for communities in those locations, but also has perhaps less obvious, but I would argue, no less dire consequences for, for the rest of the globe. And that is the range of impacts that our panelists today are going to try to encapsulate for you and also get to what it is that we need to do in response to our evolving understanding of the problem of permafrost thaw. So I'm gonna stop talking and hand it over to our first panelist, who is Dr. Susan Natali. She is the director of the Arctic Program here at Woodwell Climate Research Center. She is an Arctic ecologist whose focus on this problem of permafrost thaw is at a level personally motivated by an acute awareness of just how pressing a problem this is and the risks that it poses, both locally and globally. And so she's going to kick us off with a little bit of the basics of permafrost and permafrost thaw. So, Sue, I will hand it over to you.

Great. Thank you, Heather. Okay, so first of all, thank you for everyone for being here. And also thank you to the panelists. I'm going to start off with a very broad and brief overview of permafrost science. We're all aware climate change has either impacted or will impact every place on the Earth, but perhaps no place has been harder hit than the Arctic. Warming is happening three times faster, as Heather said, in the Arctic, than other parts of the planet. And this is causing extreme changes and hazardous conditions. And so I just want to show you this picture to remind you that the changes that are happening in the Arctic isn't something that's happening in the future. This is a map showing the amplified warming that's happening in the Arctic. And this is from one month. This is March 2019. And it's showing the temperature anomaly in that month compared to this 30 year period, 1950 to 1980. And I think what your eye is probably immediately drawn to is these very red areas in the northern region showing in this month there was a 4 degrees Celsius warmer temperatures than the average. That's 7 degrees Fahrenheit. And then this is just another look at that same idea. This is sort of a longer term view of the amplified Arctic warming. So this shows the difference in average air temperature for the past five years. So from 2015 to 2019 compared to the 1950 to 1980 average. And this is showing you this across different latitudes. That's what's on the x axis. And just take a look here at this area that's shaded in orange. This orange area is where the temperature is quite high. These are the latitudes that comprise the subarctic and the Arctic region. As Heather noted, this disproportionate warming of the Arctic is expected to continue into the future. 2021 was a big year of headlines for the Arctic. For example, from the New York Times, we heard there was a historic heat wave that rose siber. So this is referring to the 100 degree Fahrenheit temperature in the town in Northern Siberia. It was the hottest temperature ever recorded north of the Arctic Circle. We also learned that intense Arctic wildfires set a pollution record. 2020 was the record in terms of wildfire area and also the amount of greenhouse gas emissions from wildfire. And finally July 15th we learned that that Siberian heat wave, yes, climate change was a big factor. I'm pretty sure this was not a surprise to anyone. One of the most striking and hazardous changes that are happening on land in the Arctic as a result of these extreme events is warming and thawing of the permafrost. Permafrost is perennially frozen ground. It underlies much of the Arctic and subarctic regions. The permafrost is located below the surface soil that thaws and refreezes each year. And it includes any component of the ground that remains below 0 degrees Celsius. So this includes the very carbon rich soil, as you can see in this image. It includes ice and anything that's buried inside of that material. Permafrost region. Even though it seems like it's really far away and maybe it seems like an obscure area, it's actually Fairly widely distributed, as shown. All of these areas that are shaded in blue, green or yellow are areas within the permafrost domain. It covers about a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere land area. That's about one and a half times the size of the United States. Much of Alaska you can see on the top of this map here. So we're looking down on the Earth from the north. Much of Alaska is underlain by permafrost, and the country containing the most permafrost is Russia. We expect to see 30 to 70% permafrost loss by the end of this century. That's a fairly wide range, and that ranges largely caused by sort of the uncertainty in how humans will behave in terms of reducing our fossil fuel emissions, protecting forests, and protecting soils. If we take little action, we can expect to see a 70% loss in the area of permafrost. And this is going to have consequences for the people of the Arctic, but also for people globally. So these are just some pictures of what it looks like on the ground where the permafrost is thawing. Sometimes the changes can look subtle, but even these subtle changes can have important consequences for greenhouse gas emissions and for ecosystem structure. And you can see that sort of the impact on the ecosystem. This picture on the right, these tilted forests, also known as drunken forests, are what happens when permafrost beneath the forest thaw. When there's a lot of ice in the permafrost. You can see here in this exposure from Siberia, these dashed images. When you have a lot of ice like this, you can have some pretty extreme and abrupt events. Consequences of the thaw. Here's another example of an extreme and abrupt ground thaw event. This is the Peel Plateau in Canada. These abrupt events are exacerbated by these very extreme heat waves that have been happening over the past several years in the Arctic. This level of change in the landscape is really something that's irreversible on a human relevant time frame. The loss of permafrost is also severely impacting the people who live in the Arctic. This is going to be addressed more by the subsequent speakers, so I'm just going to show a couple pictures. This is a village in southwest Alaska. In some areas, when the permafrost thaws, the ground sinks and the ground gets a lot wetter as a result. This is placing communities in those areas at risk. It's impacting their health and the livelihoods of Arctic residents. And I also want to point out that permafrost thaw is interacting with Other changes that are happening in the Arctic. So, for example, sea ice loss is causing the storm damage to increase. In coastal areas, this is causing more erosion. And that erosion in turn is making the permafrost more vulnerable to thaw. At the same time, in places when the permafrost thaws, this then makes those landscapes more vulnerable to erosion. So in addition to these local and regional effects, permafrost thaw has the potential to impact everyone on the planet. And how does permafrost thaw affect global climate? Well, it's all about the carbon. So the permafrost stores a vast pool of ancient carbon. It's estimated at 1100-1500-ANDION tons of carbon. That carbon has been accumulating in the permafrost for tens of thousands of years. And to place that in perspective, permafrost contains twice as much carbon as is in the atmosphere. And there's three times as much carbon in permafrost as in the world's forest. As the permafrost thaws, the vast stores of organic matter can be decomposed by microbes. The microbes then in turn release carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere. This leads to additional warming, which in turn leads to additional thaw. And just a quick note about methane. As I said, one of the results of permafrost thaw is that in some places, the ground can get wetter. These wetter conditions are conditions that are very well suited for both methane production and also methane release into the atmosphere. And keep in mind that methane is a very potent greenhouse gas. It's 30 times more potent than CO2 on a 100 year time scale. I'm just going to wrap up now to bring back to the fact that the Arctic has been a carbon sink for tens of thousands of years because of the cold temperatures has protected the carbon that has been locked away and frozen in the permafrost. As the temperatures warm, if carbon emissions from the permafrost and from the soil outpace uptake, as is expected, the permafrost region may turn now into a new source of carbon into the atmosphere. All right.

Great.

Thank you.

Yeah.

