Arctic Community Resilience to Boreal Environmental change: Assessing Risks from fire and disease

Increasing risk to Arctic communities from wildfire and disease The Arctic has warmed rapidly over recent decades, at around twice the rate of global mean temperature increases, resulting in rapid changes to the high latitude Earth system. Key consequences of this warming are increases in temperature extremes and changing precipitation patterns, which in turn is leading to increasing trends in boreal wildfire and changes in the distribution of disease-carrying vectors. Recent years have seen unprecedented fire activity at Arctic latitudes, leading to unhealthy air quality in high latitude towns and cities. Concurrently, vector-borne disease occurrence in these regions is also changing in response to rapid changes in temperature and moisture. Moreover, fire activity is intrinsically linked to changes in vector-borne disease risk through changing the habitat conditions for vectors and their hosts. Knowledge of the community resilience and response to these changing risks is currently hampered by insufficient understanding of environmental, social, and governance factors specific to high latitudes. This urgent knowledge gap is at the center of the "Arctic Community Resilience to Boreal Environmental change: Assessing Risks from fire and disease" (ACRoBEAR) project, an international collaborative project under the Belmont Forum involving an interdisciplinary team of experts from the UK, Sweden, Norway, Finland, France and the USA. The goal of the project is to predict and understand health risks from wildfire air pollution and natural-focal disease at high latitudes, under rapid Arctic climate change, and resilience and adaptability of communities across the region to these risks. Results from the project so far show that so-called fire weather, meteorological conditions conducive to high wildfire risk, is already changing across the boreal forest regions in high latitudes. Furthermore, the frequency of high-risk fire weather days is projected to continue to increase with every degree of global warming, driven in particular by an increase in the daily temperature and a decrease in humidity at the surface. While the occurrence and severity of wildfires ultimately depend also on factors such as ignition and fuel availability, knowledge of how meteorological conditions conducive to high wildfire risk can be expected to change under continued global warming is a key prerequisite for adaptation and disaster risk management.

How resilient are Arctic communities to boreal environmental change and risks from fire and disease? The Arctic has warmed rapidly over recent decades, at around twice the rate of global mean temperature increases, resulting in rapid changes to the high latitude Earth system. Changes in the high latitude terrestrial environment include observed increases in temperature extremes and precipitation patterns, which are leading to increasing trends in boreal wildfire and changes in the distribution of disease-carrying vectors, with evidence for emerging interactions between these changing risks. Recent years (including 2019) have seen unprecedented fire activity at Arctic latitudes, leading to unhealthy air quality in high latitude towns and cities. Vector-borne disease occurrence in these regions is also changing in response to rapid changes in temperature and moisture. Moreover, fire activity is intrinsically linked to changes in vector-borne disease risk through changing the habitat conditions for vectors and their hosts. Environmental, social, and governance factors specific to high latitudes hamper our current ability to understand community resilience and response to these changing risks. The "Arctic Community Resilience to Boreal Environmental change: Assessing Risks from fire and disease" (ACRoBEAR) project will tackle these urgent issues in the most rapidly warming region of the planet. The goal of the project is to predict and understand health risks from wildfire air pollution and natural-focal disease at high latitudes, under rapid Arctic climate change, and resilience and adaptability of communities across the region to these risks. ACRoBEAR is a project under the Belmont Forum and brings together a diverse, international, interdisciplinary team of world-leading research groups and collaborators from the UK, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Russia, France and the USA.