About FutureArcticLives

The full project title is: Future Arctic livelihoods and biodiversity in a changing climate.

The project involves ten partner institutions in five work packages (WPs) working under advisory boards in each country to fulfil 18 scientific objectives.

Work Packages 1-3 are case-based and focus on three indigenous (sub-) groups relying extensively on natures contribution to people. Work Package 4 addresses the legislative and policy context of nature-based primary industries across the three case studies of WP1-3 and relevant countries. Work Package 5 is devoted to project management.

The overall objective of FutureArcticLives is to provide biological and economic forecasts and scenario assessments to assess in collaboration with local and indigenous people the impacts of climate and biodiversity change on the welfare and well-being of Arctic communities.

FutureArcticLives will also explore management options under global policies and trends and in contexts of national policies increasingly favouring large-scale operations and other sectors constraining communities’ adaptation possibilities.

The project is therefore guided by the overall question:

What are the likely future impacts and adaptation possibilities for small-scale primary resource users in Greenland and Arctic Scandinavia in the face of climate and biodiversity change?

The focus of the project is on:

• traditional Inuit hunters,
• small-scale fishers in Greenland,
• Saami reindeer herders in northern Sweden and Norway, and
• the coastal Saami in the Porsanger Fjord in Norway,

but in the context of broader interests and commercial operations.

FutureArcticLives generates transnational added value originating from the combination of expertise brought together in the project and by considering multiple cases across Greenland and the Scandinavian Arctic enabling synthesis of future impacts of climate change on biodiversity and livelihoods in a range of different Arctic settings, policy contexts and primary industries.

FutureArcticLives will generate common and local specific recommendations revealing commonalities as well as differences in how policies can be adjusted to facilitate adaptation to climate change at national and international levels and how local nature based solutions and agents of change can be promoted.