Arctic Tipping Points

The objectives of this WP is to provide the most complete set of data available on the variability of sea ice extent, concentration and thickness in the European Arctic, and of oceanographic parameters such as temperature and salinity profiles, and heat and freshwater fluxes. To identify trends and possible abrupt changes in oceanographic parameters, sea ice edge location, ice-covered area and sea ice thickness. And finally, to  predict changes in the structure of the upper ocean and in the sea ice cover of the European Arctic in the forthcoming decades.

WP3 will use new statistical and analytical tools developed within the framework of the THRESHOLDS integrated project (FP6, contract 003933-2, Andersen et al. submitted) to extract regime shifts and tipping points from historical time series of ecological properties of the Arctic marine ecosystem. The possible causes of the regime shifts and tipping points identified will be ascertained by examining their consistency with climatic and anthropogenic forcing, as represented by time series of climate (collated in WP2) and human pressure (fisheries and gas and oil extraction derived from WP6) on the Arctic marine environment. The results will be transferred to WP5 to investigate the stability of regimes for the present and projected future climatic conditions.

WP4 aims to supply WP5 with climatic thresholds and tipping points for key Arctic ecosystem components and processes, as well as to validate those identified in WP3. Ecological modelling and experimentation work best in an iterative manner, where each informs subsequent activities by the other. Therefore, experiments to be conducted under WP4 will also be used to test climatic thresholds and tipping points hypothesised from model outputs (WP5).

Work package 5 aims at projecting the likely future trajectories of Arctic Marine Ecosystems. WP 5 shall do so by running the well-established coupled hydrodynamics-ecosystem model (SINMOD) with projected climatic forcing, and implementing the mechanisms leading to abrupt changes derived from the time-series and experimental analyses derived from WP3 and WP4, respectively, into the model.

Work package 6 aims to:  (1) Test the performance of different harvest control rules in fisheries under varying environmental conditions. (2) Model optimal oil and gas exploitation strategies under uncertain prices and weather conditions. (3) Examine how institutions and policies for the management of living marine resources, tourism and petroleum development can cope with very rapid change in ecosystems driven by climate change.

Work package 7 aims at providing policy makers, managers, stake holders and the general public with an understanding of the ecological thresholds and regime shifts that may develop in the Arctic in response to climate change, and how the ecosystems will respond to EU targets for emissions. This information can then be used as a basis to refine policy targets, mitigate these impacts, take advantage of natural resilience already within the ecosystem, and to identify ways of promoting recovery. Furthermore, it will inform the general public of the possible consequences of climate change on the Arctic ecosystem to help build support for policy frameworks reacting to these predictions. Because these changes may, unfortunately, not develop in the distant future but instead within a few years or decades of the execution of the project, there is an element of urgency in the integration and dissemination of the project results. This calls for a particularly effective and well-coordinated dissemination strategy.