 affiliated with KTH as well. And I will try to lead you through this morning, and I will do that with the help of my colleague, Claudia Strummel, who has eased into the Arctic work for the past couple of years. So I will say a few words about the seminar series. And she will also walk you through the program a little bit. The seminar series is really about a collaboration between KTH and SEI that started a few years ago at an institutional level to see where we can do common work to have greater effects than if we just do it individually. And there are a range of issue areas where there is collaboration. The Arctic is one of those. And that's why we really wanted to revisit this. The very first of the Thinking Ahead seminar series, which is part of this collaboration was actually featuring the Arctic as well a few years ago. But now we have quite a broad palette that we want to share with you and give a little bit of a smorgasbord of the activities that we're working on. All right, so the program today, we're going to talk about two topics. The first one is about assessing Arctic change. And the second one is about the context of polar politics. We'll have several presentations for each of these topics. There will be opportunity for one or two clarifying questions at the end of the presentation. But please keep in mind that we'll have a discussion at the end of the presentation. So keep your good comments and your good questions for that time. We actually have two options, two opportunities. So we don't have to wait till the very end for your discussion questions. And you will tell us more about the state of the collaboration between KTH and SEI on Arctic issues. Yeah, I've been having a little fun to see what we're actually doing and Arctic work at SEI and KTH and what's happening over the years. And the green projects here are SEI projects, kind of pinkish ones. They were blue originally, but they couldn't show up or else I had to make them pink this morning. Those are projects that KTH had at least, I might have missed some, especially the early ones. I think there have been some even earlier than this timeline. And the kind of turquoise ones are ones where we're actually collaborating actively. And as you can see, it's quite a range of projects starting, I think LaShippa and Arctic Northern, they are starting in the sense in the time of the international polar year very much, where there was a real boost in Arctic research in general. And at least also, kind of a starting point for social science Arctic research and humanities Arctic research on a broad scale, of course, had been that research before, but in terms of the breadth of it internationally. And Sweden has actually been quite strong in that field. We started with a project with Formas, then MISTRA came into the picture and funded quite a big project that has now gone into a second phase with the broader, where we are led by Umeå University, where we collaborate, where KTH and SEIs in different work packages, but still nevertheless connect quite a bit. And then we have the more policy connected project, such an early one, EU Arctic footprints, EU wanted to know what impact Arctic had on the EU. But more recently, Arctic resilience assessment and adaptation actions for a changing Arctic. And you will hear more about those. I haven't put funders there because it's got a diversity of funders, but basically the Swedish government is paying for the Arctic resilience assessment. And adaptation action for changing Arctic is a little bit more of a mixed bag, but not too much like it in Swedish governments in there as well. And then we have some very KTH resource mining, colonialism geopolitics that you will hear more about. And then we have a new thing that's starting to pop up more recently, working together with some communities, what's happening in the landscapes, reindeer herding issues, and we'll hear more about that. And RECSAC is the new Center of Excellence on Resource Extraction and Sustainable Arctic Communities, where some of these different angles actually come together in a very interdisciplinary Center of Excellence project that we're just getting started with and that you will hear a little more about. We'll have presentations that touch on the things that I put frames around here today. So you will get to see a little bit more of what's going on, even if each presentation will be a short one. We will start with the topic on assessing Arctic change. We'll start with Marcus Carson, his senior research fellow here at the CI, and he's the project director for the Arctic Resilience Assessment. The report, the assessment is scheduled to be published in September this year, and we'll have a sneak preview right now. Very sneaky, huh? So thanks. It's really great to get a chance to do a sneak preview. What I'm going to try to do is squeeze an awful lot in into this short space. But I want to start off by acknowledging my colleagues in the project, first and foremost, Claudia and Annika, but also our colleagues at the Resilience Center, with whom we share the overall project. So just a couple of words about the project. It's in its second phase, started off as a Swedish initiative without a co-chair. Along the way, we picked up the United States as a co-chair, which the timing for that works really well for us, because it allows us to deliver the report at the end of a chairmanship that's very consistent in terms of its values and goals with what the Arctic Resilience Report is seeking to do. Our interim report was delivered in 2013. Final scientific report, as Claudia says, is going to be ready in September. And our final synthesis that includes some policy recommendations or policy relevant insights will be delivered to the ministerial in 2000. It's actually 2018. No, 2017. That's right. Good. No mistakes in the slide yet. So let me start with just a couple of general statements of things that we've identified in this report overall. I don't think these will come as a surprise, but one of these is that we see a clear sort of speeding up of the rate of change in the Arctic. So this is really difficult for humans to manage. It's hard enough to deal with change itself, but when the rate of change is changing, it's very difficult to keep track of. And we see that both in terms of the social side and in terms of the swings and normal variations going outside of the norms that people are accustomed to. An important part of this is the interconnectedness. And as we learn more and more about the scientific, about the sort of natural world's interconnectedness, how ice is connected to the rest of the planet, we also learn that there are important social components to that. So even as we begin to understand that much more clearly, we see that these social connections, this is just one example, are intensifying. For example, the opening up of the sea ice in the north makes it much more possible to think about and begin to test the opportunities for shipping. But that's one of a whole range of options. The REXX project deals with one of these, resource extraction in the north as the snow and ice disappears. But tourism and other kinds of activities are expanding very rapidly. And those have a local impact on the Arctic, but it's also part of this global impact on what's happening in the Arctic. So that brings us to the basic frame that we use for this report, this social ecological systems framework. And the reason for picking this image here is a lot of the images we see of the Arctic are these really dramatic shots of ice and snow, and sometimes polar bears or other wildlife. But it's a lot less often than we see the humans in the system. And fundamentally, the Arctic resilience report is about us, whether it's humans outside of the Arctic or people who've called the Arctic home for generations or for even thousands of years, about the effects of Arctic change on us and how we feed into those kinds of changes. And this is the basic schematic of the model, this social ecological systems framework. What's interesting is a lot of the discussion about resilience and social ecological systems tends to home in on one side of the system or the other side of the system. And that has consequences for the way that the resilience is talked about. I'll come to that in just a moment. The second property with this social ecological systems framework is that it's multi-scalers. So for example, some of what we're investigating, governance sits up here, but it impacts what happens down below that scale. It's also influenced by the global agreements that create the context in which the Arctic Council and other bodies are taking action. And it certainly sets a context for local communities that are trying to manage the kinds of changes that are coming at them. This is one of the issues I have to say that I've struggled with a lot, because resilience appears to be everywhere. Its use has exploded over the last three or four years, certainly since I've been involved in this project. And you find that people mean different things when they talk about resilience. So very often, this is a fairly standard definition, the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize, but essentially keep the same functions. The variation of that, I like, is a Timex watch ad that I grew up with, takes the licking and keeps on ticking, which essentially it's the capacity to just keep on rolling, despite lots of disturbances. But the problem with that is it speaks quite nicely to the ecosystem side, but it misses the essential component on the social side, and that's agency. It's our capacity to learn from our experience, to take that knowledge and put it to work, and use it to steer our choices. So that we, ideally, we avoid the big pitfalls and adjust continually as we go. So this is a definition that's much more similar to what you see in the disaster risk reduction work, or in the UN or the Sendai framework, where it really focuses on human agency, on our capacity to learn, to steer forward, to adapt, to change, or even to transform some fundamental aspects of what we do, while still holding on to what's most important. And our definition of resilience, it's these two combined, which means it's too long to read in this kind of a timeframe, really combines both of those so that we capture both sides of this, and most essentially we capture the agency part. One of the essential elements of this framework is that we look at change in a non-linear fashion. So they're thresholds. And the tricky thing about the thresholds, this gets a little blurry here, but is that they're most easy to identify when they're behind you. And that's part of what we're worried about in the Arctic, because we, in this report, have identified essentially 18 regime shifts or thresholds that science believes that we're either in the midst of passing or may already be behind us. Some of these are pretty familiar. Loss of sea ice is one. Diminishing, quite rapidly, you'll hear a lot of reports about, I think this year is the lowest level of sea ice recorded so far. And what this analysis looks at is the driving forces feeding into that change, and then the impacts coming out of the change, which in some instances create feedbacks that actually reinforce that entire loop. And this is just one of these 18, one of the simpler ones I would say, but a really important feedback loop. This is, similarly, you see climate changes down here, but it's a more complex set of changes, in part because not only are we upstream in this question, but we're also adopting more and more efficient and effective technologies for harvesting fish, which has impacts on the fish populations. And of course