Plain Language Summary
The Arctic will profoundly change in the 21st century. Climate changes and other increasing human pressures will transform many parts of the region beyond contemporary recognition. We need ways to capture the current, Arctic-based perspectives of this future change and to provide engaging visions of where it might be headed. First, we use a computer-assisted analysis of more than 2000 news articles that all discuss the future of the Arctic. Second, we take the insights from this analysis and produce a set of story-based scenarios. We do this by blending science fiction prototyping, the Mānoa method, and others to produce speculative fiction scenarios. In our results, we produce ten new, creative scenarios of the Arctic future. We find that our story-based results have themes that are consistent with some existing Arctic scenarios. Moving forward, we think that the methods we use will improve the accessibility future scenarios.
Introduction
The future of Arctic social systems and natural environments is highly uncertain (Arctic Council, 2016; Fresco & Timm, 2016). Future climate change will lead to unprecedented phenomena in the pan-Arctic region, such as regular shipping traffic through the Arctic Ocean, urban growth, military activity, and expanding agricultural frontiers (Arctic Council, 2009; Cameron, 2012). Such impacts will challenge centuries of local and traditional knowledge (Ford et al., 2016; Krupnik & Jolly, 2002). Moreover, the unprecedented pace and character of Arctic social and environmental change reveals the limitations of traditional, quantitative scenario methods that privilege model-based projections inherently rooted in past observational data (Petrov et al., 2016). These knowledge and research gaps suggest an opportunity for novel tools providing comprehensive and, perhaps more importantly, imaginative scenarios of the future. Equipped with such scenarios, the Earth system science community could be better positioned to anticipate the social, economic, ecological, and technological changes that may unfold in the near future.