Navigating the New Arctic (NNA) is one of NSF's 10 Big Ideas. NNA projects address convergence scientific challenges in the rapidly changing Arctic. The Arctic research is needed to inform the economy, security and resilience of the Nation, the larger region and the globe. NNA empowers new research partnerships from local to international scales, diversifies the next generation of Arctic researchers, and integrates the co-production of knowledge. This award fulfills part of that aim.

The Arctic is warming on average twice as rapidly as the rest of the planet, which is leading to significant changes in sea ice to which local communities must respond. Beringia, a region of the Arctic encompassing US and Russian territory, is expected to experience some of the highest variability in sea ice conditions in the coming century. This project focuses on the question: how do we design better and more flexible governance and infrastructure to adapt to changing Arctic conditions? To answer this question, the team is taking a convergence approach to forecast potential changes in the Arctic sea ice environment and the impacts on social and ecological systems resulting from those changes and identify adaptive strategies to enhance resilience to those impacts. The project fully engages local and Indigenous communities and decision makers in the Arctic throughout the research process to generate information and models about critical hot spots of sea ice change relevant to local communities. This will help build local and regional governance capacity and allow the researchers to model and predict the robustness of communities to forecast changes.

More information can be found at https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1928235