Towards Ecosystem Resilience-based Arctic Conservation: A Rapid Place-based Assessment to Stay Ahead of Arctic Climate Change

WWF recognizes that even with major reductions in global GHG emissions, substantial changes will occur in arctic ecosystems this century and that these will have huge impacts on wildlife and humans.

Current approaches to conservation in eth Arctic have achieved a great deal, but biodiversity continues to decline and the unprecedented rates of change occurring within the Arctic have led us to believe that conservation approaches in the 21st century should be ecosystem-based and focused on building resilience This will require, among other measures, an adequate understanding of what drives ecosystem structure and function and how this is manifested in spatial terms (e.g., geophysical and oceanographic features), how these features will likely respond and change with the direct and indirect impacts of climate change, and a good interpretation of what roles these features and key areas play in building ecosystem resilience. Given the significant biophysical data gaps for much of the Arctic, the analyses required to carry-out the above will demand a lot of time and resources to complete comprehensively. As such, there is a clear need to provide interim products that can help to identify what we can successfully plan for and achieve now, in the short-term, to strengthen arctic ecosystems in light of rapid climate change. RACER (Rapid Assessment of features and areas for Circumpolar Ecosystem Resilience in the 21st century) is a rapid assessment project recently launched by WWF that seeks to examine resilience of circum-arctic ecosystems. The project takes a place-based point of departure and proposes to make use of a spatial framework outlined by terrestrial and marine ecoregions. It is anticipated that the methods and outputs from RACER will help accelerate the onset of new approaches to spatial planning, especially land and resource use management plans, to fully incorporate the consequences of rapid climatic change, including the socio-economic aspects.