building resilience and adaptation to manage arctic change.pdfVIP

Chapin III et al. Building Resilience and Adaptation to Manage Arctic Change SOURCES OF ARCTIC VULNERABILITY Unprecedented global changes caused by human actions AND RESILIENCE challenge society’s ability to sustain the desirable fea- tures of our planet. This requires proactive management Physical Processes of change to foster both resilience (sustaining those attributes that are important to society in the face of Global warming trends are amplified at high latitudes because change) and adaptation (developing new socioecological heating converts high-albedo (reflective) ice and snow surfaces configurations that function effectively under new con- to dark absorptive surfaces that absorb more solar energy and ditions). The Arctic may be one of the last remaining transfer it to the atmosphere (3, 5). This high-latitude opportunities to plan for change in a spatially extensive amplification of global warming trends and the threshold region where many of the ancestral ecological and social changes in many physical and biological processes at the processes and feedbacks are still intact. If the feasibility melting point of ice together make Arctic processes particularly of this strategy can be demonstrated in the Arctic, our vulnerable to climate warming (Table 1). However, the wide improved understanding of the dynamics of change can latitudinal range of Arctic ecosystems across eastern Canada be applied to regions with greater human modification. and the Taimyr Peninsula of Russia preserve an Arctic climate Condi