there are impacts that come out of that that also feedback. The tricky, this is not a shot from the Arctic, although I do think there are places where you see traffic jams, but the trick here is that when we look at the drivers of change in the Arctic, some of these drivers are fairly predictable, but when you put them together, and you put them together with the feedbacks, the eventual outcome is very difficult to predict, and with the kinds of changes taking place in the Arctic, what we know is that it's difficult to identify the thresholds, and exactly where those changes are going to occur is going to be very, very difficult to predict. Thanks. One of, and one of these sort of examples of these unexpected developments that is actually pretty frightening is that, have you all read that the axis that the Earth spins on is shifting because of the loss of ice mass on Greenland? So if you took a top, spun it, and then you picked it up, stuck a piece of chewing gum on it, and spun it again, you'd find it wobbled differently, and that's what the Earth is doing as a result of the loss of this mass, and people may have expected it, maybe that's why they were doing the research, but the real challenge there is that there are other surprises in all likelihood. So the social side of this, and this is what I'll wrap up with, is looks at comparative case studies spread across the Arctic, 25 different cases, that look at cases where we see resilience, where we see successful adaptation, or even transformational change, or where we see loss of resilience, and those are analyzed for factors that are known to contribute to resilience. And I'll summarize this very briefly, but what we see here is consistent with case studies actually around the world looking at resilience, and it's the capacity for self-organization, or for people at a given scale to come together, decide on a set of problems, and how to respond to them, that's the single most important element in their capacity to successfully respond, where that's undermined from above by two restrictive rule structures, or by their own inability to pull together, the result is much more likely to be loss of resilience or even failure. And then the final point is we have these decision structures at all scales, and in particular, we have the Arctic Council sitting here at the pan-Arctic level, but it sits within a larger context, and it's also influenced by what happens up and down the scale. So thanks for the chance to give this quick preview, and we'll look forward to being able to deliver the whole hardcover version of the report. Thanks. Thank you, Marcus. We have one time for one clarifying question, and then write down your notes to come back to questions. Any quick question anyone wants to pose? Everything was crystal clear, of course. Yes. Or else it was too much to think about at the same time. Thank you very much, Marcus. Thanks. And I would like to introduce Doug. Claudia, can you change the... Doug Abargo, who is at the Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment at KTH, and if you want to know anything about Svalbard, mining, Doug is the person to talk to. He knows a lot of other things too, but there he has just an incredible, difficult knowledge. But you place that also in a broader context, and that's what makes it exciting, and one of the things that we'll be talking about here is futures in the past and present, and how that has to do with resources and mining, I assume. Please. That's about it. Thank you, Annika. Annika mentioned REXAC, Resource Extraction and Sustainable Arctic Futures, which is a center of excellence for Arctic research that we are launching in these two days, and Ninis and Sverke will talk much more about this later on in the program. I will say that REXAC studies resource extraction as an economic, social and cultural phenomenon, and we aim to explain booms and bust cycles in the Arctic, why they take place, and also how mining communities in the Arctic can transform into post-industrial futures when these mines close, and these issues are, these issues are, of course, strongly connected with future visions in which resources often have a central position, and this is indeed the case in the place in this image here, the County's Vara Mine located in Paila in northern Sweden. Just a few years ago, lots of future visions about this mine as well as other mining sites up in the northern parts of Fenoskandia was very much prominent in different newspapers and in the public debate with narratives such as the one about John Elanto, who bought this mire where the mine was located and would make millions out of it from the presence of an ore body below it, and of course the enormous amounts of money that could be made by buying shares, which organizations such as Nudea's Equity Research advised investors to do, and that was back in 2012, and representations of a prosperous future in the northern parts of Sweden, like the visit by prominent politicians such as Stefan Löfven who was then in opposition and uttering the now quite well-known words it smells like money, that was only three years ago. Other future visions regarding resources in the Arctic has been formulated for over the last two decades focusing on the possibilities for resource extraction as the ice sheet decreases on the Arctic oceans from different journals to different representations of the Arctic in maps and images with shipping routes and mines, mineral bodies and presence of oil and gas fields that are just about to be tapped into as the sea ice decreases. And as historians, we have pointed out that such future visions are not new at all. They occur every time that there is a price hike or an increased demand for natural resources which are present in the Arctic. This quote is quite similar to the one from the original recently but comes from 1911 formulated by a British mining firm called the Northern Exploration Company who was very active on Spitzberg in our present-day Svalbard at that time. The future of the Arctic is as a resource base for mining. Not only British actors toyed with those ideas, also in Sweden, the major actors within the steel industry and investors across the industrial business community in Sweden at that time invested large amounts of money in this mining settlement called the Svia Mine or the Svia Grivan started up in 1917 and run in operation until 1925. Also connected with grand future visions about the coal that would be able to supply the entire energy needs of Sweden for hundreds of years into the future or the idea that the very high prices that motivated investors to buy shares in this company, these high prices were a result of a disrupted resource flows during the First World War that these prices would never go down again to pre-war levels, they would remain high forever pretty much in the same way as was argued in cases like Paila. They also talked about the environment and how the Arctic environment would enable my companies to access resources in the Arctic but with different arguments, it was not a decreasing ice sheet at this time but they argued that the North Atlantic current would take care of the ice that the places like Spitsbergen were close to northern markets. The Arctic conditions were suitable for mining because it permafrost stopped water from flowing in from the mines and arguments like that or that the Arctic climate was healthy healthy to people and building character for people. So the arguments were there. The boom ended, this is the price fall on the world market prices for coal in the early 1920s. It went back very fast to pre-war level as they expected it but it would not have done but it did happen. It was a big bust and not much dissimilar from the decrease in iron ore prices that we have seen over the last two years and which have of course had grave consequences for Arctic communities and for the future visions surrounding Arctic mining. In some places like in Paila there has been of course grave consequences for people who invested a lot of money and people who placed big beliefs in the future of future employment, the future business opportunities. We met John Elanto back in 2015 within the framework of another project. And while he was one of the few employees still at the site managing the place but not much future visions of the mining operation coming into being. But in other places, the remains of mines that have been abandoned have been formulated again as resources for post-industrial futures. In this room we have researchers belonging to the REXAC team who have studied how the abandoned coal mining town on Greenland has become a resource for employees who used to work there up until the 1970s when this town was closed and use it as a resource for maintaining memories, identity and also to formulate ideas about the future of Greenland with this abandoned mining town as a point of departure. In Spitzbergen the big mining industry that was around for most of the 20th century is going down the tubes. Almost all of the mines have closed down but the mining settlements are now being reinterpreted and reformulated into new future visions where sites like this, the Pyramiden coal mining town is defined as a cultural heritage site and an industrial heritage site which may draw tourists to visit and create a new economy and also a new way of being present for the actors who wish to do so in this politically sensitive region. So these are some of the issues that we will deal with in REXAC futures. Regarding resources both in the booms and in the bust phases and it is clear that we can learn something from the past when looking at the present and the future. Mining projects in the Arctic will always be high risk projects on the margins, sensitive to market fluctuations and to shifting political trends and we think that past experience should help guide future plans when thinking about resource extraction there. And in order to build sustainable pathways to the future in the Arctic which is one of the aims of REXAC we also need to understand again the relation between Arctic resources and global trends and also to think about the post-industrial futures, how the legacies of extractive industries in the past can become resources for building those post-industrial futures and we need to explain how, why and under what circumstances mining legacies can become something, a prominent component of new Arctic futures. Are there any questions? All right, then we will continue now with Annika. Annika Nilsson, she's a senior research fellow here at Stockholm Environment Institute. She's also part of the REXAC team and she will tell us more about her work within the MISTRA Arctic Sustainable Development New Governance Project on Arctic Future Narratives for Adaptation Action. Thank you. Okay, thank you very much Claudia. And this work is really, it started with the MISTRA program but it really grew into a team effort with a much broader group. And as you can see it representing several countries, Norway, Finland, Sweden and Russia. And the reason for that is that the work quickly became part of this assessment process, adaptation actions for a changing Arctic where we're together with two other people have been responsible for a chapter that originally was called Scenarios and we renamed it Future Narratives. And it's really about adaptation and requiring us to assess risks relating to uncertain futures. We saw from dog's presentation that definitely don't know what the future is gonna be. Can look very different than what you wanted to or expected to. But and to use scenarios for discussing the future but also a need to involve local voices in discussing scenarios. There