Dr. Angus Naylor                            ARC0002

Written evidence submitted by Dr. Angus Naylor, Research Fellow, University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

I would like to call to the attention of the Parliamentary Committee a key oversight in the way UK Arctic science is funded and administrated.

As a social scientist with six years’ experience as a doctoral and postdoctoral researcher in both the UK and Canada, my work has focused on working with Inuit (Inuvialuit and Nunavimmiut) in Inuit Nunangat (Arctic Canada) to share and co-construct knowledge of Arctic climate change. Specifically, I have worked to examine socioeconomic, cultural, and political factors that affect community adaptation and vulnerability to climate change (e.g. limited infrastructure funding, systemic health inequalities, poverty, limited self-determination and representation within national and international governing bodies).

As the Call for Evidence notes, UK Arctic research “is conducted by the National Environmental Research Council’s Arctic Office hosted by the British Antarctic Survey”. It should be recognised that this has resulted in incredibly successful ‘hard science’ climate change research in the Arctic – notably relating to ocean productivity and atmospheric science. In these areas the UK is undeniably a world leader.

However, through using only expertise held within organisations such as NERC and BAS, and not other organisations such as the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the key social sciences research that is needed to contextualise hard science is almost entirely ignored under the current funding system. It is my understanding the UK has currently has no dedicated facility to fund Arctic social sciences research.

The creation of the NERC UK-Canada-Inuit Nunangat Arctic research programme was certainly a step in the right direction. However, this research funding also included a bias toward researching climate change in siloed manner, rather than examining how it is intersecting with economic, social, cultural and political factors in the region. It is becoming increasingly evident that under the current Nationally Determined Contributions of the Paris Agreement, we are not going to keep climate warming below 1.5ºC. Therefore, there is an increasingly crucial need to understand how Arctic climate change is going to impact those who currently live there, and how this will intersect with their socioeconomic, political, and cultural lived experiences.

It is my hope that through this letter the committee understands the need for an increased diversity for the types of research that are conducted under the umbrella of Arctic science, and for the inclusion of a greater variety of voices from within UKRI when making decisions about what types of research are funded.

Angus Naylor 

March 2023