research

The Arctic Centre is internationally recognized for the quality and relevance of its multidisciplinary Arctic research, which is our key activity. Through this research, the Arctic Centre promotes increased knowledge, awareness and understanding of the Arctic both within and outside the region. This research supports decision-making and sustainable development in the Arctic.

The multidisciplinary research at the Arctic Centre focuses on the interaction between man and the nature. International research is carried out in the arctic, subarctic and boreal zones.

The research builds new multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary practices between natural and social environmental research. The Northern Institute for Environmental and Minority Law (NIEM) carries out research in environmental law and human rights law. The Arctic Centre also provides environmental impact assessment and environmental auditing services. The Arctic Centre and it's researchers are active in international networks and working groups.

Arctic Studies Programme

The Arctic Studies Programme serves as an introduction to issues that are relevant in the Circumpolar North. The approach of the programme is multidisciplinary and provides comprehensive inside knowledge of the physical, environmental, social and cultural aspects of the Arctic.

The Arctic Studies Programme is organized by the Arctic Centre and Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Lapland.

The Global Change Research Group explores futures that are engineered both by greenhouse gases and by deliberate human interventions. Our focus is the role of the Arctic economy, landscape, ecology and cryosphere in global environmental security. We consider both on-going processes, and mathematical simulations in search of optimal strategic policy pathways. Projects >>

The Northern Political Economy Research Group is engaged in research that critically investigates social and political dimensions of development in the Arctic. Projects >>

The Northern Institute for Environmental and Minority Law carries out research in the international treaties and statutes concerning the Arctic as well as land law and environmental law relating to the Arctic indigenous peoples. Projects >>

The Anthropology research group studies how human groups across the Arctic are culturally similar or diverse, and the ways in which shared human practices, values, worldviews, institutions and economic forms lead to identification of people with groups. Themes include human-animal-environment relations, Arctic peoples and industrial development, space, landscape and mobility in the North, and oral history. Projects >>

The Arctic Governance group aims at rendering the complexity of Arctic governance more transparent and at providing policy-makers, scholars and other actors with a more holistic knowledge-base to make better informed and more responsible decisions. Projects >>

CHARTER is an ambitious effort to advance adaptive capacity of Arctic communities to climatic and biodiversity changes through state-of-the-art synthesis based on thorough data collection, analysis and modelling of Arctic change with major socio-economic implications and feedbacks.

To achieve this goal, we will combine expertise from Earth System sciences and biodiversity studies within the social-ecological system framework and strongly participatory approach. Strategies co-developed in CHARTER with indigenous and local communities will comprise synergies between their ambitions for adaptation actions with novel forms of land management geared towards climate mitigation and sustainable development.

The project will merge justice theories with sustainable development goals to enable EU policy coherence toward just transitions. This will be integrated with an investigation of the empirical realities of existing Arctic economic activities in 18 case studies using innovative research methodology, through conceptual, comparative, descriptive, correlation, policy, legal and interview-based analysis techniques.

Though this, JUSTNORTH will offer policy, legal and regulatory pathway recommendations, by developing a frameworks from the reconciliation of the various ethics and value systems present in the Arctic, which can serve as a cornerstone for determining the viability of economic activities in the Arctic in line with the goals of sustainable development.

The ongoing transformation of great power politics – the rise of China as a world leader and the decline of the United States globally – will alter the shape of normative foundations of international society, including the Arctic regional affairs in which the Chinese are increasingly involved.

Based on an analysis of political statements, strategies and other official documents, media content and interview data, the project will examine how the rise of China is shaping the processes in which notions of responsibility are defined, allocated and operationalized in the Arctic.

See all projects >>

See all publications of the Arctic Centre staff >>