are a lot of scenarios that have been done by leading international experts in various shapes and forms and they might be relevant locally but not necessarily always. And so we wanted really to being in local voices but to do that within understanding the local development within a global context. So we developed a methodology was really participatory scenario workshops to produce locally relevant scenarios that we nested in what's called shared socioeconomic pathways from the global scenario framework. And I won't go through this but this is basically the climate international climate science community that have created these storylines about what global development might look like with different challenges to mitigation and adaptation. So these are very much at the global level written as kind of stories of what might happen. Very likely none of these will happen exactly as but to in a sense map the uncertainty space. What we did then was we organized first we had the workshop in Paila actually that we heard from earlier as a starting point a little bit of a pilot to try this methodology together we were half about half researchers and half people who were local and regional actors. Some people from the municipality some people from industry or different sectors people who weren't researchers. But we later then managed very much thanks to our region colleagues to get some more money. So we also organized the workshop in Kirovsk in Russia which is also very much a mining context in Buda in Norway which of course where you have all the marine issues both fisheries and oil and gas. And also then we were invited to do a workshop together with a reindeer herding youth from across the Eurasian Arctic in the Gavna de Atme which is basically something like a chance gathering in the woods. So that was a lot of fun. So we had then the material from these workshop and this is the shorthand version of the methodology. Basically, we asked people to identify which issues are really important in relation to this overarching question which changes will affect the region economically socially and environmentally in a generation or two from now. So in a sense, people our age, our kids and grandkids at the Gavna de Atme, your future and your kids' future. People got to think free. We clustered things and then we voted on which ones were most important of these once we have clustered them in kind of, so we didn't have 40 different issues we had. We ended up with between 15 and 20 or something like that. People got to vote which are the most important you think but they also got to vote which are most uncertain in your opinion. And the uncertainty of course can be things that are most challenging in terms of adaptation. Something you can adapt to something that you know will happen and it's important if you know what's gonna happen. And then we asked people to take one of these four worlds. You live in the green road or road divided, the rocky road or the highway, which is a very fossil fuel one. You said those groups got to sit and think how do these story, how do these drivers play out? For example, in Pajala, in a very fossil fueled global context, what are the challenges in Pajala? What are the opportunities in Pajala? And we, for some of the works that were actually written up those stories that came out of that, our interpretation of the discussion. If one takes it then at the more aggregate level and also organizes it a little bit in relation to how it's been organized in the international literature at the global scale, you can see which issues are considered important. And very clearly, global markets, how they intersect with local economies and with power structures became a really central theme in what will determine what are the challenges ahead. Climate change was there, and it was a challenge but it wasn't as uncertain and tricky as some of the other challenges. Technology know how in culture, not so surprising, international security and cooperation, will there be peace or war? And how will that affect specific localities? Demography, in the global context, you often talk about increasing population. In this context, it was declining population and not migration, what challenges, particular challenges that that's posed in terms of adaptation to climate change. And what I think was really interesting to see how it all came together, very much fate control, how can we make decisions? How can we affect our local future? Is it the government that decides? Is it a transnational company that decides or can we make decisions that make it possible to deal with all these changes? And also a very strong sense of the importance of cultural diversity actually as a real asset. And this was also at the time when the immigrants were just starting to arrive in Pila, for example. It was just at the start of that discussion, but it was identified by the people as an important issue and one of uncertainty. And I will do this very, very quickly because it's a lot of material, but here you can see a little bit what people rated as the most important and uncertain. And what I wanna point out in particular is that we also did this exercise with the authors, the lead authors of the assessment for the Barnes region. And then one can see, did the locals and these so-called experts, did they think the same thing? On some levels, there was a lot of similarity, I think, but I think that what's clear was that the demographics came out clearlier, more clear among the locals. Environmental technology became much more important among the experts. Policies and institutions were more important by the locals. The experts did not identify that as much. When it comes to uncertainty, the locals saw much more uncertainty in environmental natural resources than the experts did. Maybe because they have less knowledge, maybe because they know the local context better. I don't know. But they also have a lot of caveats with a methodology. Each workshop in the cells is self-contained. It's the people who happen to be there. And you can have one person who's vocal, two people who are vocal that set a tone for something. You can also miss certain voices completely that don't come out in these. So they take that as caveats. But I think as one develops the methodology and does more workshops, one can start seeing some things that are a little bit more generic. So just to conclude then, local adaptation challenges are linked to climate change, but also to global resource markets, international security, values and norms and technology development. And also that entrepreneurship, value, skills and power will affect local impacts of global developments. And if you want to read more about it, we have the reports from the Paila workshop with the storylines and everything and the methodology in an SEI report. And in a report from Cicero, we have the results from Bode and from Kirovsk. And I also wanna thank all my big team and the number of projects and funders and partners who have been involved in this endeavor. I think it really shows the strength of getting the Nordic and in this case, also the Russian corporation building on a strong funding base in Sweden and being able to go wider based on that strong funding base in Sweden. Thank you. All right, does anyone want to make a clarifying question or should we start the discussion now? Well, I think we're gonna start then. Marcus and Tom, why don't you come up here? Yes, so change is not new in the Arctic. We saw now three different ways of assessing change in the Arctic. We saw also three different ways of working with the future in the Arctic. The RIA, the Arctic Resilience Assessment, for instance, put strong emphasis on the accelerating rates of social ecological change and predictability and how people in the Arctic at different levels, institutions in the Arctic are prepared or not to deal with this. In the work of DAGS, we can see how resources have been constructed and reformulated over time and how we can learn from it when thinking today about future sustainability pathways in the Arctic. And with ANICA, we can see the importance of understanding everybody does not seize the future the same, does not find all factors and drivers as uncertain or as relevant for their daily lives and the importance of the scale we focus on when we envision the future. So within this context, well, there are still many gaps and many ways of thinking about the Arctic, about Arctic change and how to assess it. And we would very much like to invite you to share your thoughts and comments on this topic and explore, for instance, what the humanities can bring to study of Arctic change, what's the role for humanities and explain the relation between humans and nature, for instance. But please, the floor is yours now. And please use the microphone because we are recording and webcasting and the people who will listen to the recording won't hear unless you use the microphone. So... And maybe you take over the moderating and I take over the... Oh, you don't need the microphone. Anneli can help with the microphone, maybe, yeah. So who wants to go first? I think so, Jan. Okay, good. Is there a question for ANICA? My name is Lidl Björs from Olbo University. You talked about local voices in a global context and I was wondering when you allow, as you call it, those voices in a global context. Doesn't it... These voices, they seem to, at least for me, I know to change or the aim of what they're saying or can you comment on that? These local voices in a global context, they change themselves or different than if it was things being raised in people's everyday life. I think so. I think the point was to, in a sense, to in order to not, often we have a lot of case study-based research is very rich in the local context and exactly as you say, you get up a lot of things of the everyday life things. Often, when you then try to look at broader things, you get very difficult in terms of comparing across case studies because often also the methodology is used and the approaches used are very, very different. The attempt here was to find a way that you can use a consistent methodology that connects the local and the global and in one sense, one of the points was to effect because it's a little bit of a mixture of gathering material but also a learning experience of, oh, if I think about that, I haven't thought about that before. And actually when we did the evaluation, that was one of the things that came out that, wow, that opened my eyes to something. So one gets something that one doesn't get but you miss something that you do get in a completely locally focused. Yeah, hi. Sorry, I'm Alan Atkinson. I'm working with WWF at the moment on a report on the blue economy in the Arctic, the marine economy. And I was curious, this might be more to Doug and Marcus, but when you're looking forward, it might be all three of you, I don't know. When you're looking forward and you're trying to imagine impacts in the future, to what degree are you using economic data and financial data? Is it good? And I was a little, is it correct to assume we're gonna see steady with ups and downs and maybe accelerating growth in economic activity in the Arctic? I was a little, thanks to Doug's presentation, I started to think, hmm, will we see steady and up and down economic growth in the Arctic or is that sort of illusory? So I'd just like to get some comments from you on the role of economic drivers and financial drivers in the Arctic and your experience with working with the information to make those assessments. We have worked, I'm an historian. So I will work with the economic data to the extent that we look at price fluctuations