Marine Arctic Resilience, Adaptations and Transformations (MARAT)

The project Marine Arctic Resilience, Adaptations and Transformations (MARAT) studies how Arctic marine ecosystems are responding to climatic and socio-economic changes, and the implications for resilience of coastal communities of the Arctic. We focus on coastal communities because many major changes occur at the interface between land and ocean. Coastal communities are entry points for development projects including tourism, transport, mineral exploration, or biological resource exploitation, and their local ecosystems are impacted by climate change.

The proposed activity of MARAT is an interdisciplinary workshop fostering cooperation among the international MARAT researchers (Canada, Sweden, United States) and supporting the development of early career researchers, who are leading the project. This research integrates theoretical models and empirical, place-based comparative case studies. Community-based case studies bring together Indigenous knowledge and Western science to study complex social-ecological dynamics under climate change. The models simultaneously capture the interaction between biological dynamics and management strategies in coastal settings. The empirical studies allow us to parameterize models, check how realistic the models are at capturing recent dynamics in social-ecological systems, and identify in which Arctic coastal regions similar situations might be occurring. More explicitly, our research is divided into four work packages (WPs):

• WP 1: Modelling the response of marine food webs to climate and fishing pressures.
• WP 2: Assessing the social-ecological implications of changing marine ecosystems and fisheries in the Canadian Arctic and ways to respond to these changes, through a multiple knowledge approach.
• WP 3: Assessing the resilience of salmon dependent communities to climate change and the genetic erosion from hatcheries in Alaska.
• WP 4: Developing tools for assessing adaptive and transformative capacities of Arctic communities

Date and Location 

5-7 November 2024 | Montreal, Quebec, Canada

IASC Working Groups funding the project

• Marine WG
• Social & Human WG

Project Lead

Marianne Falardeau, TELUQ University and Université Laval) 
Juan Rocha, Stockholm Resilience Center, Sweden

Year funded by IASC

 2024

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