One kind of quick question for clarification, really, and that is, you know, you mentioned at the top that we could see between 30 and 70% of permafrost thawing. You also gave kind of a range of numbers for the amount of carbon that permafrost holds. Could you just give a sense in terms of, when we're looking at these ranges of numbers, where does that uncertainty come from? Is it that we don't understand the processes going on in the Arctic? Is it that we just can't predict human behavior or that we don't know how those two interact? Where are some of those knowledge gaps and sources of uncertainty?

I think in the case of that wide range of permafrost thaw, that largely comes from that range is largely from human behavior. So the 30% is, if we immediately reduce our fossil fuel emissions, increase our ambition to protect carbon and forests and in soils, we still are going to see some permafrost thawing, but it will be at that low range. If we continue as we are acting now, then that is going to be at the high range of 70%. There also is uncertainty, scientific uncertainty, and a lot of that comes into when we're really trying to get a handle on just how much permafrost carbon will come out, the timing of that permafrost carbon, whether it will be methane and CO2. The one thing we are certain of, though, is that, you know, we know when permafrost thaws, this is just a natural biological process that microbes break down that organic matter and release greenhouse gases.

Thank you so much for that. So I think we are going to move on to our next panelist. As I said, there will be. We are attempting to ensure, as we move fairly rapidly through these presentations, that we do leave plenty of time for audience Q and A and more of a conversation at the end. So we're going to move to our next presenter, who is John Holdren. He has, as you can see on this slide, a range of distinguished titles with Harvard University, but is perhaps best known as being President mbapa's top science and technology advisor. And today we all get the benefit of his science and technology insights. John, thanks for being here and take it away.

Thanks very much, Heather, and thanks, sue, for that great beginning to our science portrayal here. Let's see. Here we go. So let me start with the essence of the global threat. It has already been mentioned that thawing permafrost poses impacts and hazards not just in the Arctic region, but beyond the Arctic region for the whole globe. And that is largely associated with this phenomenon that Sue Natalia has already mentioned, that carbon dioxide and methane emitted to the atmosphere as a result of permafrost thaw don't remain over the Arctic, but they mix into the global atmosphere. They're both what are called, well, mixed greenhouse gases. And in the global atmosphere, they add to the inventories of carbon dioxide and methane that have been emitted by fossil fuel technologies, by deforestation, by other land use practices. If the permafrost emissions are significant compared to those other sources of carbon dioxide and methane, they're going to make worse climate change as a whole and all of its impacts globally. Everything that we suffer from as a result of climate change. More powerful storms, longer droughts, hotter heat waves, bigger wildfires. All of those things will happen faster if it turns out that the emissions from permafrost add significantly to the other sources of CO2 and methane in the atmosphere. And they'll take a bite out of the so called carbon budget. The amount of carbon that society can emit from energy systems and land use chain without exceeding any given global temperature target. For example, the internationally agreed target of 2 degrees Celsius above the pre industrial level, 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, or the even more demanding 1.5 degrees Celsius target that was embraced as an aspirational goal in the 2015 Paris Agreement. The biggest questions about this particular threat are number one, in a world that's having limited access in reducing emissions from fossil fuel use and land use change, how much will the emissions from thawing permafrost add to global climate change and its impacts? The other question is, in a world that's making a serious attempt to meet a 1.5 degrees Celsius or a 2.0 degrees Celsius target, how big a bite will the growth of permafrost, carbon dioxide and methane take out of the carbon budget for those targets? And I just note now here's the yardstick For a 2/3 chance of staying below 1.5 degrees Celsius, the post 2020carbon budget is a little less than 600 gigatons of CO2. That means 160 gigatons of contained carbon. That's how much room we have for remaining emissions from fossil fuels and land use change. Assuming there's no significant contribution from the permafrost, for a 2/3 chance of staying below 2 degrees Celsius, the post 2020 carbon budget is a little over 1300 gigatons of CO2 or about 360 gigatons of carbon. So let's look at what has been estimated for the rate of carbon release from terrestrial permafrost over the periods now to 2100. Now to 2200, now 2300. The dark red lines are now to 2100. That's going to be our main focus here. These numbers are all in billions of tons of contained carbon. For comparison, the current fossil fuel emissions are about 10 billion tons of contained carbon per year. And what you see looking at this, number one, is there's a very wide range of estimates that have been made for how much of the carbon in the permafrost will have been released by the year 2100. And it turns out that that range is such a. That the releases are a little deal, not a big deal at the low end, but they're a very big deal at the high end, taking a huge bite at the high end out of the carbon budget that remains for the world to stay below either of the currently embraced international targets. It's also very important that more recent results, those results were all 2015. Earlier results in the last five years are mostly pointing to emissions at the high end. The work of Dr. Natali herself, with a number of colleagues, has indicated that carbon dioxide emissions in winter were previously underestimated. Paper in Nature, one of the leading science journals in the world, last year. Methane emissions from lakes likewise seem to have been underestimated previously. This is a picture of methane bubbling from an Alaska lake. These lakes are called thermokarst lakes. They're created or expanded by voids left by thawing permafrost. And they could more than double the methane releases otherwise expected from the Arctic by 2100. And again, as Dr. Natali has already pointed out, the methane releases are far worse per molecule than the carbon dioxide releases. It is also the case that some of this methane might be coming from unfrozen fossil fuel rather than from bacterial action. That is, there's more than one way that thawing permafrost can release to the atmosphere methane that has previously been trapped in the frozen Earth. Emissions from lakes are now expected to be large enough to more than double the emissions caused by gradual thaw from land, as shown in this picture. That starts at 1999 and goes out to basically the year 2100. Furthermore, it is possible that methane from subsea permafrost may also be a previously neglected contributor to the increase of methane flowing out of a thawing Arctic. Read the little box at the bottom. This is a Russian observer who's been watching what's happening in the Arctic over the course of 45 expeditions. And he notes that this particular bubbling methane out of the East Siberia Sea is the most powerful sea that he has ever observed. These are anecdotal, isolated results so far, but they are worrisome. So let me come to the bottom line first. There are big uncertainties in the estimates of carbon emissions from thawing permafrost in this century and beyond. Secondly, the allocation of the carbon emissions between carbon dioxide and methane is also uncertain, and it's very consequential for the impact of these emissions on global climate. The more of it comes out as methane, the worse. Multiple observations and preliminary analyses are suggesting that most past projections of the carbon emissions expected from permafrost may be underestimates. And the same could be true of the methane fraction, very possibly an underestimate. Fourth, more comprehensive observations and better models are going to be needed to clarify how significant the issue is how significant the release of carbon dioxide and methane from thawing permafrost is in terms both of their impact on the global planet and also their impact on carbon budgets for deep global emissions reductions. In the meantime, prudence dictates that permafrost carbon be considered a further incentive for the fastest possible reduction of emissions from fossil fuels and land use change.

Thanks, John, for that quick tour of the carbon budget and global ramifications of the permafrost thaw issue. I wonder you ended with the bottom line, but I wonder if we could condense that bottom line even more. I mean, if we look at the potential for release of greenhouse gases from permafrost thaw and that total carbon budget that we are working with at this point, I mean, what percentage could be eaten up by permafrost?