on the world market for minerals and the prices that companies were active in the resource extraction receive and how they have, how the changing prices have influenced their decisions to continue or discontinue and how they have framed and presented their projects to investors and to decision makers and to the public. But apart from, I have not really used economic data to predict the future in that sense, but looking at the longer time perspective, you do see that these price fluctuations on resources, they are a sort of constant feature that goes together with the global capitalist economy basically and this I think it's fair to assume that we will see this in the future as well. And just to follow on that, we didn't use economic data as a focus for the resilience assessment work, but I could say in some of the background work that was done for the AACA adaptation action for changing Arctic project that there was some data used to try to project into the future. And what was clear from that is that there's huge uncertainties. So maybe one of the certainties is you'll get fluctuation and surprises, but to actually try to predict, I mean you might be able to predict the range of possibilities, but to predict what's going to happen is fraught with difficulties and especially when you mix that with these other uncertainties about the price of commodities and climate changes, for example. Thank you. In those stakeholder meetings, I noticed that there was quite a lot of agreement that economic drivers were going to be a source of change, but what were people basing their assessments on when they made those determinations? But they weren't really assessing where things are going, what they were looking at, what are the issues that's gonna matter for assessing? And one thing that came up very strongly in terms of economic, especially strongly I think at the Piala workshop, was that the tax base, the local tax base, how important that is in terms of having job opportunities and the tax base that spills over to elderly care and social services. So this interlinkage between the global resource markets and whether you can employ enough people to take care of all the older people in your municipality who are scattered over huge distances. Those linkages, and I think that's in a sense the power of narratives is that you can start exploring them. You might not be able to project, but you can put them on the map. Thank you. Thank you very much. This is Larsen at the SEI. Very exciting to get more insight into your work. And I was just, I guess it's a reflection tied to a question. I was struck by how it was implicit or in some points explicit in I think all your talks, how the Arctic is often constructed from the outside. It becomes the other, and I'm thinking of the Edward Said's book, The Orientalism, and maybe we see the same here and perhaps even increasingly when resources grow scarcer and security becomes more important. And maybe it's more a question we can take with us as well, but I mean, if you ask the question, what's the role for the humanities? And how do you, how do we navigate that? Because the US government, Swedish government, others have certain stakes in coming into this and bringing out local voices. I mean, yeah, I think it's a tricky challenge. And I was curious if you had any reflections on how you navigate that tension, sort of that the Arctic becoming the other in the work. Yeah, thank you. I think it's a really good reflection because I think that's often the role that the Arctic has played in, especially when we talk about the Arctic outside the Arctic. And that's in a sense, it's a challenge for research, how we do research, how we work together with people who live in the region, but it's also a challenge in terms of what perspectives do we bring? You can do participatory research methods and action research methods, but you're still an incomer. Can you also build capacity among people living in the region to do their own research according to their own priorities? And I think some of that is happening actually. I think there's a huge difference today from 10 years ago in terms of getting opportunities for young people to get educations in the Arctic to actually become active researchers by themselves. So there are things happening there. And I think to get away from this other, I mean, that's what's really necessary. Yeah, I could just add real quickly that the fact that the permanent participants are in the Arctic Council and have in essence veto power actually helps to change the conversation to something very different than it would be if it was just nation states sitting around the table. And that is an interesting institutional innovation. I think this is mostly for Marcus. You emphasized this concept of drivers. It seemed to play a significant role in the report. Could you reflect a little bit on what is really referred to by that concept? For example, not too many years ago, the Danish government or parliament actually decided that there's gonna be more independence for Greenland. So is that a driver or is it not a driver? I mean, so what is the range of usually one might think about social change in terms of or other kinds of change terms of causes, explanations, roots and many concepts to deal with this. But this concept of drivers is interesting because it also because it seems to play such a big role. Could you maybe expand on that? Yeah, I don't think it's so complicated in a sense, but it's part of the language that describes these forces for change. And it can be natural forces like climate change, although if you follow that upstream, see us sitting there burning things, right? So ultimately, I guess what we're most concerned with are the social forces that are driving change because that's what we have real influence over where we contribute to those. But you could use that interchangeably. We could say the forces that are driving change are carrying it forward. And it's really, I think, not more complicated than that. Questions? I have a question for Dak actually. So most of the work that I've done in the past has been on Greenland. And I'm sure you're familiar with the work done by the University of Copenhagen, the University of Greenland on mining and the benefit of Greenland report. I was curious as how you see Greenland and Greenland's prospects. I mean, there's a history in Greenland, obviously, of boom and burst also in the mineral industry. I was curious to hear your reflections on how you see this going forward. Greenland has not been at the core of the research I have done, but of course, we follow the debate in Greenland and the hopes placed in resource-based futures. And of course, what I presented here, of course, and this has also been a part of the discussion on the high hopes placed in resource-based futures of Greenland and the possibilities to build economic foundation for independence from Denmark on natural resources that this, looking at the long-time perspective, of course, this calls for some, how should I put it? Caution, caution is the word, yes, yes. There's a vulnerable economy to build your, natural resources is a risky business to build your entire future. Yes, Canada and Alaska. Yeah. But that's something that struck me, too. I mean, I'm not an historian, but I've had the pleasure of working with historians and it's really made me open my eyes to, okay, some of these things are really not new. They happened before they are going on and you gain a lot from looking at that longer perspective and actually talking about the workshops, we also had one workshop just recently looking at what are the drivers of change again? What are the issues and events and changes that have occurred in the past in Norberten that have actually made a big difference in how the future developer, still in the process of working with that material. But I can say that technology actually came out as quite important. Even technologies you might not think about such as the refrigerator. I was actually going to make that, almost that point, it was very interesting in your presentation, Anika, to see comparison between experts taking a scenario and exercise and local stakeholders and sort of a question if any of the future projects, you have the opportunity to involve historians in future scenarios exercises because that would be a very interesting exercise. That's what historians do is analyze which drivers are most important in determining the change that happens. So it would be a fascinating exercise to involve historians in future scenarios. And that's in a sense what that workshop that was just in the beginning of May was all about is the first kind of step of exploring what you get out of that. But whereas still we haven't hardly started working with the material, so. I think it's perhaps also important to point out that the only global matters that affects the profitability and possibilities for resources to actually in the Arctic is not only world market prices, it can also be other global events like this we witnessed just a few years ago, one of the big mining projects under development in Green and the Isua mine, the Nuuk fjord which was canceled and has been discontinued. I don't know exactly the status of that project right now, but the triggering factor for putting down that project was not the falling world market prices for iron or even though I think that it may have contributed but the main reason was that the mining company, their main asset was a huge mine in Liberia which went bust because of the Ebola epidemic which ruined the company and forced them to discontinue the mining product in Green and so other global events than shifting the world market prices may affect what happens in the Arctic. So we have time for one more and just go ahead. This is a question for Doug. I'm Magdalena Pfaffel from James Cook University. We seem to be talking a lot about the global drivers impacting the Arctic, but then both Markus and Annika at the feeling talked about the importance of agency. So have you seen in your historic surveys any impact, any footprint of agency on how these case studies, how these mining towns developed past the mining boom? Well, you think of agencies, well the imprints of what the initiatives of different actors who have their interests basically. Yeah, yes, of course, but that is very important. We should not only stare ourselves blind on the global driving forces, it is of course needs actors who take initiatives and who has a vision and a particular idea. This has been the case over time and of course they are a part of their interests and shifting interests are part of the footprint that you get in the Arctic, of course. I think also, I mean, any driver has agency behind it. It might be a very diffuse and dispersed agency, but the drivers don't appear on their own normally. And I think that's one thing with the resilience report is to unpack that and also say that these are choices that people make. It's a choices that are made by politicians to go certain directions, not to go other directions, that actually might determine where the future lies. So it kind of falls back on actually taking responsibility as well. Just to take off of that as well. I mean, one of the reasons for using that slide and there was actually part of the series is to counteract the tendency to see drivers as these extra human forces of some sort, especially when we're talking about global forces. So your question actually was better than I was thinking off the bat. But so much of this, we hear lots of discussion about climate change, how it's forcing all of these changes and at least my reading is a lot of that discussion. It's as if it's happening external to humans. And it's not the only example of that. So I think we've really wrestled a lot with how to make sure that humans' capacity to take action, make choices and steer itself better or less well is really central in that whole report. So. We can give them an applause. All right, so while our next speakers get ready with the microphones, I'm not sure if everybody is set up already. We're gonna now start talking about the second topic for this seminar today, the context of polar politics. We will start with Peter Roberts, who is researcher at KTH, at the Division of History of Science, Technology, Environment. Peter will tell us about his work on geopolitics and research priorities in the past and the present. