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1. Gender Equality for a Thriving, Sustainable Arctic

   https://doi.org/10.3390/su131910825  

   Oddsdóttir, Embla Eir ; Ágústsson, Hjalti Ómar ; Svensson, Eva-Maria ; Hoogensen Gjørv, Gunhild ; Kendall, Sarah Seabrook ; Smieszek, Malgorzata ; Prior, Tahnee ; Hayfield, Erika ; Williamson, Karla Jessen ; Rozanova-Smith, Marya ; et al ( October 2021 , Sustainability)

   On 21 May 2021, a milestone Pan-Arctic Report: Gender Equality in the Arctic was published in tandem with the Arctic Council’s Ministerial Meeting held in Reykjavík, 19–20 May 2021. This article provides a brief review of the report and its major findings across six chapters that address key themes concerning gender equality in the Arctic: Law and Governance, Security, Gender and Environment, Migration and Mobility, Indigeneity, Gender, Violence, Reconciliation and Empowerment and Fate Control. A major conclusion of the report is that accessible, comparable, gender-disaggregated, and Arctic -specific data is severely lacking. Further, all chapters highlight the importance of gender-based analysis and gender mainstreaming in all decision-making processes at national and regional levels. The varying roles that gender—and its intersections with existing inequalities—plays in mediating the impacts of climate change and other socioeconomic transformations are also discussed throughout the report. The Arctic Council is identified as the main driver for implementing recommendations that were provided and discussed at the Council’s Ministerial Meeting and in the Reykjavík Declaration 2021, where the eight ministers of Arctic states “Emphasize[s] the importance of gender equality and respect for diversity for sustainable development in the Arctic… encourage[s] the mainstreaming of gender-based analysis in the work of the Arctic Council and call[s] for further action to advance gender equality in the Arctic”. This report and its policy relevant highlights, address these priorities and serve as a knowledge base for promoting gender equality and non-discrimination in the Arctic. 

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2. COVID-19 and Housing Security in Remote Alaska Native Communities

   Nicewonger, Todd E. ; McNair, Lisa D. ; Fritz, Stacey ; Supple, Laura ; Criss-Carboy, Laura ( November 2023 , Virginia Tech Publishing)

   Nicewonger, Todd E. ; McNair, Lisa D. ; Fritz, Stacey (Ed.)

