Federal Interagency Coordination for Research in the Arctic

As an Arctic nation, the United States is directly affected by Arctic amplification of global warming and the resultant impacts on the Arctic environmental system. Unprecedented changes across all levels of the Bering Sea ecosystem unfolded in 2018 and 2019 leading researchers scrambling to gather information to inform decision-makers. For effective decision- and policy-making, we need to know how the record low sea ice coverage, warm ocean temperatures, unusual seabird and marine mammal die offs, and northward movement fish species are connected and what implications this has for economic development, marine transportation, and the coastal communities that rely on commercial and subsistence harvests of marine wildlife. To do this, it is imperative to have collaboration across disciplines and organizations in order to understand the cause and effect linkages across the whole system. The U.S. Interagency Arctic Research Policy Committee (IARPC) accomplishes this through its development of five-year Arctic research plans and their implementation via “IARPC Collaborations”. This presentation will highlight how agencies are able to advance their own missions while also supporting the broader collaborative research objectives of IARPC.