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for coming along. What I would like to talk about for the next 10 minutes or so, and making sure I've got some time pieces so I can actually see where I'm going. 10 minutes exactly, yeah. A bolt of lighting will descend from the heavens otherwise, yeah. The relationship between geopolitics and research priorities, particularly in terms of scientific research agendas, both in the past and in the present. What I'd like to do is really a couple of things here. Firstly, I'd like to complexify the idea of geopolitics. There are a number of people in this room who have done extremely good work in this field, pointing out that geopolitics is more than just decisions made by men in diplomatic offices in national capitals, frequently wearing suits, which then eventually work their way down to people on the ground. But rather to think of geopolitics as comprising a whole range of practices and decisions which can range from those at the very top end of what we think of a state decision making through to the actions of individuals on a regional and local level, who not only act in accordance with what they perceive to be their own priorities, but in doing so articulate and enact particular visions of what sort of an environment they are living and working in. And this is the key point, that it's really not possible to draw a distinction between the environment as something self-evidently out there and the scientific research that is conducted within it. Work always takes place within a space because it is deemed to be appropriate or relevant. And that always means that there is human agency behind the construction of a particular environment. The second point I'd like to make, really follows on from the first one, is that there is always a historically relevant dimension to a greater or lesser extent. Decisions made in the past about what kind of activity was appropriate in a particular time and place can sometimes have a form of inertia, which continues into the present and can lay down paths into the future, rendering what in some cases have been decisions made based on priorities at particular historical conjunctions into what can appear to almost be natural formations. So with that out of the way, I'll give you a couple of examples to illustrate what I mean. The Svalbard archipelago, I think, is a lovely example. We can depict it in a number of ways. The one on the left, I think, is, I know it's a bit of a tacky picture, but I do really like it, because I think it captures a really important point, which is that the act of making a space known, conducting scientific research, be that geological mapping, conducting a survey of the number of reindeer that happened to live on the archipelago, so on, so forth, that knowledge contributes to a sense of legitimate sovereignty. And in the case of Norway, in the 1920s, 1925, when the Spitzberg archipelago formally becomes the Norwegian province of Svalbard, these forms of scientific understanding of a space were pivotal to rendering the new province a natural part of Norway. If you knew the geological resources, you were in a good position to determine what sort of mining should be allowed and under what terms. If you happen to know where the reindeer were and how threatened they were, you were in a privileged position to pass legislation and regulations concerning the management of those reindeer. In turn, the kinds of scientific research that were prioritized tended to support Norwegian authority. So in this case, it's a very nuts and bolts. What kind of information do you want to assemble to render an environment knowable? But there's another dimension too. One of prestige that I think works in a slightly different way. In the case of Svalbard, this meant that as of, I think it was 1928, an edict was passed that researchers from outside Norway who wish to work in Svalbard should first run their plans through the Norwegian authorities in Oslo, who acted in a sense as gatekeepers. They would sometimes tell people not to bother with a piece of research. It was already done and it wasn't very interesting. They would attach names to the maps that people brought back, taking away the power to inscribe their own terminology upon the archipelago, and in that sense, ensuring that the scientific representation of this particular environment was stamped as Norwegian. I'm sure that many of us could think of analogous examples elsewhere in the Arctic. The picture on the right is from a much more recent vintage and it shows the protected areas on the Svalbard archipelago as they exist. I don't know if that's exactly today, but certainly very close to it. Nature reserves in purple, national parks in green, geotope protection areas in the orange. I won't go into the full detail of how these particular areas were declared, but once again, science performed a valuable role in providing the information that allowed Norway to declare particular environments to be in need of protection. And there's nothing self-evident about, say, the polar bear denning areas on Kongkarlsland, which are among the richest in the entire Arctic in terms of polar bear den numbers. There's no self-evident reason why you have to protect that. Who decides that a polar bear den is a thing that's worth protecting? That is a choice that is made. But once that choice has been made, finding the information, how many polar bear dens are there? What basis do we have for making a regulatory decision? Suddenly, those two things start to fit together. Similarly, we can think of science as being linked to concepts of development. And this means not just things like opening a mine, but can sometimes also mean altering and even improving, I say that in inverted commas, particular Arctic environments. Dolly Jorgensen in Luleå has done some lovely work on the transplantation of muskox from Greenland across to Fenoscandia and also to Svalbard. Again, it's not self-evident. Why should you have muskox in Northern Norway and on Svalbard? It's a decision made that this particular environment is one that would be better with these animals in it. In the case of Svalbard, some of the argumentation was literally at the level of, well, if your boat got stuck on a remote corner of Svalbard, you are gonna be in a lot of trouble unless you can find something to eat. Wouldn't it be good if there were some muskox around? And you actually see similar argumentation made in Canada. Lisa Marie Vandervat and I have discovered a pitch made to the Arctic Institute of North America in the 1950s to transplant muskox into the far north of Canada on the grounds that the increase in scientific research stations would mean an increased demand for local food. Hence, we're gonna transplant some muskox. Once again, these are choices that are made that a particular environment is suited to this. And then the technical issue of actually bringing the muskox is secondary to that decision. We can flip it over and say that now we would think of many of these choices as being illegitimate. That an environment is something that should be preserved. That the imposition of an alien animal upon it is something that is actually wrong. Once again, particular time, space, historical context become central. I wanna finish up by stressing quickly another point. Infrastructural legacies. Greenland mining has been mentioned already. And when I mentioned inertia early in my introduction, one of the issues I had in mind was the extent to which infrastructures can become causes for scientific research in their own right. This is Master's View. A no longer operational lead zinc mine in East Greenland operated 1956 to 1964. Interesting in two ways. Firstly, the mine was established as a result of Danish state-sponsored geological investigations which led to the discovery of this deposit and a political decision that it was expedient to actually mine it. 20 years before when East Greenland sovereignty was a considerably more touchy matter, it was completely the opposite. You actually don't want to open a mine because it will only attract unwanted attention. The scientific knowledge that resources existed was in a sense one of the least important factors to take into account when deciding to open the mine. Open it did, close it did not very long after, but an airstrip remained and once again. You start to see scientists saying, well, now that there's an airstrip there, this place in East Greenland is just where we want to do our research. The science followed the mining in that sense. And the research agendas that were constructed to make this site in East Greenland a peculiarly appropriate place, well, of course, they had to be tailored around questions of geopolitics and infrastructure. This was an appropriate place to be doing science. And that continues today. This is my final slide. Some of you will recognise this building on the left, the newly opened research station at Stashort Noir, the very northeast corner of Greenland, opened recently to much fanfare. In a sense, this is analogous to New Orleans in the northwest corner of Svalbard. A site that previously had another driving purpose, military in Stashort Noir's case, coal mining in the case of New Orleans, that again has become repurposed as a scientific facility. But, and here's the point I want to finish with, when we have things like the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, official knowledges in a sense, as my colleague Duncan de Pledge in Britain has termed them, the production of scientific knowledge. And in this case, climate change related knowledge has become an immensely valuable source of state prestige. It's highly ironic that a former coal mining settlement in Svalbard is to date a huge political asset to the Norwegian government as a place where climate change data is produced, where Norway can be seen to be performing the role of a good international citizen, supporting this globally and locally important research. So, should we ever think that science and geopolitics are alternatives in a sense? I would suggest we should think again, the links between them are sometimes intimate, sometimes more distant, but they're always there. And the way that we think about environments is in some ways often a product of science, but in sometimes also a cause. This is a kind of place where we should be doing this, not that science has told us it has to be done here. I'll finish there. Thank you very much, Peter. I think you linked very nicely the earlier theme of assessments here to the geopolitics, creating a nice link. I think I will ask you to hold your questions till we have another discussion session. And Mia, there you are hiding in the back. And do you think you can get her? Mia Christensen is one of the people where the collaboration with KTH, a little bit of matchmaking, I would say. We worked on a book together a couple of years ago and we just hit it off in terms of