Well, at the high end, sad to say, the entire carbon budget for the 1.5 degrees C target could be eaten up by permafrost. The entire budget, nothing left for emissions from fossil fuels and land use change. That's the high end. But as I say, the high end looks increasingly likely based on incomplete evidence. And it underscores the urgency of understanding better what the emissions could be and the urgency in any case of moving with all possible speed to reduce the emissions from fossil fuel burning and from land use change at lower latitudes.

Thank you again, John. We are going to move to our next presenter, who is Joel Clement. He is an Arctic Initiative Senior Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School's Welfare center for Science and International affairs, and we've been focusing on climate change and permafrost thaw, as you know, biological, geological, physical processes. Here Joel's going to start to get us into the human realm talking about some of the ramifications of this issue.

Great. Okay, thanks, Heather. I'm going to continue the parade of good news and talk about some of the impacts around the Arctic, both in terms of industrial and economic impacts, but also public and health and safety implications of Thawing permafrost. But first, I want to say that the Arctic is sparsely populated, but there are 4 million people there and the cultural diversity is off the charts. These isolated villages, setting aside for a moment the industrial Russian towns and cities, these isolated villages, mostly indigenous, are culturally distinct in terms of language and practices and culture. So they punch way above their weight in terms of our global cultural diversity. So that's what we have up in the Arctic. But of course, we also have these immense oil and gas operations in Russia. 80% of the Russian natural gas infrastructure sits on permafrost. It's also a very strategic geopolitical region, a lot of national defense installations in the region. So we're just going to take a quick look, a snapshot of impacts around the Arctic. I'm going to tick through a few things to give a sense of the scope of impacts, and I look forward to some questions at the end of our session here today. On the industrial and economic side, a good example of impacts. The Red Dog Zinc mine in Alaska has already spent $20 million to manage water storage and discharge because of conditions caused by thawing permafrost. Alyeska, which is the company that manages the Trans Alaska pipeline, had to spend $10 million last year just to address a single river flooding event on the North Slope. They had to essentially rebuild protective barriers for an underground portion of the pipeline in destabilized permafrost. And oil and gas operations, not even permanent operations, even exploratory operations, rely on permafrost for water containment and something they call drilling sumps. And on the Mackenzie Delta in Canada, these sumps are already failing and contaminating aquatic ecosystems. Now, agriculture is not huge in North America, in the, in the Arctic of North America, but in Siberia it is, or has been, but it has essentially collapsed due to permafrost thaws. These pastures and fields are quickly turning to lakes and swamps. The arable land in Yakutia, which is in Siberia, has dropped by more than half since 1990. Cattle herds have shrunk by 20%, even though resilient reindeer herders are being pinched by the permafrost thaw. And those herds are shrinking. So it's affecting economies across the board. The operating season for industry in the Arctic, particularly in Alaska, is dependent upon frozen ground for ice roads. The ice road season is growing shorter as the permafrost thaws by up to two months since 1980. So this is a substantial change. And not surprisingly, the oil and gas industry folks are not. They seem reluctant to Talk about how they're coping with this issue as a result of a problem that they have essentially caused. The one company that's doing pretty well in Alaska as a result of permafrost thaw is the company that builds the thermosyphons. These are the refrigerants you can bury in the permafrost to help it freeze up again. Industry and communities alike are taking advantage of this technology while they can. Oil companies on the North Slope aren't talking about numbers, but these things are expensive and they've invested heavily, probably to the tune of millions dollars, to fight what may or may not be a losing battle to refreeze permafrost. And interestingly, the thought the permafrost thaw has gotten so bad, and maybe this is a cultural tipping point, but it's now the go to excuse for industrial disasters in the Arctic. The 20,000 gallon diesel spill into a river in Norilsk, Russia was caused by negligence of the mining company Norilsk Nickel. But their immediate press releases sought cover in the prevalence of permafrost thaw in the region and claimed that that was the cause. So that may in fact demonstrate just how important permafrost thaw has become to industrial operations in the Arctic. Now in terms of health and safety and food security. I want to preface by saying there's already a profound public infrastructure deficit in the Arctic. Services are not in place. It's a particularly in North America, difficult place to get supplies, food and health care. And permafrost thaw has combined with the reduction in protected sea ice, as sue mentioned, to increase rapid coastal erosion, which is leading to the relocation of homes and infrastructure. And Fran Omer is going to talk a bit about that. But also river travel no longer an option in parts of Siberia. Winter river travel on the ice and it's become very perilous in Alaska and Canada as well. And there are sad stories every winter of individuals falling through unreliable ice, but it's also constrained subsistence hunting and economies in the region. Now all those rural Siberian farmers are also now moving to cities and that's stressing public infrastructure in the cities where they already had relatively poor urban services. Yakutsk has seen a 20% population increase just in the last 10 years. So this is a major social upheaval happening in the Siberian Arctic. And often mentioned other risk that permafrost thaw brings is the exposure of pathogens. We don't know to what extent that's going to be a big driver, but certainly the anthrax incident in 2016 and Siberia woke a lot of people up. About 2,000 reindeer died and a dozen people. But speaking of disease, you know, the COVID 19 pandemic has created this stress test for infrastructure in the Arctic. And it's become very clear to many people just how important runways and roads are to getting supplies in at a time of pandemic, the important role of health clinics and services and broadband connectivity. So permafrost thaw is affecting all of those things and increasing risk in the region, reducing the resilience of communities up there. I will just briefly note that there have been some studies trying to take a swing at the economic value of both climate change and permafrost thaw in the region. I'll mention that George Washington University produced a report showing that about $300 billion of infrastructure sit on Russian permafrost, and the cost for mitigating in the case of permafrost thaw will be around $100 billion by 2050. But even a Russian government estimate has shown that permafrost thaw will cost Russia about 2 1/2 billion dollars a year, which is changing the calculus a little bit in the Russian government about addressing climate change. A study out of University of Alaska Fairbanks demonstrated that climate change overall is likely to damage infrastructure to the tune of $5.5 billion. And permafrost thaw was one of the top two drivers of that damage, alongside river flooding. That's money, of course, that Alaska does not have. I'll note that infrastructure value is a very incomplete assessment of value in the Arctic when you consider the importance of subsistence and cultural activities that are profoundly affected by permafrost thaw. And also note that, as sue and John both mentioned, permafrost thaw is not operating in a vacuum. And it's extremely difficult to know the combined social, cultural and economic effects caused by the interactions of permafrost thaw, the loss of sea ice, ice shelf collapse, reduced snowpack, and this warmer, wetter climate state that we can now expect in the Arctic. But all of the above constrained resilience in the region and permafrost thaw, the erosion of the ground beneath their feet is profoundly destabilizing to the social, ecological and economic systems of the north. Thanks very much. I look forward to some questions.