   https://pressbooks.lib.vt.edu/alaskanative/ At the start of the pandemic, the editors of this annotated bibliography initiated a remote (i.e., largely virtual) ethnographic research project that investigated how COVID-19 was impacting off-site modular construction practices in Alaska Native communities. Many of these communities are located off the road system and thus face not only dramatically higher costs but multiple logistical challenges in securing licensed tradesmen and construction crews and in shipping building supplies and equipment to their communities. These barriers, as well as the region’s long winters and short building seasons, complicate the construction of homes and related infrastructure projects. Historically, these communities have also grappled with inadequate housing, including severe overcrowding and poor-quality building stock that is rarely designed for northern Alaska’s climate (Marino 2015). Moreover, state and federal bureaucracies and their associated funding opportunities often further complicate home building by failing to accommodate the digital divide in rural Alaska and the cultural values and practices of Native communities.[1] It is not surprising, then, that as we were conducting fieldwork for this project, we began hearing stories about these issues and about how the restrictions caused by the pandemic were further exacerbating them. Amidst these stories, we learned about how modular home construction was being imagined as a possible means for addressing both the complications caused by the pandemic and the need for housing in the region (McKinstry 2021). As a result, we began to investigate how modular construction practices were figuring into emergent responses to housing needs in Alaska communities. We soon realized that we needed to broaden our focus to capture a variety of prefabricated building methods that are often colloquially or idiomatically referred to as “modular.” This included a range of prefabricated building systems (e.g., manufactured, volumetric modular, system-built, and Quonset huts and other reused military buildings[2]). Our further questions about prefabricated housing in the region became the basis for this annotated bibliography. Thus, while this bibliography is one of multiple methods used to investigate these issues, it played a significant role in guiding our research and helped us bring together the diverse perspectives we were hearing from our interviews with building experts in the region and the wider debates that were circulating in the media and, to a lesser degree, in academia. The actual research for each of three sections was carried out by graduate students Lauren Criss-Carboy and Laura Supple.[3] They worked with us to identify source materials and their hard work led to the team identifying three themes that cover intersecting topics related to housing security in Alaska during the pandemic. The source materials collected in these sections can be used in a variety of ways depending on what readers are interested in exploring, including insights into debates on housing security in the region as the pandemic was unfolding (2021-2022). The bibliography can also be used as a tool for thinking about the relational aspects of these themes or the diversity of ways in which information on housing was circulating during the pandemic (and the implications that may have had on community well-being and preparedness). That said, this bibliography is not a comprehensive analysis. Instead, by bringing these three sections together with one another to provide a snapshot of what was happening at that time, it provides a critical jumping off point for scholars working on these issues. The first section focuses on how modular housing figured into pandemic responses to housing needs. In exploring this issue, author Laura Supple attends to both state and national perspectives as part of a broader effort to situate Alaska issues with modular housing in relation to wider national trends. This led to the identification of multiple kinds of literature, ranging from published articles to publicly circulated memos, blog posts, and presentations. These materials are important source materials that will likely fade in the vastness of the Internet and thus may help provide researchers with specific insights into how off-site modular construction was used – and perhaps hyped – to address pandemic concerns over housing, which in turn may raise wider questions about how networks, institutions, and historical experiences with modular construction are organized and positioned to respond to major societal disruptions like the pandemic. As Supple pointed out, most of the material identified in this review speaks to national issues and only a scattering of examples was identified that reflect on the Alaskan context. The second section gathers a diverse set of communications exploring housing security and homelessness in the region. The lack of adequate, healthy housing in remote Alaska communities, often referred to as Alaska’s housing crisis, is well-documented and preceded the pandemic (Guy 2020). As the pandemic unfolded, journalists and other writers reported on the immense stress that was placed on already taxed housing resources in these communities (Smith 2020; Lerner 2021). The resulting picture led the editors to describe in their work how housing security in the region exists along a spectrum that includes poor quality housing as well as various forms of houselessness including, particularly relevant for the context, “hidden homelessness” (Hope 2020; Rogers 2020). The term houseless is a revised notion of homelessness because it captures a richer array of both permanent and temporary forms of housing precarity that people may experience in a region (Christensen et al. 2107). By identifying sources that reflect on the multiple forms of housing insecurity that people were facing, this section highlights the forms of disparity that complicated pandemic responses. Moreover, this section underscores ingenuity (Graham 2019; Smith 2020; Jason and Fashant 2021) that people on the ground used to address the needs of their communities. The third section provides a snapshot from the first year of the pandemic into how CARES Act funds were allocated to Native Alaska communities and used to address housing security. This subject was extremely complicated in Alaska due to the existence of for-profit Alaska Native Corporations and disputes over eligibility for the funds impacted disbursements nationwide. The resources in this section cover that dispute, impacts of the pandemic on housing security, and efforts to use the funds for housing as well as barriers Alaska communities faced trying to secure and use the funds. In summary, this annotated bibliography provides an overview of what was happening, in real time, during the pandemic around a specific topic: housing security in largely remote Alaska Native communities. The media used by housing specialists to communicate the issues discussed here are diverse, ranging from news reports to podcasts and from blogs to journal articles. This diversity speaks to the multiple ways in which information was circulating on housing at a time when the nightly news and radio broadcasts focused heavily on national and state health updates and policy developments. Finding these materials took time, and we share them here because they illustrate why attention to housing security issues is critical for addressing crises like the pandemic. For instance, one theme that emerged out of a recent National Science Foundation workshop on COVID research in the North NSF Conference[4] was that Indigenous communities are not only recovering from the pandemic but also evaluating lessons learned to better prepare for the next one, and resilience will depend significantly on more—and more adaptable—infrastructure and greater housing security. 