thinking and writing together. And we now have a joint project where we also go the geopolitical theme, but more in the present day, Arctic governance and the question of fit in a globalized world, where Mia is at the Department of Media Studies at Stockholm University and guest professor at KTH. So we'll hear today a little bit about the media angle and how media plays into scalar politics. And of course, scalar we heard before how the Arctic is one dimension, but there are also many other dimensions and how different actors like to put one dimension before another. Please, Mia. Thank you, Anika. Well, I guess I start, I can start with emphasizing hope and agency and then we can hopefully go back to that during our discussion session. Relations, geopolitics and media come together. And I would like to guide that discussion in relation to a number of examples that Anika and I have pointed out were focused on in our project. So to start out, the sort of more ethnic, although it is not always the case that we are focusing on the regional dimensions of the Arctic, but just to give it as a, it's an image here. What I'd like to point out or start the discussion is, you can hear me. Yeah. Is the Alaska Glacier Conference that Obama conducted in August 2015, only two and a half months before the Paris COP 21 meeting. And it's a very significant event in and of itself and also from a media perspective, of course. He's the only, the first president to go there and to point out that the United States is a nation that has region in that part of the world, that is the border part of the country. And also, obviously he was trying to accomplish something here. These were the months preceding the Paris COP 21 meeting and he was trying to point out a certain kind of agenda. He was pointing out that the region has vested interests in politics, but also in terms of vested interests in drilling and all the issues that were part of the upcoming talks in Paris. So in that way it was a given sort of agenda for media and it was picked up by the media in very significant ways, of course. When it came to Paris, all that discourse that is proceeding from Glacier and Alaska and all that was said by the president during that event we had all sorts of other layers of interest and politics when it comes to scalar politics, which were part of the media coverage in ways that were actually insignificant and many significant parts missing. We had many layers relating to indigenous issues and local issues and regional issues that were not part of the media coverage. They were not part of the media coverage of the event of the Paris COP 21 meetings, but at the same time the spectacular, the spectacular of course in quotation marks were very much there in the media coverage of the issue. So this brings us to the point that when we're talking about hope and agency, especially in the current environment, the mediated discourse, the media coverage are very much part of indicating what is there in terms of public understanding and what is concealed from public discourse and what is not there. And the fact that certain issues are raised to significance and they are there, of course doesn't mean they have endurance that they are there for extended amount of time. And this goes to, I will get back to that, but for instance, scalar transcendence and topical multiplicity, which we covered in our previous project in relation to the CIS minimum in the Arctic. At that time, it became a huge media event. It did have big media significance and coverage in terms of how it was indicating that, and what I'm saying here is the fact that Arctic climate change was indicating big global climate change and it was in the media, but it did not mean that it was there to stay. And a very short time after that it disappeared from media discourse and media coverage because then we had the 2010 elections, re-elections in the United States, so the agenda changed and it was not making the news anymore. Well, what was making the news here, just to, I don't have much time, but just to point out was, again, the spectacular, the visual aspects, the polar bears, the disappearing of the glacier, the ice and all that. But at the same time, we could say that the media were paying attention to topical issues that were not there in their media coverage before, such as disappearing of local languages and ecological issues that were not covered before by the media. So in that way, it did contribute to a better coverage of the issue by the media these moments, but at the same time, we had to say that it was not enduring, it wasn't there to stay. So this is all, of course, to highlight the fact that media coverage, mediation and mediated aspects are very much in relation to or in parallel to scalar political dynamics, and they go in flux. They're always in flux. There's no sort of continuity, but again, you can say that it's getting better, but we cannot predict what's gonna happen in the next year or in the next five years or things like that. So another thing to highlight in relation to again, to give an example, to give a solid concrete example and to use the Paris COP 21 gathering, which was also media event again, is the fact that these things are also covered by social media, Twitter, Facebook and other platforms that have significant nowadays, not only journalists and big media who have representatives there, and people are tweeting a lot, people are covering these things a lot in their own media pages, on their own Facebook pages, which have significance, but we have very little as it is now, and I'm talking from speaking from a media and communication studies point of view, we have very little research about these things and the impacts of these things as to what they mean for public understanding and what this is doing for people to understand what's going on. Again, to emphasize what I said a minute ago, we do have a better understanding of what's going on, we do have better coverage, but with these dynamics, which are really changing by the day, we do not know what this kind of mediation and mediatization is gonna do in terms of public understanding in the days and years. What we do know, for instance, there are some parallels when it comes to, for instance, when we look at Twitter coverage and newspaper coverage, the only time the Arctic was covered actually in relation to COP 21 in Paris was, when it peaked was, there was someone dead, I think the governor of Alaska, and that's when it peaked in terms of coverage. But otherwise, Arctic was not really visible in the news coverage or also in Twitter or social media coverage. And indigenous issues were not really there as much as they needed to be there. So in that way, there is some parallel in relation to the ways in which these issues are being covered, both by social media and by individuals and by big media and news media. And this is just, which doesn't show well here, but this is a Twitter map showing how people are exchanging information, messages and news. And this is a year ago environmental correctly. So, 11, okay, yeah, well, five years ago. This brings us to the point where, where we start to actually hope an agency, the big one here, of course, with increasing use of social media. So what do we make of scalar politics, mediation and Arctic climate change in the face of increasing use of social media and mediation and, but of course, the importance of news and traditional media. So, I believe us there. Thank you. Larsen, Rasmus is a research fellow here at Sokolne Environment Institute, and he will tell us about his work on impact assessments in overclaimed landscapes. Good to be here. A question I tried to phrase earlier about the activity defined by whom and so on. I just came back last week for a meeting with a few of the very different communities that we worked with. I think one of the things that happened in the meeting I wanted to talk about was the fact that we were able to do the things that happened in the meeting that was interesting to me was that the herders, the chairman of the community said, well, discussing about the Arctic and that this cause, well, wait a second, we are also Arctic and we can actually use that this cause as part of our strategy and our work. And of course, it's interesting this construction and because we're interested in the necklace. So what I'll do in less than 10 minutes now is I need to pick up a little bit of the ball from here. I think you have excellent presentation about the politics and the connections between science and development. And look at a little bit of the same perspective on impact assessments as a specific component of the planning process, which is very often assumed to be exactly neutral for your values and so on and throw in some thoughts about what impact assessments mean in contested landscapes. And this is at a juncture where we are about to close to earlier studies that we've conducted and are about to launch a new one. Andy Kerr, I think, referred to it in the slide, the opening slide, which is called Contested Landscapes and New Fronting on the Swedish ETA. And the two past studies that I'm drawing insights from here, as we can talk together with Amon and Rebecca Lawrence, who's part of the Registrar team. I don't know if Rebecca's on Skype here today. Thank you, Rob. Is that better, you? I'll use this one. And Kajsa Rachel at SLU and also Carlos D'Alene, who sits down here. And a number of other people that you'll see in the references in the end of the slide. Slide show. So it's always a bit, I think it's always hard to know where to start when you want to tell a story, but I thought this is a helpful starting point since I assume many of you come in from a research perspective and are used to picking up the literature. This is a quote from the Social Impact Assessment Handbook, 2011, Van Cley and the Stavis and the big gurus within this field on social impact assessment. At first sight, this quote seems intuitively right, but there are two things I thought that's worth highlighting and I guess two assumptions that we are critiquing through our work. The first is that impact assessments are often undertaken with the default assumption that development should go ahead, which is interesting. And of course it's reflected by the fact that EIAs are owned by the companies or the consultants undertaking the work. And secondly, that the purpose should be to contain conflict or to reduce the level of conflict. And we challenge that and say, well, sometimes conflict is helpful and you can distinguish between destructive and constructive conflict. I think a topic that Kaisa is working very much on in one of her projects. And you actually sometimes need to have that discussion about conflicts of interest, conflicts and perspectives. So this is perhaps a quote that illustrates more where we are coming from that impact assessments and planning processes should also be recognized as spaces of resistance, creative resistance, especially by indigenous communities like the reindeer herding communities in Sapmi in the north, who are now also seeing that they're part of the Arctic. And one of the examples I wanted to give of that is from a community-based impact assessment that Rebecca and I undertook with the same Miss Jawa Nja, a reindeer herding community in Norbotten in Sweden, where a bull-eating is planning a new mine in Lava. So you might have heard of it. It's been in the media and I think it's the largest mine proposal at present in Sweden, roughly the size of the Itig mine outside of Gjellivare, open pit copper mining. And this is the reindeer herding pastures of the community. You have Ajaplow or Achaplow, I think, in