Thank you so much, Joel. I'm going to actually go a little out of order here, I guess, and there's just a clarification question that popped up in the audience. Q and A. That I do want to make sure. That we address in a timely manner. And that was just a question about what land use change like that, that kind of term means and kind of how that comes into this story.

Well, I talked about land use change. That means deforestation. It means agricultural practices that affect the flow of carbon into the atmosphere, both CO2 and methane primarily. It can include desertification. Any form of human activity that leads to a change in the COVID the vegetative cover, or the annual cycles in which carbon enters and leaves the soil is land use change. And it contributes a significant but comparatively modest fraction of current human emissions. That is, if the fossil fuel emissions are characterized as being about 10 billion tons of contained carbon per year, the land use change emissions are typically estimated as being in the range of 1 to 2 billion tons of contained carbon per year. So they're important but not dominant. Fossil fuels are the dominant contributor.

And Joel, one more question for you. As you were ticking through this list of impacts and how infrastructure, but also different industries are being impacted, you did mention a couple of industries that are essentially finding opportunities in what is happening in the Arctic right now. And I think there's kind of a pretty widespread truism about climate change that climate change will produce winners and losers, but often in the long run, the short term winners kind of peter out and we end up with more long term losses. Is that what you see happening and unfolding in the Arctic?

Yeah, Heather, you know, I mentioned the company that builds the thermosyphons because they, you know, it's a, it's a niche that is oddly popular right now, but they're fighting a losing battle. And frankly, the rate of transformation in the Arctic is so fast and increasing and we don't talk much about that, but the rate of change is accelerating. Now. I don't see a lot of winners. I see a lot of resilience challenges and the need to really innovate. Now, out of that innovation may come some opportunity, but mostly it's going to be about maintaining the quality of life that people have now.

Thank you so much, Joel. I'm sure there'll be more questions for you in our Q and A portion. We're going to move on to our next presenter, who is Fran Ulmer. She is chair of the U.S. arctic Research Commission and she is going to hopefully get us a little bit, not beyond, but take the next step from three presentations about the impacts and all of what is happening and that we need to understand into what do we start to do about it? What are the adaptations and the responses to what is going on in the Arctic. Fran, take it away.

Yeah.

Thanks, everyone, for joining us. I'm calling in from Anchorage, Alaska, one of the parts of Alaska that isn't dramatically impacted by permafrost thaw. But as you've already heard from sue and others, much of this state is impacted and is going to be even more so. Alaska has about 180 communities that are already impacted by flooding, and that flooding takes a variety of courses in terms of how much impact it has and also the causes. But increasingly, particularly further north, permafrost thawing is contributing dramatically to the problems associated with flooding. So we've talked about the science. We've gone from global to regional to local. I'm going to take you to a few examples in Alaska, and I know Darcy will take you to some of the river communities that are experiencing these problems. I'm going to talk a little bit more about the coastal communities. So the U.S. army Corps of Engineers, as well as the Government Accounting Office, which have responsibilities for looking at disaster areas and how to prevent them. The U.S. army Corps of Engineers has done a number of studies in Alaska about how many communities are at risk. They've identified quite a few that are at risk, but basically 31 that are what they call priority action communities. That is where serious erosion, a combination of coastal flooding, river flooding, permafrost thaw, ice impacts, wind, storm damage, et cetera, is really requiring immediate action in terms of saving lives and protecting property. Now, given that there is no state of Alaska comprehensive erosion program and no comprehensive federal relocation program in our country, this creates the question, whose job is it to worry about these communities and these people and the way in which they might possibly put together the necessary resources to be able to prevent disaster from happening? And I'll just give three quick examples. Kivalina, Shishmaref and Newtok. These are communities that you may have heard of, you may have read about how much climate change is impacting their quality of life and their ability to continue to exist in areas where they have been and where they wish that they could stay. So just as an example, Kivalina first had a boat to relocate in 1953, and it was a 5050 vote. So they didn't move. That was considered not passing. At that time, Kivalino was on an area of 54 acres. That's the extent of their barrier island space. When the second vote did pass in 1992, those 54 acres had shrunk to 27 acres. Now, that is a combination of permafrost thawing of coastal erosion from storm damage. You, when you have less ice covering the ocean, as we do in the Bering and in the Beaufort and the Chukchi, what happens in those storm conditions is you get big pounding waves. Pounding against that thawing permafrost means that you get significant loss. So what does that mean to a community? It means losing houses. It means putting at risk roads and utilities and fuel tanks and schools, and unfortunately, sometimes the loss of life. So Kivalina has picked a couple of places that they'd like to move to. But unfortunately, most of those places have also been ruled by the Corps of Engineers as probably not safe and probably open for flooding. And so not a lot of progress has been made. Shishmaref is a community larger than Kivalina. It has a about 500 people or more. They've had votes through the years 1975, 2002, 2016. And they have looked to federal and state agencies for help and have had a variety of help in terms of things like riprap and gabions and sandbags and beach enrichment and the kinds of things that we see being done in a lot of communities, even in the lower 48, but not enough to really protect them. They haven't made a whole lot of progress yet. And the price tag, I might note, has been estimated to be about $200 million, maybe more, to move that community of about 500 people. The third example I want to give you is newtahk, which is the most successful, I would say, of the communities that are in the unfortunate situation of needing to relocate. They chose a site. They've named it matarvik, and now about a third of their population is actually living in the new site. They have built houses, they've got a road, they've got a barge landing site. Back in 2006, they put together a newtahc planning committee, which has been considered a model of partnerships of federal agencies, state agencies, tribal leadership to make it happen. But it's been very piecemeal. I mean, that's the only way they could do it. Their committee includes the Navy, the Marines, the Corps of Engineers, the state Department of Transportation, all kinds of entities that might have any kind of resources to provide, but again, no comprehensive system. Here they are making it up literally as they go. So in the past, we've tried a variety of things, you know, both the federal government and the state government, the Denali Commission, which was a specially created entity to try to help with just this sort of state federal partnership that really hasn't Worked out very well. There have been coalitions of tribes and villages. That has certainly helped. But I would say for these communities in Alaska, but also for many communities in the lower 48, whether it is impacts from permafrost thawing, coastal erosion or the rising level of seas, and the extent to which communities from Miami beach to Boston to San Francisco are facing the same problems, our country really needs to address this question of policies and funding for helping communities help themselves to relocate and also to make decisions that are actually sustainable and resilient for the long term. So with that, I'll pass it back to you.

Well, I'm actually going to pass it right back to you, Fran, because your final statement started to get us in the direction that I was about to ask you about, which is each of your examples really seem to be an example of when it became absolutely necessary. Maybe a little bit more than stopgap measures, but you know, very much in this responsive mode and as you said, kind of making it up as they go along. And we do need this more forward looking, more comprehensive approach because obviously this is not a one off problem that's just going to disappear. So is there any progress on moving in that direction?

