 I'm Jackie Dawson, I work at the University of Ottawa in Canada and I work on the human and social and political dimensions of climate change, mostly in the Canadian Arctic. So I focus on the human and policy dimensions of climate change in the Arctic. So right now we're doing a lot of work on Arctic shipping and so what's going on with climate change, it's changing sea ice conditions which is opening up the Arctic for shipping and tourism. So we do a lot of work on the fact that there's a 400% increase in pleasure craft in the Canadian Arctic between 2005 and now, so there's a lot to be done in terms of regulation, policy, how do we deal with this situation, what are the impacts on local people, good and bad. So we're looking at opportunities and risks associated with climate change in the Canadian Arctic. Climate change isn't always such a bad thing but then you have to think about what are the secondary impacts. So it is good, there's economic development potential for sure. There's more resource development, there's access to resources that weren't there before, we can, well there's new shipping routes but then are our local communities really ready for a lot more tourism. We're talking about small, small hamlets of 250 to 1200 people. We don't have the infrastructure necessarily to support this so there are a lot of opportunities but there are a lot of risks that we need to mitigate to make sure that those opportunities are opportunities still. I would imagine there would be a great desire among people to see the Arctic given that sense that it's not going to be around forever. Yeah, so there's this phenomenon right now called Last Chance Tourism which is where people are going to places that they think they're not going to be able to see in the future so the Arctic is a huge draw for that. So people think there's going to be no more glaciers or polar bears are dwindling, they're drowning and all these sort of perceptions that may or may not be true are drawing people to the north, to experience the north before it is gone which may or may not be accurate but it is influencing an increase in demand in tourism in polar regions. Yeah, there's a market, there's a market for this and actually the Great Barrier Reef is another place where Last Chance Tourism is being experienced. People want to go and see the reef before the coral is bleached beyond what is authentic, the idea of authentic. Most of the work we're doing right now is in the Arctic but we are doing some work in the Caribbean and so we recently looked at a case study where we're trying to determine what are the factors that a community needs to enhance their adaptive capacity to climate change. So one way you can do this is you can look at communities that have successfully implemented some sort of adaptation strategy. So in Padgett Farm in the Grenadines and the Caribbean region they've through funds from Climate Change Adaptation Funds through Jeff and et cetera, they've implemented a desalinization plant there. So what we did is we went there and we looked at that plant and we tried to figure out okay well this is an example of a community that was successful. They now have fresh water where they didn't before and they're expected to have less fresh water in the future so we worked with that community and tried to determine okay what are the factors that made this community successful compared to this community which has not successfully been able to deal with or to adapt to some fairly significant impacts of climate change. And were there success traits with a sky level or applicable to different? Yeah I mean you always have to be a bit cautious but I think we can look at certain determinants of adaptive capacity. Some of them are fairly obvious like access to financial capital, human capacity, but some of the more maybe less obvious ones are having single champions that have the ability to link to all the different scales of policy so you need somebody who's well connected within international political circles, national circles, regional circles and local circles and not every region has that and we found that having that one person who can speak the language of all of those different sort of scales was really important to the success of this community. This person was very charismatic, a real leader that had buy-in from the community and buy-in from the international funding agency so that seemed to be an important piece and then cross-scale communication between all those different levels and throughout the duration of the project. There's so much science going on that's useful and important but if you aren't able to translate that into action or if you aren't able to explain that to local people or decision makers then it's kind of useless. You know I hate to see really amazing research get put into journal articles and then just circulated among all of us academics where we're just reading each other's work and then we wonder why it's not having any impact. It's because there's actually a really important piece in between where you have to work with communities to make things happen so the way we do our research is I never just think to myself oh this would be a great project. Our approach to research involves going to communities, local communities across the Arctic or the Caribbean or wherever or going to government agencies or going to industry partners and saying what are your major issues right now, what are the impacts that you're experiencing from climate change and what should we be studying, what are the questions that we need to answer and what do you need, what would help you to solve the issues that you're dealing with. We're just working with issues, what are the risks, what are the opportunities and what are the solutions and they're not coming from me, they're always coming from stakeholders. What have you found that are some of the ways that local Arctic communities are being impacted? Well there's direct impacts of climate change on local communities so things like changing distribution of wildlife which is really important culturally, there's still subsistence of culture in the Canadian Arctic, well in the Arctic proper and so that changing wildlife patterns is really, really impacting their cultural traditions, their ability to transmit knowledge between generations, their ability to read the land and read the ice so we're seeing increased accidents, increased rates of drownings and things because traditional knowledge is changing so because the ice is changing so you can't read it as well as you could in the past so there's those direct impacts but then there's the indirect impacts so the social and economic sort of manifestations of what's happening in the biophysical environment so climate change is changing the natural environment which is increasing economic development opportunities so there's impacts like there's increased resource development that's directly related to climate change so now you've got these secondary impacts and even though there might be job opportunities they're not necessarily going to local people so there's primary impacts and there's secondary impacts but essentially I can't help them adapt, they have to tell, they have to decide what's best for them but what I do is I try to gather as much information as I possibly can and give them a suite of potential options that for them to decide and implement based on what's going to work best for them. The thing that I think that we do best is we link natural scientists with social scientists and we come together and then we take all this information we put it into a sort of policy realm so we try to translate it into real world possibilities so one of the things I'll just give you an example of one of the things that we did a couple of years ago, the communities in the Canadian Arctic right now are quite concerned about the number of cruise ships that are coming through the Northwest Passage so and