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3. The Arctic in World Affairs A North Pacific Dialogue on Building Capacity for a Sustainable Arctic in a Changing Global Order

   Corell, Robert W. ; Kim, Jong Deog ; Kim, Yoon Hyung ; Young, Oran R. ( January 2017 , The Arctic in World Affairs A North Pacific Dialogue on Building Capacity for a Sustainable Arctic in a Changing Global Order)

   The volume is the seventh in the Korea Maritime Institute/East-West Center series on the Arctic in World Affairs. These volumes publish the papers from the annual North Pacific Arctic Conference which aims to provide a forum in which key individuals from relevant countries and major stakeholder groups are able to develop relations of trust that allow them to discuss complex and sometimes difficult issues pertaining to the maritime Arctic in a spirit of problem solving rather than advocacy. Bringing together prominent experts from three North Pacific Arctic states (Canada, Russia and the United States) and three leading North Pacific non-Arctic states, China, Japan and Korea including not only scientists but policy makers, indigenous representatives and other stakeholders, this volume addresses five major themes relating to the Arctic: the impacts of a changing global order; responsible development in the Arctic; sustainable Arctic communities; Arctic challenges and opportunities for global maritime industries; and opportunities for enhancing the dialogue between practitioners and analysts. The book goes beyond generalities; it identifies and evaluates the likely effectiveness of innovative measures designed to maintain the Arctic as a zone of peace and promote development in this region. 

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4. Multidecadal declines in particulate mercury and sediment export from Russian rivers in the pan-Arctic basin

   https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2119857119  

   Zolkos, Scott ; Zhulidov, Alexander V. ; Gurtovaya, Tatiana Yu. ; Gordeev, Vyacheslav V. ; Berdnikov, Sergey ; Pavlova, Nadezhda ; Kalko, Evgenia A. ; Kuklina, Yana A. ; Zhulidov, Danil A. ; Kosmenko, Lyudmila S. ; et al ( April 2022 , Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

   High levels of methylmercury accumulation in marine biota are a concern throughout the Arctic, where coastal ocean ecosystems received large riverine inputs of mercury (Hg) (40 Mg⋅y −1 ) and sediment (20 Tg⋅y −1 ) during the last decade, primarily from major Russian rivers. Hg concentrations in fish harvested from these rivers have declined since the late 20th century, but no temporal data on riverine Hg, which is often strongly associated with suspended sediments, were previously available. Here, we investigate temporal trends in Russian river particulate Hg (PHg) and total suspended solids (TSS) to better understand recent changes in the Arctic Hg cycle and its potential future trajectories. We used 1,300 measurements of Hg in TSS together with discharge observations made by Russian hydrochemistry and hydrology monitoring programs to examine changes in PHg and TSS concentrations and fluxes in eight major Russian rivers between ca. 1975 and 2010. Due to decreases in both PHg concentrations (micrograms per gram) and TSS loads, annual PHg export declined from 47 to 7 Mg⋅y −1 overall and up to 92% for individual rivers. Modeling of atmospheric Hg deposition together with published inventories on reservoir establishment and industrial Hg release point to decreased pollution and sedimentation within reservoirs as predominant drivers of declining PHg export. We estimate that Russian rivers were the primary source of Hg to the Arctic Ocean in the mid to late 20th century. 

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5. The metacoupled Arctic: Human–nature interactions across local to global scales as drivers of sustainability

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-022-01729-9  

   Kapsar, Kelly ; Frans, Veronica F. ; Brigham, Lawson W. ; Liu, Jianguo ( March 2022 , Ambio)

   The Arctic is an epicenter of complex environmental and socioeconomic change. Strengthened connections between Arctic and non-Arctic systems could threaten or enhance Arctic sustainability, but studies of external influences on the Arctic are scattered and fragmented in academic literature. Here, we review and synthesize how external influences have been analyzed in Arctic-coupled human and natural systems (CHANS) literature. Results show that the Arctic is affected by numerous external influences nearby and faraway, including global markets, climate change, governance, military security, and tourism. However, apart from climate change, these connections are infrequently the focus of Arctic CHANS analyses. We demonstrate how Arctic CHANS research could be enhanced and research gaps could be filled using the holistic framework of metacoupling (human–nature interactions within as well as between adjacent and distant systems). Our perspectives provide new approaches to enhance the sustainability of Arctic systems in an interconnected world.

    

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