Well, you know, there have been fits and starts over the years. And I will just say when there are governors, presidents, leaders, mayors that understand climate change and understand how in many communities, not just in the north, but in many communities, the time is wasting when we are not actually taking affirmative steps toward the kind of resilience building that is necessary. So periodically we have had some leadership. So President Obama had the Arctic Executive Steering Committee, which I might note John Holdren shared, which was really trying to organize more of a concerted effort of getting federal agencies to talk to each other about how they could be helpful. That was just kind of getting started when President Obama left office, and that has not been continued similarly. And we've had a couple of governors in Alaska that actually had climate action plans. And in those climate action plans, included in that were specific plans for how to help communities, something called the Immediate Action Working Group. But again, when leadership changed, that priority just disappeared. So I just might note leadership matters, but it also is really important for citizens to get their voices heard about how waiting just means it's going to cost more, there's going to be more loss of life, more damage to property. And for the long term, it really disadvantages our people and our country in a serious way.

Thank you so much, Fran. So our final presentation of the day, I would say definitely falls into the Category of last, but certainly not least, our last panelist of the day is Darcy Peter, who is a research assistant working with Sunas Halley on permafrost and Arctic ecology research and our education and training program, the Polaris Project, here at Woodwell Climate Research Center. She also grew up in Beaver, Alaska, a subsistence lifestyle there, and has worked with nonprofits in this space, and so has really an important and probably unusual perspective on this problem and on the ground perspective that we really welcome. So, Darcy, thank you, and the floor is yours.

Hey, thank you so much. So, as Heather said, I'll be mostly discussing the on the ground experiences of ground thaw and climate change in the Arctic where I grew up and where I'm from. I'm a research assistant at Woodwell Climate, so here's a. Here's a little bit of a background. So I'm from the very small community of Beaver, Alaska. Its population is about 30, and it's located approximately 110 miles north of Fairbanks along the Yukon River. And like most villages in Alaska, the way of life in Beaver is very different from the rest of the US and really the rest of the world. There are no roads, no cars, jobs are very far and few between. So we rely heavily on our natural resources as a way of life. And there's also a huge cultural tie with the practices and subsistence foods that we rely on. So in the next few minutes, I'll share an example of the indirect yet cascading effects of permafrost thaw in the upper Yukon river region of Alaska, where Beaver is located. So this is a photo I took about two weeks ago when I went moose hunting. Permafrost thaw, coupled with thermo erosion, which is the occurrence of erosion due to increased temperatures, are both contributing hugely to the erosion of the Yukon river, which is making it essentially wider and more shallow. And. And for those of you who aren't familiar with the Yukon river, it's often been referred to as a braided river. So the changing in these channels hugely impacts the safety of the people who rely on its resources and who travel by it. But it doesn't only impact the people, but the changing channels also impacts one of the largest food resources that indigenous people throughout the state rely on, which is king salmon. So the changing river channels as a result of permafrost thaw and thermo erosion is changing the spawning grounds of king salmon. And king salmon and salmon in general account for about 34% of all protein for indigenous people throughout the entire state of Alaska. So this is a huge food source for people who live in this state. The changing channels impact the spawning grounds. And the changing spawning grounds directly impact, along with many other factors, the populations of king salmon throughout the state. There is a mass decline in the amount of king salmon. And so these, these changes in the population kind of hugely increase our reliability on another huge food source in Alaska, which is moose. With the declining amount of salmon in the river, there's been a huge, huge demand for moose harvesting every fall. Moose hunting is a lot easier during the rutting season, and it's more successful during the rutting season or the mating season of the moose now. So you can kind of see this like long cascading effect of permafrost thaw, which is changing the channels, which is impacting the safety of the river and traveling on it. But that's also impacting the salmon populations, which increases indigenous peoples demand for moose. But with all of these challenges, there's even one more challenge, which is the policy aspect of moose hunting. So climate change is changing the rutting season of moose. The rutting season is occurring later, but the dates that indigenous people are allowed to subscribe systems, hunt and harvest are the same. So for example, we get four weeks mostly throughout the year in the fall time to hunt a moose and harvest a moose. This year alone, three of those weeks, the moose were not in rut, meaning that it would be like trying to hunt for a moose in June. You kind of just have to go around as you can and run into a moose and hope that it's a bull. You can't call. It's very difficult, but that's the time that we are allotted by the state of Alaska. It's hugely difficult. So there's this big disconnect between climate change and the policy aspect of it. Adapting to climate change in order for optimal hunting. And I do want to stress again that economic opportunity is hugely scarce in a lot of these communities and in beaver as well. So any amount of money that people get goes towards either fishing or moose hunting. And there's a big disconnect, as I said again, with climate change and the state's ability to adapt to climate change. But regardless, indigenous people are known for their adaptability. If we get one week to hunt moose during the rutting season, we will take that week. If there is a mass decline in king salmon populations, then we will fish for other types of fish. And you know, it's really an honor and a privilege to live this way of life even in a community of about 30 people. It's really a safe haven. And our cultural aspect behind these subsistence resources and our natural resources is something that is truly special. And there is so much research that can benefit and go into it increasing, you know, the availability of these resources and increasing awareness throughout the state and really throughout the country. So it's starting to look up. And, you know, people are very adaptable to climate change and also to the policies, failed attempts to mitigate climate change. So with that I will end.

Darcy, you yourself, as you've just been explaining, kind of span two communities that have not always connected and worked together perhaps as they should. And I'm speaking about kind of the traditional or I guess mainstream science research community and these northern communities where we are seeing such impacts. And you've actually been working on developing some best practices for how the research community could better engage and work with and work for these communities. Could you share just a little bit of that?

Yeah, sure. So this summer all fieldwork was canceled, as many of you I'm sure know. So I saw this as a chance to really try to implement change for the way that research is conducted in the Arctic. Just in my experience growing up here, being born and raised researchers kind of have in general like an exploitative nature in how they apply for funding, go to a place they haven't been before that have these huge cultural ties to land in place and then leaving. And you know, that's all that these communities hear from them or see of them really, since there's no contact really. So there's a list of about 12 guiding principles for researchers who want to conduct research in the Arctic. And it's just basically it's really focused around respect and relationship building with these communities and having a good working relationship that that's more long term in the way that people conduct research and where to allocate funds and how to best approach working in these indigenous communities and how your research can benefit both parties, both the researchers and the scientists. So it's kind of mostly respect based and relationship based, but there's also some pretty technical things in there as well.

Would you say, Darcy, kind of continuing along those lines, that as we kind of moving from maybe the research community, the ecological research community, to socioeconomic questions and then policy responses, is there a similar need to reassess and rework some of those relationships? And then Fran, I'd love to get your insights as well on kind of that relationship between communities and policymakers, government officials, and how that plays out in these communities. So in need of adaptation and in a lot of cases Relocation.

