Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and thank you all for the opportunity to meet with you this morning.
Let me begin by providing a little bit more background about my own experience. I am a professor in biological sciences at the University of Alberta. I've spent the last 30 years studying tundra ecosystems and communities, primarily in Yukon but also in Hudson Bay and the central Arctic, on Svalbard, and a few other places. I lived in Yukon for four years when I was in my twenties. I have to tell you I'd quite happily return north again if the opportunity arose, even with the winters. I've been there. They're fine.
Over the past decade I've also been very much involved in international Arctic science organizations and activities. I served for five years as the executive director of the Canadian International Polar Year secretariat and I'm currently the president of the International Arctic Science Committee. I'll talk about that in a minute. I'm the vice-chair of the Arctic Council-led initiative on sustaining Arctic observing networks. I'm also a member of the board of the Canadian Polar Commission, the polar continental shelf program, and the Arctic Institute of North America.
In these various networks, I have, I think, a fairly privileged opportunity to meet with my colleagues and researchers from across Canada and around the world.
I want to focus my remarks this morning on aspects of international Arctic scientific cooperation, not only within the Arctic Council but also the wide variety of non-governmental and governmental organizations that are engaged in various aspects of Arctic research.
So why is there so much international interest in the Arctic? Well, clearly the Arctic states have sovereignty and have responsibilities over land and much of the marine environment. There's still an international space in the central Arctic Ocean, but all Arctic states have developed Arctic strategies or statements that identify environmental protection and stewardship as priorities and there's a very interesting convergence of the language that's used in all of these documents, if you look at them as a whole, and I find that very encouraging.
Of course, from an environmental perspective, the Arctic is a commons. It's a global commons and it's influenced by global processes, some of which John has just described. Some of the most recent assessments on the cryosphere, the Arctic Council-led snow, water, ice, and permafrost assessment that was released last year, the upcoming Arctic biodiversity assessment that Canada is very much involved in through Arctic Council, the upcoming conference on Arctic Ocean acidification; these are all examples of the strong connection between global processes and what happens in the Arctic.
For example, in my own laboratory, we've been studying changes in Arctic shrubs and the relationship with snowfall. Over the last decade these tiny little Arctic shrubs have poked their heads up above the snow and the effect of that is equivalent to what we've seen in the Arctic Ocean in terms of albedo, or the darkening of the surface of the earth.
In fact, although the Arctic Ocean changes have received much more attention, in the northern hemisphere and in the Arctic and sub-Arctic region, the change on land is just as dramatic and the implications for carbon cycling and for the way that plants and animals interact with each other, the way that people can use the land, what it means for infrastructure, are happening more quickly than we had anticipated.
I think one of the emerging challenges for Canada and in fact all Arctic states is to strengthen the links between local and global processes. The consequences of these changes occur in small spaces but they're all intimately connected globally.
At the global scale, scientific cooperation is quite normal. The organization I currently chair, the International Arctic Science Committee, was created by the eight Arctic countries in 1990, but it currently has 21 member countries represented by their national polar scientific organizations, and scientists from all of those countries participate in collaborative studies of Arctic marine, terrestrial, cryosphere, atmosphere, social, and human investigations.
IASC facilitates and promotes this cooperation and collaboration, including seeking opportunities for joint funding and efficient use of resources. IASC also works very closely with other organizations involved in Arctic research. These include the International Arctic Social Sciences Association, the World Meteorological Organization, the International Council for Science, and of course, the Arctic Council.
It's interesting that Canadians either lead, or soon will lead in the next few months, all of these international organizations that I just mentioned. Perhaps there are some interesting opportunities or possibilities as a result of this coincidence of Canadians playing leading roles in a large number of these scientific and research organizations.
The recent International Polar Year, which I think you might all be familiar with in some form, was a huge success and demonstrated the value of international cooperation in the Arctic. As you know, there was a very significant Canadian investment of $150 million in IPY, and we provided significant leadership in the program. I think there were clear outcomes from this investment. New scientific knowledge and collaboration, new observations and observation networks and tools for managing data and sharing data are engaging northern residents—especially indigenous peoples and their traditional knowledge—in the scientific process and activity and training the next generation of scientists and researchers through the University of the Arctic. The Association of Polar Early Career Scientists, a new organization developed during IPY, has become a model for how to bring early-career scientists into the development of scientific programs much earlier than has happened in the past.
We're currently in the early stages of planning a new international polar initiative. This isn't just 10 more IPYs; rather, it’s a coordinated effort to secure some of the most important legacies of the International Polar Year, to seek efficiencies in the use of existing resources and facilities. Not to go and seek new funding initially, but to look at how, among the countries and agencies involved in Arctic research, we can better use resources, to discuss priorities for new investments, and to look at better linking researchers to user needs and services, like weather forecasting.
That's at the global scale. At the local scale, Arctic research must also be strongly connected. We need capacity in leadership, not just at the international and national levels, but at the local and regional levels as well. I'm very optimistic that the centre of gravity, at least in Canada, but I think around the Arctic, is moving north. In Canada, it's an outcome of land claims and devolution of federal responsibilities to the territories. For example, all three territories now have science advisers sitting in central agencies that are responsible for developing research agendas that focus investment and priorities. The northern colleges, as I know you've heard in earlier testimony, are developing a research capacity and agenda. Also, of course, community-based and local-knowledge initiatives are emerging across the north, and some of these are the outcome of the International Polar Year, like the study of the Old Crow lakes in northern Yukon.
I see value in discussing not only a federal Arctic science policy, but also how across all of Canada we can better use the resources we have—the human resources, the logistics and physical resources, and other sources of research funding.
In the United States, they've just released a five-year inter-agency research plan to guide how some of those investments might be used in the U.S. U.S. agencies have just established a new National Academy of Sciences committee to advise on research priorities for the next 10 to 20 years. I was appointed to this committee and we met in D.C. for the first time last month. In the context of the upcoming Canadian and U.S. chairs of the Arctic Council, it might be interesting to use some of these opportunities to look at how we can enhance bilateral scientific cooperation that would also, of course, strengthen our own interests.
In closing, the Arctic environment is changing very rapidly, more rapidly than we expected even a few years ago. I think the scientific consensus is that the Arctic is headed to a new state that will substantially change the north, and indeed the planet. But our understanding and our ability to respond and adapt to these changes is also evolving. I think the foundation of that is timely, robust, and relevant knowledge. If you look at Canada's northern strategy, the underlying support of the four pillars is science and technology, what once was called the “one ring that binds them all”. I'm quite optimistic that we have capacity. We just need to make sure we focus that.
We have a tremendous opportunity over the next few years to learn from what we've done in the past, and I think keep Canada at the forefront of Arctic science and technology.
Thank you.