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Global Change Research Programme is a natural sciences-oriented programme bringing together experts from many academic disciplines such as biology, physical geography, biogeography, glaciology, geophysics and ecology, but also social and cultural anthropology. 

The geographical coverage of research is circumpolar extending from Alaska, Greenland, the Canadian High Arctic to the North-East Russia, China/Mongolia and northernmost Fennoscandia.

We have worked successfully with Arctic communities to co-develop adaptation strategies and policy pathways for locally and regionally critical livelihoods such as reindeer husbandry. Through long-term research partnership with local communities, the group has become one of the rare experts in Finland in the genuine knowledge co-production, and trusted partner in international consortia requiring this kind of expertise.

Research programme is led by University Researchers Minna Turunen and Sirpa Rasmus. 

Team members.

Our goal is to better understand the responses of Arctic ecosystems and society to climatic, environmental, zoogenic, anthropogenic and socio-economic drivers. Studies link these responses to ecosystem carbon budgets, and range from decadal to centennial time-scales through combining ecological, dendrochronological, palynological and historical work.

We provide environmental impact assessments and nature inventory services. This means also analyzing and publishing data about the state and changes of the northern nature for the use of local, regional, national and international land use planning, and for the long-term monitoring during the times of rapid changes.

Our research focuses on the adaptation and resilience of nature and Arctic social-ecological communities to the past and recent changes and their feedbacks and interactions. Understanding the interactions within social-ecological systems, direct involvement of local and indigenous peoples and the valuing of traditional or practitioners’ knowledge have been key issues within the projects on northern nature-based livelihoods.

We live together with the communities and livelihoods of the North. In addition to international high-level research projects, we carry out development projects supporting the adaptation and resilience of local livelihoods (game management, nature tourism, reindeer herding, cattle farming, development of practical tools to support climate change adaptation), and advice decision making from regional to international levels.

In cryosphere research, the goals are for example to study the impacts of solar geoengineering on the earth system and potential for rapid sea level rise due to ice sheet collapse. Snow and permafrost dynamics are also studied, and the participation of local communities is emphasized in the work.

Given the political and climate system inertia, the need for studying and piloting climate intervention methods with communities has been stated. The research group has been contributing to finding new solutions, for example on ice sheet conservation and other geoengineering research, combining natural and social sciences.