Right. Yeah. I was going to ask Fran to take this one, but, yeah, I think there's a huge, huge relationship building and like, there's. There's just a lot of things that need to happen, really. And I mean, it's mostly just scientists and other people, you know, not knowing how to approach something and seeing it as this big, scary thing. But really, it's just really small steps and getting all the right people in the same room together and having real conversations and being comfortable with being uncomfortable and being, you know, comfortable with just listening and saying nothing and learning and then going from there once you've, you know, heard everybody out and just approaching everything with respect. Yeah.

The only thing I will add to that is that because I've been around for a long time, I will just say that I have seen a tremendous amount of progress in recent years in a positive direction in this space. If you flashback 25 years, you know, it's really been a steady learning experience. I would say, in a way, on both sides, how to bridge the gap between very different ways of knowing. I mean, indigenous knowledge holders who have an incredible understanding of place and culture and. And systems have not always been that happy to share what they know, to be honest. I mean, I feel very fortunate that I've had many people who have kind of taken me under their wing and been willing to share with me, which has opened up my eyes to a lot of things, and I am deeply grateful for that. But it requires that, frankly, before a Western scientist or Western policymaker even knows where to start. It does require on the part of the Western, more traditional scientists and Western policymakers, so to speak, to want to do that. However, I mean, there has to be openness and a willingness to share on both sides, and that is easier to say than to do. But I think there are many things that are now happening in society and in a culturally appropriate way, creating some of those avenues for exchange that Darcy's talking about. I think some of the things that she and others are doing by way of just even simple manuals. I mean, for someone who is from Iowa or Oklahoma or Texas, who's never been to the Arctic or frankly, even in the lower 48, has never worked with indigenous people. It is just a learning experience, and people need to stay humble and open and willing to learn. And on both sides, if we do that, I think we'll continue to see progress beyond where we are now.

So I'm going to move into our audience. Q and A. We have a little bit less than.

Half of an hour.

And I will say We've already got 15 questions in the Q and A, a few that popped up in the chat. If you have other questions, please put them in there. I may take the liberty of combining or modifying some of these slightly for the purposes of time. And there are a few here, Fran, that fall into the same sort of theme of kind of wondering if we were to look broadly at the US and the full range of communities that may need to relocate as a result of climate change, different sorts of impacts, whether that's from, you know, the Gulf coast and flooding there or wildfires in the west or the many issues that we're talking about coming together in Alaska. What proportion of those communities that might need to relocate is in Alaska? And what are the relative roles of the Alaskan state government versus the federal government to confront that?

Well, those are big questions. First of all, I can't tell you the exact percentage, but I would say that Alaska villages, particularly that are at risk are kind of at the head of the pack in terms of immediacy or imminence. But having said that, there's already a community in Louisiana that has moved or is in the process of moving as well. And what made that sort of unusual was that the federal government actually delivered a fairly large chunk of change to enable that move to happen about six years ago. And of course, we also know that there are many communities from San Francisco to Boston and in between that have very vigorous local planning processes underway to try to mitigate the increase issues in terms of damage to their infrastructure because of rising sea level, because of subsidence, because of a whole host of things that make it quite clear that business as usual and simply ignoring these problems won't work. I mean, I think the mayor of Houston and many other mayors have basically said, you know what, we can't ignore this problem anymore. So in terms of proportionality, again, I don't know. But if you know, the communities in Alaska have very small populations, when you're talking about communities, big cities, Miami beach, which is in a world of hurt, if you look at the sea level increase implications for a place like Miami beach, there are immense challenges. So yes, there is a responsibility on the part of mayors and governors, but I do believe there is a responsibility on the part of the federal government because there's simply no way that at the local level these problems can be solved. This is a global crisis. Climate change is what is driving all of these things. So yes, you can take steps, necessary steps to protect the buildings and the life the property of your community at the city or even state level. But if we really want to get to the problem area, it's all the way back to what sue and John were talking about, which is it is about reducing the rate at which our climate is warming to reduce some of the increasing issues that all communities are going to, all coastal communities and many others will be facing.

So a question, I think perhaps for sue and for John, kind of springboarding off what Fran was just talking about. Someone asked, is there a point at which we can no longer stop permafrost thaw? And how close are we to that tipping point?

John, do you want me to start?

Yeah, go ahead, Sue.

I guess the way that I think, you know, I think when we talk about permafrost thaw in the Arctic, we talk about one thing and it's not really what it is, right. It's this huge place. It's a lot of different types of ecosystems. You have permafrost that's at, you know, minus 10 degrees and permafrost. Sorry. Yeah, minus 10 and minus 1 degree. And so the, you know, the impacts are happening now and they're going to continue to happen. So is there a tipping point where it's like it's all going to thaw? I think we have ways to go for that. I also will say permafrost can thaw and then it can refreeze. I mean, under the current conditions right now, that is unlikely to happen. But there are some. These abrupt events, these big ground collapses. Those are the ones that are essentially irrigation reversible. So even if we can imagine a world where we. Our temperature is increasing and we can bring it back down and we can protect this permafrost, some of the changes were locked in with. And then there's also these lags, right? So we've, you know, we start reducing our fossil fuel emissions. We've already thawed a substantial amount of permafrost. We sort of, kind of have this kind of lag in the energy of the system. So we're going to, even once we stop, we're going to have this sort of tale of, you know, emissions from permafrost and a tale of these impacts. So I guess I sort of think of it less as, you know, when is this tipping point is like, it's actually now, like it's thawing now for some places. So for those places, it's already happened. So I don't see the urgency as the future. I see the urgency actually is something that was a Couple decades ago.

John, would you like to add to that, weigh in on that?

No, I would. I agree with everything that sue has said. I would just add that science in general is not very good at predicting tipping points precisely because tipping points tend to be the product of multiple interacting factors and nonlinear phenomena. And both of those kinds of things, nonlinear phenomena and multiple interacting factors are extremely hard to model, are extremely hard to predict. And I think Sue's point is exactly the right one, that for all practical purposes, we are already in the thick of it right now, and we need to consider this a current emergency. Much more important than knowing exactly where the next tipping point is, is agreeing to start acting and moving in the right direction in the hope of minimizing the number of tipping points that ultimately will be crossed.

So, John, to continue on that theme, someone asked to what degree is permafrost thaw included in climate models? And I'll add to that and say, and in climate goals and climate policies at this point.

Well, one of the problem that has motivated this joint work that's going on between the Woodwell Climate Research center and our Arctic Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School is precisely that the main models that have been used to estimate the carbon budgets, how much headroom we have, as it were, before we crash through certain levels, those models, for the most part, have not included permafrost thaw. They have not included a contribution of accelerated emissions of carbon dioxide and methane from Arctic soils. And so to that extent, these models are underestimating the trouble we're already in, and they're underestimating the potential for these Arctic emissions to undercut emissions reduction strategies that have been based only on. On fossil fuels and deforestation and agricultural practices at the lower latitudes.

Yeah.

