SW CASC Researchers collaborate with the Yukon River Inter-Tribal Watershed Council to develop project-specific knowledge co-production protocols.

Authors from the Southwest Climate Adaptation Science Center are behind a new publication in the open access journal Community Science. This publication titled “The Arctic Rivers Project: Using an Equitable Co-Production Framework for Integrating Meaningful Community Engagement and Science to Understand Climate Impacts” is an effort by multiple CASC scientists, university researchers, and Indigenous communities and scientists to increase collective understanding of climate change impacts on rivers, fish, and communities and co-produce this understanding with Indigenous communities.

In this publication, the authors discuss the efforts undertaken by the Arctic River Project to conduct ethical and equitable research with Indigenous communities and generate science that is useful to those communities. Through this research their goal was to better understand potential future impacts of climate change on rivers, fish, and Indigenous communities in central northern Alaska and the Yukon Territory in Canada. To achieve this goal, the project formed an Indigenous Advisory Council (IAC) and together developed guidelines for how they could work collaboratively with Indigenous communities. Their specific process of forming an IAC and guidelines was, to their knowledge, a new way to approach collaborative research when working across a large geographic area. They presented their process in a publication so that it may provide an example for other research efforts.