Arctic Council Working Group Recommendations
| Project | Type | # | Outcome | Report | Year | FEC |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Resilience and Management of Arctic Wetlands (RAW) | Key finding | 1 | Arctic wetlands provide important ecosystem services to Arctic and global communities, including cooling the global climate. They provide clean water and buffer floods and droughts, support fisheries and hunting, support biodiversity, and act as long-term sinks for atmospheric carbon. Wetlands are an integral part of many Indigenous Peoples’ lives; they provide and sustain food security, including grazing for traditional reindeer herding. Recognition of wetlands’ importance, including in the Arctic, is growing as their role in sustaining a wide range of ecosystem services becomes better understood. | Resilience and Management of Arctic Wetlands: Key Findings and Recommendations | 2021 | |
| Resilience and Management of Arctic Wetlands (RAW) | Recommendation | 4 | Develop pan-Arctic inventory of protected wetlands and completed, ongoing or planned restoration projects, Indigenous led and partnership projects, with country cases contributed by each Arctic State and with the list to be managed by CAFF. Such cases can serve as pilot and demonstration projects for other rapid action. | Resilience and Management of Arctic Wetlands: Key Findings and Recommendations | 2021 | |
| Resilience and Management of Arctic Wetlands (RAW) | Recommendation | 20 | Integrate wetland monitoring with CAFF CBMP monitoring where possible, with the CBMP Terrestrial, Coastal and Freshwater monitoring plans. | Resilience and Management of Arctic Wetlands: Key Findings and Recommendations | 2021 | |
| Resilience and Management of Arctic Wetlands (RAW) | Key finding | 10 | Substantial and rapid benefits for ecosystem services such as climate stability, biodiversity conservation and hydrological systems could be gained through restoration of drained or degraded Arctic peatlands. Degraded wetlands exist in all Arctic states and are particularly common in Boreal regions where extensive drainage for forestry, mining or peat extraction has occurred, or in Tundra where vulnerable permafrost wetlands have been degraded by unsustainable human land-use. Re-wetting of artificially drained or restoration of damaged wetlands could lead to substantial increases in natural carbon sink capacities. To achieve long-term success, restoration efforts should be planned together with conservation of undamaged systems as part of a landscape scale approach to sustainable management. | Resilience and Management of Arctic Wetlands: Key Findings and Recommendations | 2021 | |
| Resilience and Management of Arctic Wetlands (RAW) | Recommendation | 13 | Develop a tool for translating between existing national and international wetland classifications systems, identify where there is presently no way to translate between systems and explore potential benefits of developing unified Arctic and Boreal wetland classification systems. | Resilience and Management of Arctic Wetlands: Key Findings and Recommendations | 2021 | |
| Resilience and Management of Arctic Wetlands (RAW) | Key finding | 3 | Anthropogenic climate change is a serious threat to Arctic wetland ecosystems and exacerbates many other threats. Widespread climate change impacts in Arctic wetlands are ongoing and projected to increase in this century and reducing greenhouse gas emissions is necessary to limit these impacts. Climate-driven permafrost thaw and increased drought conditions impacting wetland ecosystems will cause greater fire occurrences and shifts in hydrological flows, affecting wetland ecosystem services and biodiversity. Sea level change and declines in sea ice are driving increases in coastal erosion that threatens many coastal wetlands. Thawing permafrost is projected to transform peatlands from a net sink of greenhouse gases to a net source lasting for several centuries. | Resilience and Management of Arctic Wetlands: Key Findings and Recommendations | 2021 | |
| Resilience and Management of Arctic Wetlands (RAW) | Recommendation | 6 | Develop a uniform inventory of degraded Arctic wetlands with potential for restoration. Many candidate sites for restoration are known, but the exact extent and location of other damaged or degraded wetland systems remains poorly known. Encourage Arctic states to identify data gaps where wetland extent and condition are unknown and can be prioritized for inventory. | Resilience and Management of Arctic Wetlands: Key Findings and Recommendations | 2021 | |
| Resilience and Management of Arctic Wetlands (RAW) | Key finding | 12 | There is a need for new pan-Arctic wetland maps based on a uniform approach, thus ensuring comparable accuracy and data quality across the full Arctic domain. Such mapping efforts should ideally train and validate algorithms using existing national wetland inventories, relevant institutional data, inclusive of Indigenous Knowledge and/or input from Arctic communities. Maps are needed that show the spatial extent of discrete wetland complexes at high resolution and should separate mineral wetlands from organic wetlands (peatlands). On the shorter term, new maps of wetland extent will be bound to one specific classification system; it is not possible to address the diversity of existing systems. Over the longer term, boundaries between maps and monitoring dissolve. Spatial wetland data can be stored in spatial databases that allow flexible adaptation to different classification systems. | Resilience and Management of Arctic Wetlands: Key Findings and Recommendations | 2021 | |
