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ACRoBEAR Objectives

Arctic Community Resilience to Boreal Environmental change: Assessing Risks from fire and disease (ACRoBEAR)

ACRoBEAR will tackle urgent climate-health linkages in the most rapidly warming region of the planet, through addressing the following cross-disciplinary objectives:

1. Determine variability and trends in fire-sourced particulate and ozone air pollution across three high latitude regions (Alaska, Eastern Siberia, Sweden) and the pan-Arctic region, and associated societal health impacts.
2. Estimate empirical-based relationships between natural-focal disease (NFD) occurrence and temperature and precipitation variability, including fire effects on NFD spread.
3. Identify key patterns and modes of climate variability related to increasing risk of fire-induced and NFD-induced health impacts across the pan-Arctic region, and their interactions.
4. Estimate future changes in risk associated with fire and NFD occurrence under a range of projected climate scenarios, identifying common and competing climate drivers for these risks.
5. Investigate local perceptions and experiences of wildfire and NFD health risks in selected coastal and inland urban communities in Scandinavia, Siberia and Alaska and identify the factors shaping societal vulnerability and resilience to these potentially changing risks under a range of policy/ resource management, socio-economic and climate scenarios
6. Produce a web-based dashboard system targeted to decision-making needs that builds on improved and integrated scientific and community knowledge for understanding and mapping these risks historically and for identifying appropriate adaptation measures and actions under different climate and policy scenarios.

ACRoBEAR Overview