Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
must build upon undertakings by separate government agencies in at least the eight dif-
ferent nations of the Arctic Council, and for hydrology also Mongolia and Kazakhstan,
which constitute parts of the PADB. Even if all national hydrometeorological agencies
were committed to promoting a coordinated Arctic observation effort, domestic budget
limitations and conflicting information goals may still interfere with ambitions being met.
Secondly, public agencies that apply cost-recovery principles to their environmental
data may be reluctant to undermine this rule by freely sharing their data with international
repositories. Thirdly, in a previously isolated Arctic that is now rapidly becoming more
accessible to activities such as natural resource exploration, shipping and tourism, water
data may be viewed as increasingly sensitive information from both political and economic
perspectives. Occasionally, pressure from international organizations on member states to
disclose water chemistry information viewed as sensitive has rebounded and instead caused
delays
in
the
progress
of
sharing
other
water
data
(Vladimir
Ryabinin,
personal
communication).
Despite these potential obstacles, member states of the Arctic Council have in the
Tromsø Declaration recently committed to facilitate data access. The organizational form
for this commitment is the Sustaining Arctic Observation Networks (SAON) process,
which is currently in its implementation phase. The European Commission has also
expressed support for SAON (European Commission
2008
,
2012
). It remains to be seen to
which extent the SAON process can contribute to increased accessibility to monitored
water chemistry data in the PADB, but it is now established as a platform for policy dialog
on Arctic monitoring issues, for example, through recurring Arctic Observation Summits.
To improve monitoring systems while considering climate change, and with limited
resources, one must develop a strategy to decide which areas that should be prioritized. If
GCM projections and observations were in agreement on which basins that are the most
affected by climate change, a natural prioritization basis would be the rank of these basins
by their relative intensity of change. However, the results in this study show that projec-
tions and observations diverge in this regard.
An alternative strategy may be to instead prioritize basins where the disagreement
between observations and projections is particularly large, as such a strategy would yield
important information on the hydro-climatic system functioning and changes regardless of
whether there is actual convergence of observations and projections in the end or not.
Alternatively, one could argue for prioritizing monitoring of basins with greater observed
deviations so far, as these are based on the actual measurements, and increased efforts at
understanding and adapting to them can be intrinsically motivated. With respect to pre-
cipitation deviations, such a prioritization is to some degree evident in the present distri-
bution of monitoring (greater observed deviations correlate with greater monitoring effort),
although this situation is most likely by coincidence rather than by design.
Based on the results in this study, one can thus argue for different rationales and
prioritization bases when planning for increased hydro-climatic monitoring efforts under
climate change conditions. These different rationales and prioritization bases point in
diverging directions, which underlines the importance of attempting to formulate win-win
or no-regret solutions (UNECE
2009
) that also incorporate other parameters, in addition to
temperature and precipitation outputs of climate models, and to explicitly formulate water
information goals to be achieved. The results presented here can inform observation
assessments connected to strategic Arctic initiatives and programs, such as SAON and the
upcoming Third International Conference on Arctic Research Planning (ICARP III) in
2015, where continued evaluation of monitoring efforts will be a priority.
