Principal Investigators: Guangquing Chi, Ann Tickamyer, Douglass Wrenn
Project description: The POLARIS, or Pursuing Opportunities for Long-term Arctic Resilience for Infrastructure and Society, is a newly funded NSF project that investigates how interconnected environmental stressors and infrastructure disruptions are affecting coastal Arctic Alaskan communities and identifies the important assets (social, environmental, infrastructural, institutional) to help them adapt and become more resilient to climate-related changes. It is composed of three convergent research pillars: environmental hotspots of disruption to communities and infrastructure, food in complex adaptive systems, and migration and community relocation. The research is interwoven with education, outreach, local community engagement, international comparison and collaboration, and evaluation. Research will integrate the pillars where system responses and uncertainties will be predicted under several socio-environmental scenarios. Ultimately, POLARIS will develop an innovative and replicable modeling protocol for combining primary and secondary data to identify and predict population-infrastructure-environment conflicts.
