Welcome to the CHARTER research project web page. Here you will find out what this project is about, the research institutions involved and who the people and communities doing the work are. The name CHARTER is derived from the research project title: Drivers and Feedbacks of Changes in Arctic Terrestrial Biodiversity. You can read summaries of the CHARTER project in the following languages: Russian, Finnish, Swedish, North Sámi, Inari Sámi, Nenets, German, French and Bulgarian.

CHARTER involves 21 research institutions across 9 countries. See the full list on our Partners page. The 4 year, 5.9M Euro project is managed by the Arctic Centre at the University of Lapland, Finland and is funded by the EU Horizon 2020 Research and Innovations Programme (Grant #869471). The Project Leader is Prof. Bruce Forbes, and projects contacts can be found here.

CHARTER is an ambitious effort to advance the adaptive capacity of Arctic communities to climatic and biodiversity changes through state-of-the-art synthesis based on thorough data collection, analysis and modelling of Arctic change with major socio-economic implications and feedbacks.

To achieve this goal, we will combine expertise from Earth System sciences and biodiversity studies within a social-ecological system (SES) framework and with a strong participatory approach. Strategies co-developed in CHARTER with indigenous and local communities will comprise synergies between their ambitions for adaptation actions with novel forms of land management geared towards climate change mitigation and sustainable development.

CHARTER is made up of seven transdisciplinary Work Packages (WPs) to address three central aims:

1) Work with Arctic communities to co-develop strategies and policy pathways for livelihoods such as herding, hunting and fishing, that reflect, and enhance adaptation to, the changing Arctic (WP 1-6).

2) Project, and simulate the effects of social-ecological changes for linked indigenous and local communities and traditional livelihoods, particularly reindeer herding and hunting (WP 3 and 5).

3) Understand the responses of Arctic terrestrial systems to changes in the cryosphere (e.g. permafrost, snow and sea ice cover, and rain-on-snow (ROS) events), biodiversity and their feedbacks and interactions, using observations at decadal (WPs 1 and 4), centennial (WP4) and recent (WP1) time scales.