one of the concerns among many was that people coming off those cruise ships didn't necessarily understand how to act in the communities, what's culturally appropriate, what's not so what we did with the one particular community, Pond Inlet in the northern tip of Baffin Island was we worked with the community and we created a code of conduct for visitors coming to the community so when they come off, so when they get on the cruise ship they get a brochure that sort of has a list of things that you might want to know and something that was really important to the local community was to that we would write these kind of rules of conduct in a very welcoming way so it's not your typical do not step on the flowers or leave only footprints take only pictures or things like that, it's we welcome you to our community and while you're here we ask that you ask the parents of our children if you want to take photos of them or I think so it's very welcoming and they wanted that tone set so we helped write and produce that and now that's distributed on cruise ships all cruise ships that are coming through the Canadian Arctic and there's a nook-to-tock you can learn a nook-to-tock phrases which is the local dialect. We find we're often writing multiple reports of the same the same material because yet we're writing policy briefs to government with the same outcomes and material we're writing community reports to communities and then we're writing academic journal articles so you do you have to change the way that you pitch your ideas and the code of conduct for the tourists as an example of that very simple language very inviting language because they want the local culture is very sharing oriented it's very inviting so they want that tone set and then when you write something a policy brief to try to influence government to change a certain regulation or policy or make a suggestion the language you need to use is succinct it needs to succinct and clear and punchy and you need to get to the point in the first two sentences the first sentence so yeah there is a there's a there's a big difference and you have you do have to I find the best way to do this is to work as a team I think that's the only way to do it we have to work together with glaciologists with with permafrost experts with climatologists and paleoclimatologists and communication experts and social scientists and all of these different peoples and on top of that we need to be working with government with communities with industry there's no other way to solve a problem that is as big as as climate change early early on when we started doing some research on the impact of cruise ships the increasing number of cruise ships in the Canadian Arctic we organized a workshop and we brought together all the stakeholders that we could bring together and we went in and unconsciously went in to this workshop not really realizing that how much knowledge was already in the room and not really realizing where they were in there dealing with the issue of climate change and tourism and and so the the workshop did not go well and there was a lot of conflict and irritation and something a simple comment was was regularly miss miss communicated misunderstood because there was a tension there because we we didn't take enough time we didn't take the time we needed to understand who was in the room and you have to do that and we learned from that and we never I mean this was over a decade ago we learned from that and now we work regularly with these people and they're an invaluable resource so you have to you have to know you you have to understand the amount of knowledge that that already exists even though we didn't go in thinking that we knew more but we did go in not understanding who we had invited to the table we also didn't understand that there was already conflict between different groups that we had brought to the table so for years afterwards we had in meetings individually with those groups but I can say ten years later we we're now able to work all of us together and and and we've actually written papers together we've contributed to to two policies that have gone through the the territorial legislative legislature so you do you learn from these mistakes but you got to be resilient you just you have to you have to learn and keep going two groups that I guess kind of have cultural differences would be physical scientists and social yes what are the challenges of getting these two groups there are yeah there are child there are often challenges working social science with social scientists and natural scientists together and we're we're we are working out those bugs and we're getting much better at it than we were in the past so the our our languages are different our culture our own culture of research is different and I think one of the first things that that is happening now is is a culture of respect needs to be created and the only way to to create that is to increase understanding of everybody's research and you know and instead of a social scientist saying oh well they're too those natural scientists they're so linear in their thinking they are ignoring all the big pictures it's not realistic and then the the natural scientists saying oh those social scientists is airy-fairy you know not important but the only way the only way forward is for us to work together so we we need to respect what we what we do understand that we can do something better together and I think we're doing that I mean we I work regularly with glaciologists CI scientists and we take their outputs and we translate it and we and then we work with communities to create policy to create you know and you have to you have to to do that but then when you go to write your journal articles you have to figure that out too that's a challenge because even the way you the way you create your dialogue is totally different between natural science and social science in in natural science you're really reporting on a finding in social science you're creating a storyline around your findings how did you come to be working in this area my path was I'm a natural scientist well sort of I I'm not I did I did a natural science undergrad so I have a bachelor's of natural science so I was going down that path and but what I found what really what I was really passionate about was the applications of natural science so then in grad school I did a masters in a business department that was focused more on tourism so I went to social sciences and then for my PhD I did I did my PhD in climate change and did some climate change modeling but then took those those model outputs and applied it in a social context so I've always been really interested at being at that intersection being that person who translates you know the natural science to the social science so that was my my path and and and in terms of why I do research in Arctic shipping well I do research in the Arctic because I love the Arctic and I love it I love the landscape I love the people I love everything about it I've always been drawn to the Arctic but why do I do shipping or tourism research because the community the people the residents in the community told me that's what's important right now it is the impact of shipping climate change is causing this this increase in shipping we need to deal with this well we're causing it so we better deal with it yeah I mean if you want it succinct we we have an obligation and and we need to we need to live up to that there's no there's no other path there's no other answer because I did all this climate modeling and you just like honestly just I was like okay I manipulate the model change the inputs run you know it's like and now you're working now I'm working with government I'm trying to influence policy and I'm trying to make sure that local people's voices are heard in in the policies that we create or that not that I create but the government creates it's way more complex