Regions: North Slave Region
Tags: climate change, infrastructure planning, diamond mining, ice roads, northern business, seasonal travel routes
| Principal Investigator: | Sturm, Matthew (2) |
| Licence Number: | 14657 |
| Organization: | USA-CRREL-Alaska |
| Licensed Year(s): |
2010
|
| Issued: | Mar 04, 2010 |
| Project Team: | Matthew Sturm (Project Director, USA-CRREL-Alaska), Thomas Douglas (Participant, USA-CRREL-Alaska), Henry Huntington (Participant, Huntington Consultants), Michael Goldstein (Economist, Babson College) |
Objective(s): The researcher’s goal is to understand how changes in the seasons, particularly the shortening of winter, might impact the economics of the North.
Project Description: Research goal is to understand how changes in the seasons, particularly the shortening of winter, might impact the economics of the North. In Canada the researcher will focus on the impact of ice road seasons on diamond mining. Research activities will mainly be to observe how environmental data are collected in the field, how they are utilized by regulatory agencies to make decisions, and how businesses weigh climate impacts with other factors in their operations. Based on these studies, the researcher will isolate the impact of climate-driven changes in seasons from the other factors. The outcome of the project will be explicit information on the extent to which climate-driven changes in seasons are affecting tundra opening and closing and ice road use. More generally, it will be a methodology (including modeling) of how to distinguish climate drivers from non-climate drivers for uniquely Northern businesses. The Researcher will be talking to all sorts of people involved in building, operating, permitting, and using the ice roads in NWT. Results will be provided by report to them and will be published in the open literature available to all who wish to see them. The fieldwork for this study will be conducted from March, 2010 to December 31, 2010.
