Dr. Edward Carr

Clark University

Professor, Sustainability and Social Justice

https://www.clarku.edu/faculty/profiles/edward-carr

Climate Services as Tools for Transformative Change

Climate services are often framed as tools of protection.  This is as true of early warning systems for hydrometeorological hazards as it is of seasonal forecasts aimed at facilitating farmer decision-making to preserve production in an increasingly variable climate. Protecting “what is” might seem, at the surface, to run contrary to the calls for transformation emerging from recent IPCC and IPBES assessments. This contradiction can be resolved if one understands the socio-ecologies of climate service end users, specifically the ways in which reducing risk is one way of creating
space for transformative socio-ecological change.

Dr. Barry Zellen

PhD, University of Lapland (2015)

Arctic Exceptionalism in a Contested World: Navigating New Challenges to Circumpolar Unity

Dr Zellen’s talk is a preview of his newest book, Arctic Exceptionalism: Cooperation in a Contested World, which is due to be released this summer.  The book is a structural analysis of the roots and endurance of Arctic cooperation, and the rise of what until 2022 was quite commonly called “Arctic Exceptionalism,” a term that has since come under much fire as the profound consequences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine rippled beyond Europe, fostering a complex re-organization of the international system aimed to isolating Russia from the globalized world but which has induced instead a re-bifurcation of world politics into western and eastern blocs, largely corresponding to the late-19th to mid-20th century geopolitical constructs of Rimland and Heartland.  This re-emergence of competing blocs has quickly reached the Arctic, leading many to believe Arctic Exceptionalism was over, or perhaps had never existed at all.