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Abstract
Arctic cities are subject to the highest rates of climate warming globally, generating regionally-specific sustainability challenges. In the sparsely populated Arctic, cities are hubs for public services, climate adaptation initiatives, and socio-economic development. Sustainability indicator data has proliferated offering new opportunities to evaluate trends, identify best-practices, and make comparisons. This thesis, in collaboration with the mayors of Fairbanks North Star Borough (NSB), United States, Yellowknife, Canada, and Luleå, Sweden, explores existing and potential indicators and their applications in these municipalities. This study includes extensive participant observation in each city and in-depth interviews with these mayors revealing current sustainability indicator use in Arctic municipalities is limited. Statistical analysis of past trends in each city and a new environmental indicator toolset for Arctic municipal planning are presented in two interrelated, but independent chapters.
Chapter two delves into Arctic mayors’ decisions and to what extent they integrate sustainability indicator data. Based on International Organization for Standardization (ISO) guidelines, 128 indicators grouped into 19 sustainability themes were compiled from 2000 to 2019 for each study city. Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) is applied in an attempt to identify the most important sustainability themes for local decision-making. Results reveal that ISO data collection is too demanding on municipal resources and collinear trends render it ineffective for independent guidance or statistical modeling. For Arctic municipalities, particular sustainability indicators can be useful, but they do not provide decision-making heuristics that mayors receive from direct interactions with constituents.
Chapter three, in response to chapter two findings that current indicators are specifically ineffective in tracking Arctic-specific environmental hazards, presents the Arctic Climate Threat Indicator Set (ArCTISt). ArCTISt was developed in consultation with Fairbanks NSB, Yellowknife, and Luleå mayors to identify key climate variables most relevant to Arctic constituents: (1) extreme temperature variation, (2) extreme precipitation events, (3) wildfire risk, and (4) permafrost thaw. ArCTISt uses World Climate Research Program Coupled Model Intercomparison Project model (CMIP6) extreme and conservative projections to calculate nine indicators until the end of the 21st century. High-emission scenario results forecast over 40 new heat wave days per year in all cities, intensifying precipitation in Fairbanks and Luleå, divergent wildfire risk scenarios, and intensified permafrost thaw potential in Fairbanks and Yellowknife in a comparative example use case. The presented ArCTISt methodology offers Arctic cities a transparent, user-friendly means to project city-specific sustainability scenarios with lowered data collection requirements. Unlike other sustainability indicators, ArCTISt automates generating easily interpretable future scenarios graphics for constituent communication and funding initiatives.
Examination and comparison of long-term sustainability trends from cities in different Arctic countries offers new understandings of Arctic urban sustainability characterized by shifting environmental, social, and economic conditions. Furthermore, results reveal the role and limitations of indicator data usage in assessing and modelling urban community sustainability in the Arctic and beyond.
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