And I will say that this graph that John showed with these estimates of permafrost carbon emissions, none of those models incorporated these abrupt thawing events. They see the permafrost is thawing as this gradual process from the top down. And we know very well that is not how it happens. These abrupt events are really important. The other thing they don't incorporate is this interaction between fire and permafrost. And fire can greatly accelerate permafrost thaw for a number of reasons. And so all of the things that we know that are missing are kind of, as John said, pushing this into a worse scenario than even when we haven't, you know, modeled understanding of it.

So that leads to the next question, which has been asked in a couple of variations here, and multiple of you have driven home the importance of reducing greenhouse gas emissions from industrial sources, from human sources directly in order to get this problem under control. And the question is, is there any other technology or strategy for, for mitigating or limiting permafrost thaw?

Well, I'll take an initial crack at that. Besides reducing the emissions that are driving global climate change, and therefore driving particularly rapid climate change in the Arctic, people have looked at possibilities, number one, for increasing the uptake of carbon in the terrestrial biosphere by growing more trees. That's a promising approach, but not as easy as early estimates often assumed. It's not enough to plant a tree. You have to take care of it. You have to make sure it survives and grows to a size where it's removed a significant amount of carbon from the atmosphere. And you're limited by competing land uses and unsuitability of some land. And so if you do the calculations very carefully, you find that maybe growing additional trees could address 15 or 20% of the emissions reductions that we need. Another approach has been to try to invent technological trees to try to develop affordable technologies that could directly remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. That looks extremely expensive. It's research worth doing, but there's no early prospect that the capacity to remove carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere in that way is going to work. Another approach is using biofuels to generate electricity, but capturing the carbon dioxide from burning those biofuels and sequestering it the earth. So the combination of biofuels and carbon capture and sequestration, which gives you a net reduction in atmospheric CO2 because the biofuels pulled CO2 out of the atmosphere when they were growing, if you burned them, they would ordinarily put that CO2 back and it would be a wash. But if you capture the CO2 and put it in the ground, it's a net carbon dioxide benefit. People have also looked at ideas more far out, ideas like trying to shield the Arctic regions from some of the sunlight that would otherwise arrive by putting reflecting particles in the atmosphere over the Arctic to reduce the rate of temperature increase. These kinds of ideas are being explored, they're being investigated. Nobody's doing them yet. And the question is always the combination of effectiveness versus cost, but also versus unintended consequences of fiddling with the system in ways of that sort. So lots of ideas out there, but at this stage, I would say there's nothing else as promising as modifying our fossil fuel use practices and our land use practices at the lower latitudes.

And I will quickly add to that that new research out this week in the journal Nature involving Woodwell Climate Research, as well as the Nature Conservancy and others, actually showed that just natural forest regrowth, not only planting trees, but just letting forests regrow naturally, has been underestimated in terms of its potential. But your point, John, well taken, that nature cannot do this on its own. We've got to reduce emissions. And Joel, you mentioned a technology that sparked some interest, mentioning this technology to kind of refreeze or keep frozen the permafrost on a local level. I guess you could call that a mitigation strategy in that it's keeping the permafrost frozen, but obviously it's not addressing the root cause, so maybe it goes into the adaptation category. And a couple of questions about are there other technologies and technological adaptations being put into action right now to safeguard or upgrade other infrastructure in the Arctic?

Yeah, you know, there are some. You know, the goal in the north for communities and agencies is to build resilience. And so there are. And I mentioned the infrastructure deficit there. So really it's fundamental stuff. How do we get accessible health clinics in all the right places? Stuff we know a lot about. It's just a challenging environment within which to work. How do we expand broadband connectivity? That is the single most important thing, aside from the whole world getting off fossil fuels asap, that's the single most important thing you can do for resilience in the Arctic is to increase broadband connectivity in the COVID pandemic made that painfully clear because now we do education, we do healthcare, we do everything online. And a lot of these communities don't have reliable access to that. So those are the things, I think, that are on people's minds in the north right now, is to reduce that infrastructure deficit, give them a fair shake, like we get down in the lower 48 or elsewhere in the world for responding to tough times. And I will say that, you know, the big question is always how do we pay for these things? And I saw a question in the Q and A from Sally Russell Cox, who really knows her stuff in Alaska about the process of relocating or building resilience in communities there. And she mentioned the costs, and they seem like a lot, you know, three and a half billion dollars before 2050. But if we actually do pivot away from fossil fuels, we're looking at repurposing some huge subsidies that currently go toward fossil fuels. So there could be resources all of a sudden to pour in to building resilience in the region. I think that's when we'll start to see that innovation kick in and some of these good ideas that go beyond just meeting the infrastructure deficit, but actually making life better. People in the north and in the Arctic are incredibly resilient. And I think we'll be looking for leadership from indigenous leaders to get through this up there. But we need resources. We need to invest in indigenous institutions and indigenous knowledge holders and so on. That's where we need to make change.

Now, in my view, I'm really struck, Joel, as you're speaking, and this has come through in multiple of the presentations, just the complexity and the multifaceted nature of these problems. Right. I mean, that you could be pointing to Internet connectivity as one of the greatest ways to address climate change resilience in Arctic communities. I would love to hear actually from each of you. Do you think that kind of truly, I don't know if multidisciplinary is even the right word to get to this, but multifaceted nature of this issue is appreciated in your community, amongst your colleagues, when you're talking about or confronting these issues.

I think it's becoming more widely understood. The notion that multiple stresses, for example, are critical has become certainly common knowledge in the ecological community, in the community of ecosystem studies. And if we think about the particular problem of adaptation that you've mentioned, Heather, think about the case of the salmon, the declining runs of king salmon happening all across Alaska. That is certainly a multi stress phenomenon. And one of the resilient strategies is to understand first of all scientifically what all the factors are and then address the ones we can. We may not be able to quickly address the temperature factor, but there are other dimensions of the stresses on salmon that we could address and that we should address in order to reduce that particular form of harm to the indigenous communities all across Alaska and indeed to the salmon industry of Alaska. And there are many, many of the problems that we've been talking about that have this multi stress character where what we need to be doing is understanding better what those stresses are so that we can tackle the ones that are able to be tackled with current technologies and available measures.

I can add to that. I think that a huge aspect too is communicating what those factors are to people in a way that they're going to understand. So once the research is done and everything's finished, that's all good and well, but if you just send a published paper to a village or a community or, you know, someone who can use that information, there's this huge disconnect in language and interpreting that. So I think additional effort and resources need to go into communicating the results and the research that is happening that does directly impact, you know, the people who live and rely on these resources and communicating everything in a way that people will understand in a language that's very clear and very simple.

Absolutely. That's absolutely right.

