The ARCPATH Project: Assessing Risky Environments and Rapid Change: Research on Climate, Adaptation and Coastal Communities in the North Atlantic Arctic

The NordForsk Centre of Excellence-funded project Arctic Climate Predictions: Pathways to Resilient, Sustainable Societies has as its acronym “ARCPATH” which reflects its focus on the Arctic region and the NordForsk focus on “pathways to sustainability”. ARCPATH is a ground-breaking project designed specifically to synthesize results derived from a variety of traditionally very different and separate academic disciplines. In this spirit, the project seeks to address the complex and interlinked issues of climate and socio-economic change occurring in the Arctic by focusing on near-term changes, with the overarching goal of fostering responsible and sustainable development. This requires the reconciliation of environmental, social, and economic demands. These aspects are central to the project’s three main goals: (1) To predict regional changes in Arctic climate over the coming decades using innovative methods to capture both anthropogenic and natural factors in global and high-resolution regional models; (2) To increase understanding and reduce uncertainties regarding how changes in climate interact with multiple societal factors, including the development of local and regional adaptation measures; (3) To combine improved regional climate predictions with enhanced understanding of environmental, societal, and economic interactions in order to supply new knowledge on potential “pathways to action”.