25 March 2025 | 16:00 - 17:30 (MDT)
Open Session - HYBRID
Room: UMC Third Floor - 382
Organisers: Keith Musselman (INSTAAR / CU Boulder, USA); Peyton Thomas (INSTAAR / CU Boulder, USA); Julio Postigo (Indiana University, USA)
Session Description:
Climate change is impacting northern Indigenous communities in many ways through cascading, compounding, and counteracting climatic, hydrologic, and ecologic effects. Numerical models of environmental systems (e.g., climate, Earth System, hydrologic models, etc.) are key tools to evaluate historical conditions and project future change. Especially when paired with Indigenous and/or local knowledge about an environment, model output can be a valuable climate service that has the potential to inform climate adaptation plans to support community resilience. This session seeks contributions from studies that link environmental processes with human aspects of climate change through the combined use of multiple knowledge sources. We invite presentations that merge information from technical climate and/or other environmental modeling efforts with local and Indigenous knowledge, observations, and experience to assess how permafrost, snowpack, groundwater, ecosystems, and/or river conditions in the Arctic may respond to future climate scenarios, and how the changes may impact local and regional communities. Particularly of interest is how such research efforts to address power asymmetries between knowledges systems might facilitate scenario planning and the development of localized adaptation strategies that respond to previous experience with specific events.