All sectors / economy wide

70 articles
Sort by

Arctic communities must negotiate locally, regionally and with external actors on how to make the best use of the human and natural resources in the region. This is against the backdrop of increased globalization, climate change, high demand for the region’s mineral resources, and increasing local demand for improved living conditions and sustainable livelihoods.

Digital platforms and the online services that they provide have become an indispensable and ubiquitous part of modern lifestyles, mediating our jobs, hobbies, patterns of consumption and forms of communication. However, no one is steering this development, or closely looking at the impacts that it may have on remote communities in the Arctic and Nordic region, a hotspot for datacenter development.

Both policymakers and the technology industry need to do more to combat the ever-growing demand for data and its associated energy impacts. In this study, based on novel corporate data, expert interviews, focus groups with members of the public, extensive site visits across Greenland, Iceland and Norway and a literature review, we look at the energy and climate impacts of existing and proposed datacenters, both quantitatively and in terms of stakeholder and public perceptions.

In July 2020, the European External Action Service of the European Commission launched a public consultation on the way forward for the European Union’s Arctic policy. The consultation was held to re-examine the role of the EU in Arctic affairs, to revise the priorities of the current Joint Communication on an integrated European Union policy for the Arctic and the actions thereunder, and to identify possible new policy areas to be developed.

This article gives an overview of the recent advances on the interactive modelling of ice sheet dynamics in Earth System Models, and the implications for reducing the uncertainty of sea-level rise projections, especially when considering multi-centennial timescales of changes or low-likelihood high-impact scenarios.

In this article, we provide an overview of current understanding of the land-to-ocean carbon fluxes. We describe the new conceptual model of the land-to-ocean aquatic continuum (proposed by Regnier et al, 2022, Nature), as well as ongoing work to include this new knowledge in Earth System Models.