Arctic Freshwater Natural Capital In The Nordic Countries

Current indicators of economic growth (e.g., GDP) do not adequately consider sustainability, while environmental indicators alone fail to acknowledge the economic needs of a society. Natural Capital Accounting (NCA) can be the tool that fills the gap separating current economic and environmental indicators. Development of NCA has progressed considerably and is being widely deployed in the Nordic countries, but development and deployment remain uneven. This report provides background on NCA and its associated accounting frameworks, demonstrates the applicability of NCA for sustainably utilizing freshwater resources in the Nordic Arctic and provides recommendations for maximizing the value of environmental accounting as an economic, environmental, and sustainable development tool.

Current indicators of economic growth (e.g., GDP) do not adequately consider sustainability, while environmental indicators alone fail to acknowledge the economic needs of a society. Natural Capital Accounting (NCA) can be the tool that fills the gap separating current economic and environmental indicators but development and adoption remains uneven across the Nordic region. This policy brief provides background on NCA and its associated accounting frameworks, demonstrates the applicability of NCA for sustainably utilizing freshwater resources in the Nordic Arctic and provides recommendations for maximizing the value of environmental accounting as an economic, environmental, and sustainable development tool.

In the project we show that climate change is not only affecting a few individual species or habitats in the Nordic region, but that number of changes occur concurrently and at many scales.

For over twenty years the Nordic Council of Ministers Arctic Co-operation Programme has contributed to enhancing knowledge about the Arctic region The current Nordic Arctic Co-operation Programme 2018–2021 is focused on four overall areas: People, Planet and Prosperity as well as Partnerships as a cross cutting theme. Closely connected to the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement, the programme supports international research projects and other collaborative efforts to support sustainable development in the Arctic. This folder gives a short introduction to the programme with examples of project results.

The FIMAGLOW project is a Nordic project with the aim to study possible drivers and impacts of global warming on Arctic fisheries. Two workshops has been held, serving to identify the relevant set of institutions and people, updating the research community on on-going research projects and initiatives in this realm, and pointing to some critical issues for further research. The material presented in the workshops is collected in this report, which hopefully then may serve as a stepping stone for further explorations of this important issue. A web site for the FIMAGLOW program has been set up and is available at the URL: http://fimaglow.maremacentre.com. The website includes program information and tentative programs for the workshops. MaReMA Centre at Norwegian College of Fisheries Science is organizing the program, Alf Håkon Hoel and Arne Eide being the project managers.

Two dozen studies from an April-May 1998 conference in Tallinn, Estonia that were carefully commissioned to provide a snapshot of the state of knowledge about the flow of fresh water from Arctic Ocean as of that weekend, one paper even being written afterward to cover for a presentation that was not ready for publication. Meteorologists, hydrologists, oceanographers, and sea-ice specialists explore such aspects as oceanic freshwater fluxes in the climate system, atmospheric components of the Arctic Ocean freshwater balance and their interannual variability, atmospheric components of the hydrologic budget assessed from Rawinsonde data, moisture transport to the drainage basins relating to significant precipitation events and cyclogenesis, the dynamics of river water inflow, a positive-negative estuarine couple, tracer studies, exchanges of freshwater through the shallow straits of the North American Arctic, modeling the variability of exchanges between the Arctic Ocean and the Nordic seas, and the cycle of fresh water freezing and melting. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR