• Arctic Research Plan

Introduction and background

Lead authors: Brendan P. Kelly, Office of Science and Technology Policy C. Nikoosh Carlo, National Science Foundation

Introduction

Meeting the Nation's economic, scientific, and environmental needs in the Arctic requires research across diverse disciplines and the involvement of multiple Federal agencies. The Interagency Arctic Research Policy Committee (IARPC), which consists of principals from 14 agencies, departments, and offices across the Federal government, is charged with developing five-year plans for federally sponsored research in (and about) the Arctic region (Arctic Research Policy Act of 1984; Title I of P.L. 98-373 of July 31, 1984). Federal agencies that participate in the IARPC have diverse roles in carrying out the National Arctic Research Policy, which is articulated in National Security Presidential Directive 66/Homeland Security Presidential Directive 25. It mandates that—with respect to research—the IARPC will:

• Meet national security and homeland security needs relevant to the Arctic region;
• Protect the Arctic environment and conserve its biological resources;
• Ensure environmentally sustainable natural resource management and economic development in the region;
• Strengthen institutional cooperation among the eight Arctic nations (the United States, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, the Russian Federation, and Sweden);
• Involve the Arctic's indigenous communities in decisions that affect them; and
• Enhance scientific monitoring of and research on local, regional, and global environmental issues.

To ensure that these policy objectives are informed by the best possible science, this plan sets seven priority research areas for the next five years that stand to benefit significantly from close interagency collaboration. This plan does not include all Arctic research activities occurring across the Federal government—many important investigations will continue to be conducted within individual agencies or through other interagency collaborations. Individual agencies have described their own Arctic research priorities in a series of recent reports including:

• The U.S. Arctic Research Commission's Report on Goals & Objectives for Arctic Research 2009–2010
• The U. S. Navy's Arctic Road Map
• The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Arctic Vision and Strategy
• The U.S. Geological Survey's (Department of the Interior) An Evaluation of the Science Needs to Inform Decisions on Outer Continental Shelf Energy Development in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas, Alaska
• The Changing Conditions in the Arctic section of the National Ocean Policy Implementation Plan

This five-year plan also does not describe the considerable important and complementary Arctic research being conducted outside of the Federal government—by academic, state, tribal, and non-governmental researchers.

Under the auspices of the Arctic Council1, Federal agencies also pursue Arctic research through work-ing groups and ad hoc task forces. This collaborative work focuses on a wide range of issues, including climate change, indigenous land use, and communications technology.

Successful implementation of this five-year research plan will require close coordination with all of the above listed efforts, the State of Alaska, indigenous organizations, academic institutions, non-governmental organizations, the Arctic Council, and international partners.

Scientists widely agree that the societal and environmental consequences of rapid environmental change are the most pressing scientific concerns in the Arctic region today. Diminishing sea-ice cover is expected to impact the global climate; diminishing ice sheets and glaciers are resulting in sea-level rise; and thawing permafrost is having impacts on both local infrastructure and the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Addressing these challenges will require a sharp research focus on the changing cryosphere—the world's solid-state water, including sea ice, glaciers, snow cover, and permafrost—and its effects on the physical environment, ecosystems, and communities in the Arctic and elsewhere. Key research questions include:

Sea ice and Arctic Ocean ecosystems

• At what rates will Arctic sea ice diminish over the next 100 years?
• What will be the consequences of diminishing sea ice for Arctic ecosystems and their inhabitants?
• What will be the consequences of diminishing sea ice for global climate and environments?
• How will Arctic Ocean acidity change in coming decades?
• What will be the consequences of acidification for Arctic ecosystems and their inhabitants?

Ice sheets and glaciers

• At what rates will Arctic glaciers and ice sheets diminish over the next 100 years and what processes and forcings are driving the loss?
• What will be the consequences of diminishing glaciers and ice sheets for Arctic ecosystems and their inhabitants?
• How will diminishing glaciers and ice sheets impact global climate and sea level?

Permafrost

• At what rates will Arctic permafrost diminish over the next 100 years?
• What will be the consequences of diminishing permafrost for Arctic ecosystems and their inhabitants?
• How will changes in permafrost impact the global climate system?

These key questions are being addressed by several Federal and non-Federal research efforts including:

• The U.S. Global Change Research Program
• The National Ocean Policy Implementation Plan, Changing Conditions in the Arctic
• The interagency Study of Environmental Arctic Change (SEARCH)

This five-year plan identifies seven priority research areas where interagency cooperation will strengthen and enhance this ongoing work. They are:

• Sea ice and marine ecosystems
• Terrestrial ice and ecosystems
• Atmospheric studies of surface heat, energy, and mass balances
• Observing systems
• Regional climate models
• Adaptation tools for sustaining communities
• Human health

Background

The Arctic Research and Policy Act of 1984 (ARPA) established the United States Arctic Research Commission (USARC) to promote Arctic research and recommend a research policy for the region. It also established the IARPC to develop national Arctic research policy and a five-year implementation plan. The IARPC is chaired by the director of the (NSF) and consists of principal representatives from 14 Federal agencies, departments, and offices. The IARPC staff meet monthly and the Principals meet twice per year.

In May 2010, recognizing the increasing participation of multiple agencies in Arctic research, President Obama directed the IARPC to be chartered as a subcommittee of the National Science and Technology Committee. This report constitutes the committee's first deliverable since that change and subsequent revitalization under the leadership of both the Office of Science and Technology Policy and NSF.

The IARPC planning efforts adhere to Section 112 of the ARPA, which defines the Arctic as “all United States and foreign territory north of the Arctic Circle and all United States territory north and west of the boundary formed by the Porcupine, Yukon, and Kuskokwim Rivers (in Alaska); all contiguous seas, including the Arctic Ocean and the Beaufort, Bering, and Chukchi Seas; and the Aleutian chain.” While fully accepting this definition, the Committee also emphasizes that the Arctic is part of a larger, changing global system—the boundaries of which must be considered flexible in order to properly study the Arctic's role in important global processes.

Previous work of the IARPC

Between 1987 and 2007, the IARPC produced 21 volumes of the biannual journal, Arctic Research of the United States, which reported Arctic research and results emerging from agencies and partners. The journal's broad vision was to support scientific and engineering research that implements national policy objectives, including:

• Protecting the Arctic environment and conserving its living resources;
• Promoting environmentally sustainable natural resource management and economic development in the region;
• Strengthening institutions for cooperation among the eight Arctic nations;
• Involving indigenous Arctic peoples in decisions that affect them;
• Enhancing scientific monitoring and research on local, regional, and environmental issues (including their assessment); and
• Meeting post-Cold-War national security and defense needs. Development of the five-year Arctic Research Plan

This plan was developed by the IARPC staff: Jonathan Berkson, USGC; Shella Biallas, DOI; John Calder, NOAA; C. Nikoosh Carlo, NSF; Ashley Chappell, NOAA; Kathy Crane, NOAA; Richard Eckman, NASA; Wanda Ferrell, DOE; William Fitzhugh, SI; Martin O. Jeffries, DOD; Brendan P. Kelly, OSTP; Igor Krupnik, SI; Michael Kuperberg, DOE; Marya Levintova, NIH; Kim Mcgraw, DOI; Adrianna Muir, DOS; Alan Parkinson, CDC; James Partain, NOAA; Robert Sanford, NSF; Sandy Starkweather, NOAA; Simon Stephenson, NSF; Louis Tupas, DOA; Taneil Uttal, NOAA; Thomas Wagner, NASA. The Arctic Research Commission also provided valuable input to this plan.

Evolution of scientific studies in the Arctic

Early scientific information about the Arctic was primarily geographic and collected by 18th and 19th century European explorers (Beechey 1831; Hall 1866). For most of the following 100 years, scientific information came mainly from scattered efforts in ethnography and natural history, mostly associated with expeditions by the U.S. Signal Corps and others (Dall 1870; Ray 1885) and with management of fishing and hunting (Allen 1880; Elliot 1898).

The first intensive investigation along the Arctic coast of Alaska took place with the International Polar Year (1881–1884) when the Signal Corps occupied a research station at Barrow, Alaska (Baker 1982). In the 1940s, ONR established the Naval Arctic Research Laboratory at Barrow, and studies of Arctic environments have been carried out there almost continuously under the administration of the Navy, the University of Alaska, and the North Slope Borough.

In the late 1950s, the Federal government considered detonating nuclear devices to create a port along the Chukchi coast of Alaska (AEC 1959). The Atomic Energy Commission contracted an investigation of potential environmental impacts and, thereby, provided baseline information about the Chukchi coast of Alaska and its near-shore waters (Willimousky and Wolfe 1966). In the 1970s and 1980s, an interagency agreement between the DOI's Bureau of Land Management and the Department of Commerce (DOC) NOAA created the Outer Continental Shelf Environmental Assessment Program to study the potential impacts of offshore oil development in sub-Arctic and Arctic Alaskan waters. For a decade or more, hundreds of studies looked at ice movements and deformation, mammals, birds, fish, benthos, plankton, microbiology, chemistry, oceanography, meteorology, and geology. Some of the work was eventually published in peer-reviewed literature, and all of it has been assembled by the Alaska Resources Library and Information Services housed on University of Alaska Anchorage campus.

Through the 1980s, most Arctic research was conducted in isolated disciplines such as biology, geology, and anthropology. Toward the end of the decade, systems science matured (Ashby 1956; von Bertalanffy 1972; Lawton 2001), and a realization that human activity was driving rapid change in the Arctic began to prompt interdisciplinary work. The importance of interactions among systems—atmosphere, geosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere—was underscored by the International Geosphere- Biosphere Programme and the World Climate Research Programme. The notion also stimulated the formation of NSF's Arctic System Science Program, with a research focus on paleoenvironments and contemporary studies of interactions among ocean, land, and atmosphere. Eventually, human dimensions were included in studies of contemporary and paleoenvironments.

While the IARPC's mission is focused on the Arctic region, many new systems science approaches have been developed to consider high latitude phenomena (especially those associated with ice sheets, sea ice, and atmospheric coupling) in a broader perspective. As a result, there have been many commonali- ties in the evolution of Arctic and Antarctic science.

In 1997, scientists from 25 institutions called for a coordinated effort to understand rapid environmental change in the Arctic. Their efforts led to the formation of the SEARCH. They produced science and research plans based on three main components: observing, understanding, and responding to Arctic change. The Arctic Observing Network (AON)—a component of SEARCH—aims to track and foster understanding of the complex, rapid environmental changes taking place in the Arctic through modeling, reconstructions of paleoen-vironments, and process studies of the environment, socio- economics, cultures, and human health. Responding to change requires consideration of possible adaptive responses of Arctic communities and possible effects on people living outside the Arctic region. Rapid warming of the Arctic has led to dramatic declines in sea-ice extent and thickness with local and global impacts. Arctic sea ice influences atmospheric circulation patterns and precipitation as far south as the tropics (Budikova 2009). Similarly, warming has led to substantial losses of land ice, primarily from Greenland and Alaska, which are now responsible for a substantial fraction of observed sea level rise.

Summary

Interagency cooperation on Arctic research is more important than ever. Rapid changes are affecting the region's biota and people in many ways, including by increasing access to the region for energy and mineral development, shipping, tourism, and military operations—human activities that may carry both risks and opportunities for the Arctic region. Federal agencies are conducting scientific research to fundamentally understand those changes, risks, and opportunities. Policymakers are increasingly relying on that science to make decisions and form practical responses. This IARPC research plan aims to support those decisions with enhanced interagency cooperation on Arctic research to address the most pressing science needs.

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