local dialect, Avisjawa. These are the two winter gracing areas and the mine is expected to be located here. So we conducted an impact assessment with the community and in the process we also contrasted our insights with the company's own assessment. And here is the map, I think the only map in the company report where you see the northern tip of that winter herding area. You see the mine operations or the installations that are planned and an example of how the company imagines that the herd, the reindeer herd will be able to move from... They are released after being moved by trucks and then being able to be gathered here by the herders. The community's view was quite different, of course, that this was not possible and what we tried to do with the community was to place the mine proposal in the context of the whole winter herding area, the whole community including other activities and once you take that step back you get a quite different view. You realise, for instance, that almost a third of the winter gracing area in this area, in this particular part of the community gracing lands is planned to be returned to the Norwegian reindeer herders which will mean that a whole winter group will lose access to winter pasture. What will they do in the future? We're talking about future scenarios. Whose perspective do you take when you craft those scenarios? Here you see the largest... I think Sweden's... What will become Sweden's largest, one of the largest wind parks, Mark Bygden, which is being planned and all the red blurbs here, red spots are so-called buffer zones or disturbance zones which is the area where because of noise human activity, it's assumed that reindeer herds will be disturbed and will prefer not to grace and you see that how that actually interferes in the community land also things that the company was not taking into consideration. So our argument is very much the fact that impact assessment has to be considered from the perspective of competing truths, that they are giving competing views, competing narratives and there are a number of weaknesses in the way this is being undertaken Sweden at present that we are now exploring further and what is interesting is I think that government authorities civil servants who sit and daily in the everyday practices meet communities, meet companies they are very well aware of these challenges and these weaknesses but struggle to find ways forward where we hope to continue to support through the research this is just I think the final example from the work which shows you some of the tension here that this is a workshop where we are observing meeting between the community and the company the first time they actually met with the whole community and you see very different interests here and we thought that was quite interesting and we couldn't quite believe our ears from the company representative so I think I'll finish with this quote perhaps which I think is where we see this opportunity for taking the research forward that both notions of indigenous rights and community impacts as supposedly very technical term challenges this sort of mainstream mode of development I think we've been here today and perhaps also raises visions opportunities for visioning about alternative futures as perceived by the so-called locals thank you we have one more presentation before we have a chunk of time for discussion again and we have now set the stage very much for presenting the REXAC project the resource extraction and sustainable art to communities that it's no coincidence that we're working towards this and and professor at the division of history at KTH and Ninis is professor at physical geography at Stockholm University and they will give us a sense of where this completely new project that is just starting and do we have one more microphone please so thank you very much this is where I work there's no center so things on waste stuff in Naples that's where we have this fancy picture and this is the project or rather the center of excellence sorry that will just start in fact today and tomorrow we are gathering the research task leaders from a range of institutions across the Nordic countries and beyond here in Stockholm to really launch it so Ninis you are at Stockholm University yes and I was kidnapped for this project which I'm really very enthusiastic about this because we need to work across disciplines and you're talking about impact assessment of the communities but mind you even the impact of the mining on the natural environment is really poorly understood if you really go into these assessments we don't want to up till now people have sort of neglected the fact that we do impact the environment much more than we do so that's where we're going to work together and this is your geography part of it this is Kiruna a town that should be known to most this is not how it looks in reality but this speaks to the complexity of everything this is of course the Renaissance city of Siena much loved you go there to have wine in Tuscany and so on and to enjoy culture and this is an ecological architect and is envisioned by the architect Ralf Erskine back in 1958 I could talk for two hours about this image if there was time it is not but it somehow summarizes both the future and the past and the visions and the realities and sometimes the lost hopes very much about the problems of resource extraction the challenges, the opportunities and the local communities be they in cities like Kiruna or be they in tiny places where actual realities play out and often you can picture that in the frame of one human being this in Tula north western Greenland just as the Americans had established the Tula base and they had been involuntarily moved across large distances to make place for that we are in a northern place it's lots about things that are about the environment that is changing I think this element of ice and glaciology is particularly interesting also because my co-director is there and developing this line of research fantastically compared to what it was just a couple of decades ago now collaborating with local communities linking up to major political media and such issues across the world and also bringing in local knowledge as in this work by anthropologist Julie Crickshank from University of British Columbia in Vancouver on the Tinglet in north western Pacific meeting with in the 18th century with enlightenment scientists this is about the politics of glaciers in the Andes so local communities encountering big money big politics is a very important theme and maybe you should say a couple of words about precisely what you are doing in this work well I'm on my way up to the climate symbol of Sweden the highest peak highest mountain which is this year probably losing because it's a piece of ice and it's melting and if the summer is normally warm whatever normal is these days but it will lose its position as the highest peak and that's very symbolic last week I think I had four different journals and TV's channels that wanted to they asked me when will it happen we will have to come back there's a politics of expectation you might wonder who this person is from whom you probably wouldn't buy a used car he was actually a Polish geoscientist inventing the concept the cryosphere almost precisely a century ago in Stockholm actually that's not the story more things that are about change and about unusual perspectives on this this is the curve this is the site where it's produced but this is the kind of work that is now growing from this kind of scientific realities about how people have tried to tinker with climate change, geoengineering that checkered history and also observations in this case by a Danish anthropologist who is not part of this project though Kirsten Hastrup on the Tula community we just saw a picture from a moment ago from Kanak 700 people where global processes become materialized in a very local setting in what we used to think about as a distant corner of the world closely linked up to anything else as anybody here environment is also another thing it's growing anywhere it's coming into popular culture it's coming into the politics of ice as we told about it's about surveillance it's about space science it's about satellites it's about change there could have been images here about industrial urbanization that sort of bolster the main point here the REC Center of Excellence is about mining, it's about extractive resources and local communities but it is ranging all the science fields from proper natural science all the way through to technology to humanities and social science couple of recent products from people who we have managed together we're very proud of several dozen of scientists and scholars that are joining us in this effort this is Marianne Lien is actually in the room working on a particular resource extraction to do with the farming of salmon which of course speaks to the diversity of resources very much an Atlantic thing Dolly Urgensen was mentioned before with the rewilding projects she and I edited a book called Northscapes a couple of years ago covering the entire circumpolar north also a range of topics and look at this we have also Kirsten T. Stead from the University of Copenhagen she's here in the room and working on this is not perhaps what everybody would expect when they see and hear images about what's going on in Greenland Nuvane Fortelekunst in Greenland and then our colleagues in Canada working on mining communities and particularly abandoned mines which is very much an issue in this Centre of Excellence these things tend to come to an end and it's very hard to think sustainably about these matters but we try as best we can and we think we can do quite a little down to the earth advice in this regard the background processes are obvious there are doggie already mentioned there are ups and downs there are ups now until very recently and this serves maybe I should use that word as a driver of the development here and that's why also new mining projects pop up everywhere so we need to take stock of the knowledge we already have and apply it as best we can and also look at this there are multiple relationships I actually picked this from our Canadian colleagues I wouldn't try to explain it but it shows the challenges that are involved when you try to even sort out who are involved in mining projects this is extremely complicated and also extremely it's full of opportunities I think for research so this is the project very briefly what we will try to do and who are leading it just saw these institutions before we will try at least a five year project and this is our geographies where we work mostly so to speak on the ground with various projects and we will extend beyond that but these are our main areas and this is the 10 research tasks again there will be no time here now to explain in detail what's going on of course in these but just the keywords here and the titles of them are about the range of this enterprise in a sense we are not knowing what we are doing and that is precisely the best state of research I think when you're not knowing what you're doing throwing ourselves slightly into the unknown making combinations that are very bold, quite unusual and slightly over the top and that is I think where at least some of us want to be because we think that is when we have most fun and do the best work and this is a little bit of the new hireings we will do we're going to get a whole new cohort of PhD students working and this is a massive research effort and we are with SEI as a prime partner building a website it's almost just about to start as we speak and it will be the perfect place