Over the past several decades, water infrastructure, in the form of municipal water systems (MWS) have been constructed in remote regions of the world in order to reduce morbidity and mortality associated with water-borne diseases and contaminants. However, scientists, policy makers, and communities have little understanding of the sociocultural effects of MWS. This research project asks "Does the presence or absence of MWS affect the social values of water?" Focusing the research on the role that MWS may play in affecting the values, perceptions and knowledge of water in the Russian Far East and Western Alaska communities, the investigators will provide insights into community resilience and vulnerability with rapidly changing social and natural environments.
The research team will be gathering data in the Chukotka region of Eastern Russia and the Seward Peninsula, Western Alaska. These two regions share similar biophysical, geographical, and subsistence characteristics but contain different cultural groups. Communities in both regions share similar challenges in acquiring water for domestic and industrial uses and are experiencing rapid transformations due to large-scale resource extraction. These cross-cultural comparisons will aid the research team in understanding whether MWS reduce the adaptive capacity to manage water resources. The objective of the research project is to understand whether or not MWS affect longer term resilience of a community by decreasing the familiarity of the users in these communities with their hydrological landscapes through a process of "distancing", a phenomenon the investigators have observed in previous work.
The interdisciplinary approach of the project uses information provided by residents about their values, perceptions, and knowledge of the water they rely on. In addition, the research integrates this knowledge into a new, composite tool to assess their overall resilience called the Arctic Water Resources Vulnerability Index (AWRVI). Since almost no social data or ethnography of water exist for the Arctic, the data collected will be a stand-alone, novel contribution to the limited analyses that exist of human-freshwater interactions. In addition, community members will be trained in the use of AWRVI and provided with the tool for their use beyond the conclusion of this project. The application of AWRVI in each community will serve as a baseline that communities may refer to in order to measure changes in their resilience over time, under diverse scenarios. In addition, this work will provide new insight into how communities who have had MWS and lost them are adapting. Ultimately, the research will help not only Arctic communities, but many developing communities worldwide to assess the trade-offs of MWS and whether or not the benefits that are provided by water treatment/supply technologies should be balanced against cultural changes in the short and long term.
This project examined the role of freshwater in Arctic communities, particularly water available through municipal water systems, in the reponses and adaptation of communities to a changing environment.There were two objectives for this project: First, to understand the values, perceptions and knowledge held by residents in Arctic communities toward freshwater, specifically for Inupiaq and Siberian Yup’ik communities of Seward Peninsula and St. Lawrence Island, and for Chukchi and Siberian Yup’ik communities of Chukotka Peninsula. This is important in developing adaptive responses to environmental change and its impacts on water resources in the Arctic. A detailed in-depth study was undertaken in one community, the Native Village of Eklutna in Southcentral Alaska, to explore innovative approaches to documenting and representing a community’s relationship to land and water using geographic information systems (GIS). Second, to advance collaborative approaches to data synthesis with Arctic communities using the Arctic Water Resources Vulnerability Index (AWRVI) and to provide training in applying AWRVI. These assessments were carried out in the same Seward Peninsula, St. Lawrence Island, and Southcentral Alaska villages as the previous efforts in Alaska. The project involved interviews of residents of the Alaskan communities to document values and perceptions of water. In these same communities an AWRVI assessment was undertaken in partnership with the village Tribal council – usually with the environmental coordinator for the village. In the Chukotka communities the assessment of vulnerability to changing water resources was undertaken as part of a dialog about food, water, and landscape. Outcomes Responding to change – one important component in determining the success of community response to changing water resources is the relative composition of individuals and their role in facilitating response to change. So the more people who perceive change and then actively establish a response, through collective action, and the fewer people who act in their own self interest the greater the resilience of the community. AWRVI assessments – the development of water resource vulnerability assessments with each community was a valuable process for co-production of knowledge concerning water, and a means of knowledge transfer and training. AWRVI assessments were developed for Alaskan communities (Native Villages of Eklutna, Elim, Gambell, Golovin, Savoonga, Wales, and White Mountain) and Chukotkan communities (Enmelen, Novae Chaplino, Nunligran, Provideniya, Sireniki). This contributed to a revision of the AWRVI tool to accommodate differences between Alaskan and Chukotkan social and physcal landscapes. Values and knowledge of water – one interesting finding is that contemporary water knowledge and relationships with fresh water sources in the Bering Strait are facilitated through the customs of drinking hot beverages, namely tea in Chukotka and coffee in Alaska, with some variation on each side. "Tasty tea" can be the sole or the primary motivator for the contemporary village residents to travel considerable distances to their preferred water sources, to improve their water access and infrastructure, and to exercise agency in dealing with municipal authorities. Cultural mapping – Place-based communities, such as Alaskan Native communities, in which multiple generations of their people have a long-standing connection to the landscape possess a very close, deep, and intricate relationship to places and times around them. While GIS approaches and databases have been adopted by Indigenous communities for a multitude of applications these invariably use conventional GIS approaches for representing phenomena of interest. In partnership with the Indigenous Denai’na of Eklutna, Alaska, we develop a geodatabase approach for representing relationships between people and water that attempts to do so from a local worldview. The geodatabase provides a valuable way to represent the cultural importance of rivers, wetlands, estuaries and other water resources to the Denia’na people of Eklutna. In addition to being an innovative way to represent complex geographies including the relationships to a community, this geospatial approach also provides a means for recording and archiving the cultural knowledge held by a community.
