Selected current projects and research interests
Applying a social ecological systems perspective to study Arctic change
MARAT
This project integrates models, local knowledge, and comparative case studies to assess the resilience of Arctic marine food webs to climate and fishing pressures, and how communities adapt or transform to such changes. In this project we develop a generic Arctic marine food web model with relevant biological features. Two in-depth case studies focus on Nunavut, Canada where we study how indigenous local knowledge and scientific understanding can inform adaptive co-management practices and on Alaska, USA where we explore the tradeoffs among commercial, touristic and subsistence fisheries of salmon and the response of its wild and domesticated populations to climate change. Finally, we develop tools to assess the adaptive and transformative capacities of Arctic communities to changes in their marine environments building on the Arctic Resilience Report.
The project is funded by Belmont Forum in collaboration with Formas
Winners and losers in the climate casino: Arctic marine resources under climate change
This projects aims to examine climate change impacts on fish, shellfish and their fisheries in the Atlantic and Pacific Arctic shelf seas. We use a systemic approach to track main impacts of climate change through the natural and societal parts of the seas and the economic activities they support. Our interdisciplinary and comparative perspective builds on experiences from case studies to identify common and case-specific challenges, and our results will increase the understanding of climate-related challenges for Arctic marine resources and support integrated ocean management.
The project is funded by the Research Council of Norway.
EFICA
I am also currently part of the European Fisheries Inventory in the Central Arctic Ocean (EFICA) Consortium. In that initiative I investigate ways to better inform decisions that have to be taken in a context of high uncertainty, limited information and complex interactions between nature and society, which could generate multiple surprises.
The project is funded by the European Commission.
Resource management with regime shifts
I model multiple aspects of resource management when the resource comes from ecosystems that could undergo abrupt change after passing a threshold. I also use behavioural experiments to investigate how groups of resource users manage their resources. Examples:
• Resource management, present bias and regime shifts, with Maria Arvaniti and Chandra K. Krishnamurthy. We investigate decision processes for impatient resource users who manage a resource with uncertain dynamics that could undergo a regime shift. We model uncertainty as a distribution of future stocks rather than adding an uncertain term in the stock dynamics.
• Sanctioned Quotas vs Information Provisioning for Community Wildlife Conservation in Zimbabwe: A Framed Field Experiment Approach with Herbert Ntuli. We investigate the behaviour of resource users to policy interventions – sanctioned quotas and information provisioning – when multiple resources (pastures and wild animal stocks) are connected. We perform an experimental study among communities managing common pool wildlife in Zimbabwe using an innovative design that includes complexities associated with linked resource systems
Investigating the interactions between water, ecosystems and the economy
I have recently started collaborations with groups of hydrologists to investigate how water, ecosystems and the economy interact. In particular we investigate how these interactions could be modelled in a way that would be useful to study policy interventions.
Askö papers
I am currently co-authing articles initiated at different Askö meetings on:
- Transformative actions towards social-ecological stewardship in the Anthropocene.
- Responding to Disruptions in Diverse Ways
- Cross-scale pathways to sustainability
Research synthesis and material accessible for teaching and policy stakeholders
I am continuously involved in efforts to spread research results in my field to a broader audience of students, decision makers, and researchers in other disciplines. For example I recently gave a presentation (in Swedish) on decision making under uncertainty at the Swedish EPAs 5th IPBES conference on biodiversity and human well being.
NEWS