to go for this kind of work for blogs and other information so thank you very much applause thank you I invite all the speakers for this second session to join us here at the front and we will start straight away with your questions and comments would you just say some finish please, of course, yeah I was just thinking before when we heard about the capacity building of the communities I must say I've been working with some of the communities myself for a few years and my capacity is definitely building by working with them so it's not one way I don't think anybody thinks so I just think that should be emphasized that the REXAC project will really provide opportunities for PhD students to work across disciplines but the senior scientists are also really building their capacity because we learn new things and actually last week an example is that I asked these representatives what their concern was of effects of mining except that they used their land because that's really the land issue that's really their rights then they started to talk about the pollution and they were worried and then when I discussed with a colleague who's part of this as well he replied the same thing from different sources so it's actually easier than you think and I think this project will make a big difference This is a question or comment for me I'm Kirsten Tister from the University of Copenhagen I was intrigued by your final slide the one where you show the use of social media across the globe because you see the whole middle the usual the industrial, the metropods and so on lightening up and then we see up there on the northern hemisphere total darkness as if those people do not have access to computers and so on and of course I can realize how this image comes about since there are so few people and the nature is so vast but thinking of those people and taking the perspective of the Arctic it's just outrageous since I don't know any persons on this globe so on the social media as they are in Greenland so I mean this was just a comment Do you want to answer something? Maybe you can use this one Thank you Thank you Well that was 2011 so hopefully it's a little different now but it's also about representation representativity when it comes to these issues that speaking of scales that scale doesn't always match what is of importance in terms of scale and the scale of interaction and mediation match each other but I think it's a little better the way it looks now in terms of how regions are represented in terms of connectivity and news flows and mediation between each other but then again I think that's what I would like to go back to hope and agency and impact what does it mean even though we might have the most quantity or volume of interactivity and mediation in relation to certain regions and certain issues doesn't necessarily mean that it leads to social change that's I think the crux of the issue and I think it relates to what happened during the Arab Spring and all those things which when things looked very full and a lot of mediation and volume of information and news flows but the end result was not what was projected before or during when those things were happening at the Arctic Frontiers Conference one of the issues that was pushed to importance for actually good internet coverage in the Arctic and I think if one makes a polar projection of this traffic today and a couple of years from now it will look quite different for also business reasons I don't know who to ask this question to because I believe I'm probably one of the only ecologists here who feels a bit lost because I see that this is a whole new dimension of studying human behavior governance natural dynamics and exploitation of these systems I wonder we have quite a lot to learn from a smaller scale field which is conservation biology which actually is a crisis discipline basically okay things have happened we need to fix it but then it has multiple dimensions we want enough population sustain we want to maybe harvest in the future we want to have stakeholders involved we want to have everything so there are some quite interesting lessons which have been tested at much smaller scales that have lessons for bigger initiatives one example I was thinking is that we have a problem that we often encounter in conservation is how to quantify biodiversity first of all we never really know how many species are there and then when impact assessment studies come in and says so what all is there what will be destroyed so an ecologist goes to the field approximately these many species and then we come across scientists who goes in saying the wind farm companies for example ask are there golden eagles in the area there's a scientist standing on the top of the hill looking through a binocular staring and waiting for the eagle to leave the area so that we can say there's no more eagles anymore these are the processes that are there and persistent in conservation field which potentially could link up and Peter made a nice analogy where how science can actually feed politics which is so true in that smaller scale so I wonder one can also dig into these lessons learned because there are quite many successful stories if I can just answer quickly I think that's a great point and because it so nicely links the idea of ecology as both a source of information and also an artifact that reveals something about the choices and I think you're exactly right to point to the fact that you need to have decided what constitutes a crisis what sort of things you want to measure but then you've also got to have the tools to actually do that work and this is where the information becomes so important whether there will be scope for learning something about exactly how those processes work on the micro level by doing a detailed study I think that would be a really interesting question particularly if it can be placed in the framework of, as you say, a broader environmental impact assessment in which this is very much seen as a contributory factor to a broader political process. I was just reminded when you raised that it's a really good point that you I think you repeated a few times here at SEI Mark is that once you put a number on something you may kill the discussion and I think that's one of the things I'm paraphrasing you right but you have the mic so you can come in afterwards but I think that's one of the challenges that we fail that we want to come in support with numbers and figures and maps but sometimes it's better not to do it because you want either it's not in favor of whoever you're working with or you might want to keep the dialogue going so I think it's a constant sort of struggle that's perhaps where the interdisciplinarity is really important because sometimes you want to do that together and other times you want to take a step back, thanks. Marcus Carson, Stockholm Environment Institute that was actually a nice lead in because as usual Sverker sort of cut into an interesting question with your question about drivers and in particular Peter and Rasmus took up the question about these underlying assumptions that guide things or carry things forward but without being looked at and that's perhaps the parallel with the sticking numbers on things that the underlying assumptions disappear but what I'm wondering is within this project it sounds like both of you are actually digging into this question of hidden assumptions that steer where we go. I wonder how that shapes the entire project. Do you expect to reveal other hidden assumptions that sort of carry where the Arctic goes or I can just add a quick response when you refer to the project you think about Reksak, is that right Marcus? Because then our work. I'll leave that to others to answer maybe Sverker. One of the things we hope to do and I'm saying while I didn't have time to say in the presentation is to take forward is to not only do it with one set of actors but actually explore what happens when you critique these assumptions together if you for instance do impact assessments with a developer company and a community at the same time how can you then revisit these assumptions? I'll just add briefly where in my head is a historian I always like to point out the fact that things are more complicated than they seem but simply uncovering a new layer of detail is not useful or important in its own right unless it challenges a pre-existing narrative and that's I think the thing that's so important gets back to this question of why do we count the things that we count. What was the original decision that led to us thinking these are the things worth counting. What are the values that we invest in these things we have decided to count which I think is important and I think it also links to this issue a few people have actually raised today too about thinking about drivers as products of human agency rather than these external forces that as it were force humans to act as though the minerals were screaming they needed to be extracted in Greenland the boats were screaming they needed to drive through the Northwest which that even things as broad as climate change present challenges to which we have a range of options and to simply say we don't any time you say we don't have a choice I think we at least need to think and if we're at least pushed to think about why we think we have no choice what are the assumptions that lead us to believe that we've got to this situation look backward how did we get to this point where something appeared to no longer be something we could contest or think in different ways about I think they're actually quite useful in framing the range of actions we have in the present just a tiny footnote on that I think also as as with a broad background we many of us most of us actually have already go we have traveled to rexac from many places having been in Arctic research before many disciplines I think we are also quite aware that although we tend to sort of look at the futures and the assessments produced before and we are sort of have these layers of various thought regimes that have produced the untold assumptions and so on we must be aware of those that guide ourselves and even rule ourselves the and and some of those are out there in some things we have already said we we tend to point at certain changes going on we refer to the Paris agenda we refer to the strategic and development goals as if they were to become realities and we perceive change guided by this but of course we don't know and we need to and we also I think at least some of us at least certainly myself tend to be sometimes overly hopeful about possibilities and potentials and so on we don't know and we need to take the height for for for that and be cautious to 12 o'clock but I think we should see this as a start of a discussion a start of an ongoing discussion that I hope you will all participate in and we'll make sure that there will be four out to do that we can arrange future seminars we will have a website for EXAC sometime in the not too distant future hopefully and we'll be sure you know about it when it happens and I'm very happy that you came and I also want to thank the statue of speakers for bringing out some really interesting neat issues that I think shows the power of reflection and humanities and social science perspectives on looking at this I don't think we would have had discussion quite this way 10 years ago there are new ways of thinking out agency for example that was not as prominent then and I think that's the way it should be it's an ongoing discussion and I thank you very much for coming here and joining us today and I hope you will join us again in the future and thanks to you