Research visit at UBC related to REGIMES project: An interdisciplinary investigation of national and international conflicts in the Arctic

The proposed research visit at the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver, Canada is related to the REGIMES project that was funded by the Research Council of Norway POLARPROG program. REGIMES is about an interdisciplinary investigation into scenarios of national and international conflicts of ecosystem services in the Svalbard zone under a changing climate in the Arctic. As the co-applicant and the leader of WP1 of the project, I am going to collaborate with Dr. Cheung and his team at UBC on investigating the effects of climate change on the Arctic marine ecosystem services, with a special emphasis on the provisional services provided by marine fisheries resources. The focus is to project the abundance and distribution of marine fisheries resource based on recently published IPCC climate scenarios, also to evaluate the catch potential and social-economic impacts of such changes on the fishing sector and community as a whole. I will benefit from this short-term research stay by closely working with them on the research activities, and also from participating activities that will be held in the Institute and related research groups and personals through seminars, meetings and discussions. I am planning to give a seminar at the institute. At the end we are also planning to co-author one or two papers together and exploring a potential for developing a collaborative proposal between Norway and Canada.