I think in the scientific community, there's definitely been advances in understanding the interconnectedness among the system, but the way that scientists are trained, you take the system apart and you focus on something very specific. You know, I mean, from the time you get your PhD thesis, you're just so narrow. And then maybe you try to put it back together. Right. And so the idea of whether we are trained differently or as Darcy said, start listening more to people who aren't taking the world apart, but who are living in the world and experiencing all of these components at once. I think the ability to understand the world, to communicate the world, to problem solve, will be greatly advanced if we can kind of sort of start thinking about and, you know, if we weren't trained that way, to start learning that way by listening to indigenous knowledge holders, to get different perspectives from different parts of the community. Because otherwise we're not going to solve this multifaceted problem.

I feel like the, on the surface of it, fairly simple example that Darcy mentioned of the shifting rutting season of the moose and the fact that the allotted hunting season has not shifted to meet that maybe highlights some of this multifaceted nature that that state agency isn't necessarily set up to deal with climate change. And yet it seems like that should be a fairly simple change to make, to change the dates of a hunting season, of a designated hunting season. Darcy, I wonder if you have any insight into it, to what the challenges are there. And Fran, you as well. I mean, is this one of those examples where we just aren't set up to deal with the way that climate change crosses boundaries?

Right. So there's a Board of Fish and Board of Game that, you know, the state has that decides the regulations and the seasons and the allotted times. And a lot of it honestly just comes down to advocacy and getting these people who are out on the land hunting these resources and fishing on these resources in the same room as the people who set the regulations and the allotted times. Now, that can be a lot easier said than done. I think the pandemic has, in a way, been a blessing to some indigenous people just in the fact that they don't have to spend thousands of dollars traveling to Anchorage or to Fairbanks. They can call in on their phones and participate in the process. But before, you know, everything was so technology based. It was quite a struggle to get indigenous people and subsistence fishermen and hunter men to these places where the regulations are set. That being said, once the indigenous people and the subsistence users did get there, there was a certain way they had to act, a certain language they had to speak, and a lot of it went over their head. So there's this again, huge disconnect. And if you will, I think it would be fair to say that the system is not set for indigenous people to participate in the process. But thankfully, there are some institutions and some organizations that hold trainings and try to apply for funding to bring these people into this process. And, you know, they have classes on how to speak, what to say, and like, really hold their hand through this process. My first meeting, I didn't know what was going on. I was so confused. I didn't know why I was there. But it took a few tries, and it definitely makes a big difference to get people in the same room as these policymakers and the people who set the regulations.

Yeah. The only thing I will add to that is there are a lot of agencies, both federal and state, that have to behave according to what their statutes, what the regulations require them to do. And unfortunately, very few of those laws and regulations really contemplate the kind of rapid change that is happening as a result of climate change. And so adjusting the systems of decisions, so to speak, to not only enable that information to be productively presented, but also incorporated as a standard in the decisions that have to be reached. Whether it's the Corps of Engineers or the Department of Fish and Game, they're kind of constrained by what those laws are. And so to change them to reflect the realities on the ground of how much change is happening, not just in Alaska, but literally, I mean, around the world, is a governance challenge that I don't know, that I do know we have not stepped up to adequately. But again, it does kind of go back to, you've got to have leaders and elected leaders particularly, who are willing to acknowledge this problem and come to understand it enough to realize how much of the system that has evolved needs to actually get changed to accommodate the way the world is changing, the way it's impacting people, their lives, their subsistence, and the way in which we can adjust, adapt to a new reality.

I know we're at time, Heather, but I just want to say that in addition to what I absolutely applaud what Fran was just saying, in addition to climate proofing, these regulations and laws and governance structures which is a big lift. We need to decolonialize them. And I think we're moving horribly slow at that. And that's leading to some of the problems that Darcy was talking about, particularly in the Arctic.

I know we are at 2:29. Joel, I appreciate you for keeping an eye on the time as well. I hope everybody will indulge us in just a couple of more minutes because there's a question here that I would really like to get maybe just a quick answer to from each of you because I think it's a really important one. Stephen asks I'm listening to this. In Bethel, Alaska, we do back hauling and environmental work at the association for Village Council Presidents. So I'm frequently asked by residents here, what should I do about climate change? If you are asked this question, how would you answer? And why don't we. We'll go in the order we did presentations. Sue, we'll start with you.

Oh, is the first one for sure. And then also greenhouse gases are global greenhouse gases, as John reminded us, they mix in the atmosphere. So it's not good news to know that, but it also is good news to know that you can reduce your own personal carbon footprint by driving less, by flying less. I know that is not possible for many people in Alaska because flying is the only way to get around, but we've done that quite a bit. We've been forced to with this global pandemic. So I think both of those two steps are good ones to take. And you know, both. I'll say that one again.

John, how about you? And I think, you know, I think this is a great question to be able to answer for someone in Bethel, Alaska and also anywhere else, what should I do about climate change?

So the same as Sue's answer, A vote for politicians who show that they understand the issue and promise to act. And number two, tell your friends and neighbors to do the same. And why.

Short and sweet. Let's see. Joel, I think you were next.

Yeah, well, I certainly endorse that one and I won't even have to repeat it. I think everyone knows how I feel about that. But I would also say advocating for local empowerment because in these remote areas in particular, we've found that the best way to build resilience, the number one thing that improves the ability of social ecological systems to become more resilient is local empowerment. And that means deconstructing some of these colonial type governance structures and being creative and nimble and innovative about how we make changes to policies. Someone in the comments mentioned migratory bird Policies that have changed in a more nimble way than the moose rutting one. For example, there are good examples out there for how to get it right. So looking for those good examples of how to be nimble and advocating for local A seat at the table basically for this decision making process will help in the response. Remote communities in Kenoa.

Great, Fran.

So I will just add yes, vote, advocate, communicate, change your own behavior. Look for ways in which you can actually reduce your own carbon footprint. And if you're looking for a book that really gives you hope in terms of actually dozens of things that can be done, I would say get the book Drawdown. Drawdown just lists out a whole long list of. Of things that can be done at the city, state, federal, private sector, individual level. It gives you hope that you can really, even as an individual, make some progress in the right direction. But we all need to do something and I think everyone can do something.

Darcy, we'll give you the last word.

Great. Yeah, I don't know what more I can say more than the four, so I'm glad I'm going last. I'd say in small communities in particular, using a reusable water bottle, buying a Brita filter, you know, it saves on freight, it saves on, you know, the struggle of recycling if your community has it. Just small things. And leading by example, I think less paper, less plastic, you know, reusable utensils, plates, bowls, stuff like that. I know it's hard being in the village, but. And it's, you know, a hassle to do dishes, but it's just something small. I think that can make a pretty big difference. And especially if people see you, you know, skipping the paper plate every now and then, they might be encouraged to do the same. So mostly leading by example. And yeah, voting. Can't stress that enough. And being educated with your voting.

Great. Well, thank you so much for this discussion today and have a wonderful weekend. A recording of this will be available next week if you'd like to revisit any of it or share it with others. Thank you so much and Happy Climate Week.

Set for indigenous people to participate in the process. But thankfully there are some institutions and some organizations that hold true.