Understanding resilience in its diversity with communities in the Arctic and Pacific regions.
Communities in the Arctic and Pacific regions are looking for effective ways to build resilience to the multiple and elevated climate risks they are facing. The RETRACE project seeks to work with these communities to integrate local, intrinsic, and cultural resiliences into decision-support tools. This approach celebrates the richness and diversity of local experiences and cultural legacies in understanding and responding to climate risks.
This project represents a significant step forward in creating more inclusive, effective, and context-sensitive resilience strategies.
The RETRACE project is a multidisciplinary initiative aimed at enhancing the resilience of communities. Bringing narrative-based insights from Arctic and Pacific communities together with existing resilience assessment methods will foster a more comprehensive understanding of resilience and result in resilience strategies that are more understandable and accessible to both communities and policymakers.
The teams will develop transdisciplinary and convergent research approaches on cultural heritage and climate change, foster collaboration among the research community across several regions, and contribute to knowledge advances at the global level.
Members of the EDeN research group will be working in the Copper River region of Alaska, in partnership with the Copper River Native Association (CRNA) and its members.
Developing community-driven resilience strategies to climate risks.
A significant output of the project is the development of a spatial decision-support system, combining qualitative and quantitative data to aid decision-making. The RETRACE project will enable communities to identify and strengthen unique resilience levers, enhancing understanding and response to climate risks through the integration of traditional knowledge and scientific insights.
RETRACE’s outcomes will offer a model for other vulnerable communities, providing a framework to understand and strengthen resilience in various settings.
THE EDEN IMPACT
Resilience to Climate Risks
Lessons from Arctic and Pacific Communities
Glennallen, Alaska; Trondheim, Norway; French Polynesia
The overarching goal of the collaborative RETRACE project is to address the resilience of communities, in order to create more actionable approaches to developing and implementing resilience strategies.
Toward this goal, during the first phase, the research team will collect testimonials and information about cultures, memories, experiences, sensitivities, and expertise from Arctic communities on forms of resilience and their visions of environmental risks. Concurrently, the team will collect, store, and transform open-access quantitative data from the study region.
The quantitative database will support the development of indicators for measuring resilience. At this stage of the project, the main impacts have been the following:
- Developing a robust and respectful research protocol in collaboration with the Copper River Native Association
- Conducting an audit of publicly available quantitative data and making those data available to community partners
- Holding multiple (five) community events to introduce ourselves and the project
- Joining in the Youth Environmental Summit hosted by the Native Village of Gakona in which more than 100 young people took part
- Sitting down with more than 50 community members to hear about their experiences with environmental changes and how they are responding
- Reaching over 100 community members with a survey covering topics relating to environmental changes, infrastructure, social support, migration, and food