Mush! The only race in town this past week was the Yukon Quest, a grueling dog sled endurance race of 1,000 miles from Whitehorse to Fairbanks. Our WWF team, however, was in Alaska for a different kind of expedition – consulting with some of the world’s leading interdisciplinary science and social science researchers on Arctic climate change.
Co-authored by Hussein Alidina, Peter Ewins and James Snider
Enter the world of RACER – a project of WWF’s Global Arctic Programme that seeks to identify important places in the Arctic in the face of rapid climate change. RACER stands for (deep breath) Rapid Assessment of features and areas for Circumarctic Ecosystem Resilience in the 21st Century.
For the past 18 months, a RACER team of WWF staff from Norway, Russia, USA and Canada have been reviewing key papers, consulting with experts, commissioning analyses, holding workshops, compiling digital maps and crunching data – all to develop the analyses that will identify some of the key places that will remain important for the well-being of arctic ecosystems and human communities as we experience climate change. Continue reading →