| Resilience and Management of Arctic Wetlands (RAW) | Recommendation | 15 | Support the ongoing work with the Arctic SDI to develop a pan-Arctic wetland map making use of modern remote sensing and data processing methods but supported by existing national and local data and inventories. Work with individual nations on a plan for incorporating this product into their national systems. | Resilience and Management of Arctic Wetlands: Key Findings and Recommendations | 2021 | |
| Resilience and Management of Arctic Wetlands (RAW) | Key finding | There is relatively little comparative analysis of national-level policies that impact Arctic wetlands. | Resilience and Management of Arctic Wetlands Phase 2 Report | 2021 | ||
| Resilience and Management of Arctic Wetlands (RAW) | Key finding | Participation by indigenous and local communities in decision making, restoration and stewardship of Arctic wetlands is widely considered to be a crucial ingredient for success. | Resilience and Management of Arctic Wetlands Phase 2 Report | 2021 | ||
| Resilience and Management of Arctic Wetlands (RAW) | Key finding | Research findings make it clear that restoration of damaged or compromised Arctic wetlands ecosystems offers substantial benefits across multiple areas of interest – water-centric ecosystem services, biodiversity, and increasingly over the past decade, climate mitigation. | Resilience and Management of Arctic Wetlands Phase 2 Report | 2021 | ||
| Resilience and Management of Arctic Wetlands (RAW) | Key finding | A considerable and broad experience with wetlands restoration and conservation dates back many decades. Expressed in an extensive body of publications by government agencies, practitioners’ organizations, trade organizations and consultancies, NGOs and scientists, a significant portion of this literature is Arctic-specific or Arctic relevant. | Resilience and Management of Arctic Wetlands Phase 2 Report | 2021 | ||
| Resilience and Management of Arctic Wetlands (RAW) | Key finding | The ways in which public opinion influences the development and implementation of wetlands restoration and stewardship in the Arctic are important, but largely unresearched. | Resilience and Management of Arctic Wetlands Phase 2 Report | 2021 | ||
| Resilience and Management of Arctic Wetlands (RAW) | Key finding | While policy pertaining to Arctic wetlands is expansive, preliminary evidence points to three key challenges for effective policy: inconsistency and/or conflict between policies and goals addressed to different aspects of wetlands, the distribution of responsibility for policy implementation into agencies and departments with differing, sometimes contrasting missions, difficulties with good communications between responsible agencies and departments | Resilience and Management of Arctic Wetlands Phase 2 Report | 2021 | ||
| Resilience and Management of Arctic Wetlands (RAW) | Key finding | Comprehensive information on Arctic wetlands ecosystems is currently lacking but needed to adequately identify the location and type of wetlands with high levels of accuracy. Recent developments in the use of geospatial data and artificial intelligence provide the basis for substantial improvements in mapping of the extent and condition of Arctic wetlands, opening up valuable opportunities for pan-Arctic collaboration to improve wetlands inventories and keep them up-to-date. | Resilience and Management of Arctic Wetlands Phase 2 Report | 2021 | ||
| Resilience and Management of Arctic Wetlands (RAW) | Key finding | The key obstacles to scaling up and expanding wetlands restoration and management efforts in the Arctic are not due to a lack of knowledge about wetlands ecosystems processes and functions, or steps that can be taken to improve their status. Policy design and difficulties with implementation appear often to be obstacles, however, and accurate, up-to-date mapping is needed to target policy initiatives. | Resilience and Management of Arctic Wetlands Phase 2 Report | 2021 | ||
| CBMP Freshwater Biodiversity Monitoring | Key finding | Patterns of biodiversity vary across the Arctic, but ecoregions that have historically warmer temperatures and connections to the mainland generally have higher biodiversity than those with cold temperatures (high latitude or altitude) or on remote islands. | State of the Arctic Freshwater Biodiversity: Key Findings and Advice for Monitoring | 2016 | ||
| CBMP Freshwater Biodiversity Monitoring | Key finding | Temperature is the overriding and predominant driver for most FECs, but climate, geographical connectivity, geology, and smaller-scale environmental parameters such as water chemistry are all key drivers of Arctic freshwater biodiversity. | State of the Arctic Freshwater Biodiversity: Key Findings and Advice for Monitoring | 2016 | ||
| CBMP Freshwater Biodiversity Monitoring | Advice | Traditional Knowledge (TK)
| State of the Arctic Freshwater Biodiversity: Key Findings and Advice for Monitoring | 2016 |